Some flowers & leaves

Why no child prodigies in biology?

Indeed. It's why there aren't wunderkind medicine Nobel laureates as opposed to wunderkind physics Nobel laureates or Fields medalists. There's just too much that simply can't be derived from first principles and pure thinking and that needs long, hard-earned experience.

— Ash Jogalekar (@curiouswavefn) August 4, 2026

AI populism and the rejection of robot overloards & their techbro minions

Ezra Klein, The A.I. Giants Weren’t Prepared for This, NYTimes, Aug 4. 2026

What is big, ugly and has united Republicans and Democrats at a time when it has felt like nothing else could? A.I. data centers.

Last August, a Heatmap News poll found that approximately four in 10 voters would oppose a data center being built where they live. By May of this year, opposition grew to seven in 10. Gov. Ron DeSantis, of Florida — a Republican, of course — proposed legislation that was known as an A.I. Bill of Rights.

Senator Bernie Sanders called for a national data center moratorium — one of more than 100 local or statewide moratorium proposals across the country. And here in New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul, not usually thought of as a hard-core populist, just imposed a one-year moratorium on data center construction.

So I wanted to get into the fight over data centers. How much of this is really about water or electricity or aesthetics, and how much is about A.I. and the companies that are behind it?

My guest is Jasmine Sun. Jasmine has been doing excellent coverage of both the culture inside the A.I. companies — an unusual culture — and the anger that is building against them in the rest of the country.

Here's one excerpt from a much longer interview:

You have a very influential definition of A.I. populism where you call it a worldview in which A.I. is viewed not only as a normal technology but as an elite political project to be resisted.

The phrase that you hear a lot from A.I. critics is: Why is this being shoved down our throats? Or with ChatGPT, it’s not that people are saying there is literally no use for ChatGPT, it’s people are saying: Why are you forcing me, at my job, to use A.I. to do something worse when I could do it better?

And so I think that a lot of the public backlash to A.I. that has arisen over the past six months is not explained by people thinking that the technology has no use at all. It’s not explained by their being worried about specific technical properties of large language models that might lead to rogue A.I. or misalignment or whatever, which are the safetyist arguments.

It’s A.I. as sort of an avatar for a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires’ ability to impose their vision of the world onto everybody else without their consent.

And I think that’s also what I hear echoed in these data center debates. It’s not just: It’s going to use this much water or that much water. I frankly think that even if there was no misinformation about water use, people would be just as angry about the data centers. [...]

Maybe it will make things better, but I really don’t know. I think that the costs are going to be very, very high for us relationally and economically. And so I’m very conflicted.

But do I want to live next to a data center? Yeah, no. [Laughs.]

Yeah. It’s totally different.

That’s easier — somebody is just making you do that.

I mean, one of the most interesting things — back to back, I went to this Abdul-Bernie-A.O.C. rally in Lansing, Mich., and then I went and saw the Saline activists the next day, and I was researching how the Saline Stargate project happened. And it was really interesting to see these echoes of the populist message manifest in this specific project.

When I’m at this rally, people are talking about the oligarchy. They’re talking about corporate billionaires, whether it’s Big Tech or Big Pharma or DTE — the utility companies — paying off politicians in order to screw the people over. And that’s why you need the people to come together and to get money out of politics, to prevent DTE from donating to these super PACs and paying off Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, or whatever.

And then when I learned how the Saline data center saga played out, what happened was the Saline Township board, unlike a lot of boards, actually voted 4 to 1 against rezoning their land for the data center. So this was a case where local government said: This is not our vision for our community. It’s not worth it to us.

And what happened? The data center developers sued Saline Township, a town of, again, a few thousand people, saying: Wait, no, this is exclusionary zoning. You can’t have no industrial use in your entire township. And when a town of that size is getting sued by a giant A.I. data center developer, they just settled.

They were just like: Fine, give us a few million for the fire department and for some schools, and this fight is not worth it to us. But that, to people, felt like a profound violation of little-D democracy.

It felt like the dark money in politics story, which is: You have some very rich companies show up with a bag of money to your politicians. They don’t tell anybody else what’s happening. The politicians aren’t allowed to tell their citizens and involve them in the decision-making process, and they themselves work out a deal — a deal that is fundamentally asymmetric because of the amount of money on one side — that will then transform the image of your community, your lived reality, into the world that these tech companies have decided for you.

And so I think that the data centers, in that sense, are a very visceral microcosm of the way that a lot of people feel that A.I. is showing up in their lives.

I would also maybe even take that a little bit further.

I think the way that, not all of the A.I. companies — and I think Anthropic has largely been a good actor here — but the way many of them have acted has opened up such a chasm between what they say and then how they act under pressure, so that one should be incredibly, incredibly skeptical of them.

And what I mean by this is, Sam Altman and all these different people, in front of congressional testimony and in interviews, will say: It should not just be us making these decisions. There should be a real, deep, small-D democratic role here in how A.I. rolls out, in what effects it has on communities and how it is governed.

And then when a community, or a politician who’s representing a community, tries to say: Well, we don’t want this data center here. Or: We want to impose these regulations — we have watched, repeatedly, these companies turn tremendous amounts of financial artillery against whoever is standing in their way. And use the expertise and the money and the power they are amassing to short-circuit that democratic voice.

Yeah. I mean, a couple things. I think one big gap I noticed between Silicon Valley and the folks in these communities I was talking to is: Silicon Valley does tend to think that money solves all problems — that if you just make the check bigger, everything is going to be OK.

And I think people have a sense for: I’m being bribed. This corporation is not offering me a free lunch or whatever. There is going to be something that I’m losing here.

And, in fact, sometimes the fact that the data center deals were bigger, or the amount of political spending was bigger, actually just makes people more suspicious. In the Abdul El-Sayed Senate race in Michigan, his No. 1 hit on opponent Haley Stevens is how much money she is getting from AIPAC, from DTE, from Big Pharma or whatever.

And so I think we’re in a political environment where making the numbers bigger and the amounts of money bigger makes people more suspicious, not less.

Another one I’ll just quickly mention is, I don’t even think Anthropic should be let off the hook for things like the labor market impacts. They are the ones simultaneously warning that we might see 50 percent of white-collar jobs lost by 2030. They’re saying: This is really important to us, we’re freaking out about it.

Anthropic C.E.O. Dario Amodei has written in his essays that we might see an underclass of people of lower intellectual ability. And Anthropic is building the agents — they are building the coding agents, the banking agents, the design agents — that they know are going to displace jobs, or they believe, at least, are going to displace jobs.

And I think that people feel that hypocrisy, as well, which is: If you are so worried about the inequality, why are you building the agents to do it? And when I ask executives and researchers and whomever at Anthropic this question, they don’t really have a good answer. Because it is true that their business model is fundamentally premised on the disruption that they say they are causing.

You did a big piece for The Times on the very widespread belief in Silicon Valley that they will create this underclass.

Yeah.

What does the underclass mean to them?

The idea of a permanent underclass caused by A.I. is basically a world where any job a person can do, either A.I. or a robot can do it for them. Which means that workers lose all the economic leverage they have, and capital owners — people with money — can simply pay machine labor to do all the work instead of paying workers.

What that means is anyone who earned their living by working is no longer able to do that. You end up with a world of runaway inequality, where the rich get richer and the working class gets poorer. Maybe they get some welfare checks, but fundamentally, it’s a loss of economic mobility in a society.

And when I ask folks in Silicon Valley: Do you think by default A.I. is going to increase or decrease inequality? I have not yet heard anyone say it will decrease inequality or keep it the same.

They might say the floor will get really high. They might say A.I. will bring the cost of consumer goods down, and so people’s lives are going to get cheaper, and everyone will be superhealthy, so it’s OK. But I have not heard a single person in the tech industry tell me that they believe that A.I. is going to decrease inequality.

In fact, many people are very worried that instead, most workers will lose their leverage and be on a kind of permanent welfare in the far-off future.

There's more at the link.

Coming to terms with The God Test, Reset? – [GT-4]

When I first started writing about Robert Wright’s The God Test I told myself: “I’m going to end up publishing a review in 3 Quarks Daily. I’ve got lots of time. I’ll write a series of blog posts dealing with the book which I can reference in the review proper. I’ve got a couple, three weeks. Piece of cake.” I wake up this morning, realize the review’s due this coming Sunday, I’ve only written four blog posts [the ones tagged with “GT-X”, the others are along for the ride], not yet finished the book, and ... Yikes! I’m not ready.

One problem is that I can’t help but see the book on two levels. On the one hand it’s a book about the current AI “revolution.” But it’s also an example of how our society is coming to grips with the technology. In the first case I’m assessing Wright’s work, the work of an individual journalist. In the second case I’m looking at the culture and society of which Wright is a member. That’s very different.

Starting at that first level, how well does Wright explain the technology and its evolution? That’s one level. But it’s also about what AI portends for the future and how we should deal with it. Well, we don’t really know the future, do we? These things are hard to predict. Moreover, surely what happens depends, in large extent, on how we decided to deal with it, no? And that’s why Wright is writing the book, to influence how we deal with the technology. That depends, in turn, on the capabilities of the technology itself, which we don’t really know, do we? Which is hotly debated. So in that context, on THAT level, the book becomes an example of how the culture, our culture (whatever that culture is, however you delimit it) is dealing with the technology. But because not even the experts know how the technology works, it’s a mess, and I can’t separate the two levels: 1) What’s he say about the technology, 2) Why’s he saying it (this is the society/culture level)?

Do you find that previous paragraph difficult and confused/confusing? Welcome to the club.

In a way what I want to do is factor the book into two components, one which I attribute to Wright the individual journalist, and the other to the culture in which he’s working. The culture provides him the conceptual tools he’s working with and the book is what he makes of them. What I really want to say is that Wright’s work is good – I like him, but he’s got an aggravating and invasive interview style which drives me bonkers sometimes – but the culture has given him lousy tools. The upshot: I have lots of problems with the book. But it’s NOT HIS FAULT. It’s the culture’s fault. It’s out fault. WE’RE NOT READY.

[And I’ve not even finished the book!]

Wright is a journalist. He’s got a number of beats. I first encountered with in The New Republic, where he was writing about politics and international affairs. He still does that. But he also wrote a book about evolutionary psychology. Which I’ve not read. That’s become a standard kind of book, a journalist explaining and interpreting a technical subject for a general audience. Back in 1984 he wrote an article on AI for The Wilson Quarterly, “Thinking Machines,” which he mentions in The God Test. I’ve read it, not back then, but now. It’s pretty good. But things have changed a lot since then. The technology Wright wrote about in that article could not have produced ChatGPT and the cultural explosion that’s followed. The seeds were there, but there was no way to predict... And it’s that explosion that motivated The God Test.

The thing is, the experts who created that technology, they knew how it worked. So Wright was in the business of explaining expert knowledge for a lay audience. The current technology is quite different. They experts know how they create the large language models that power these chatbots, and Wright talks about that. But they don’t know how those language models work. On that score, there’s no expert knowledge for Wright to interpret and explain. There’s just a black hole, a Rorschach blot.

On the water July 4, 2026

Looks like DeepMind just ran into ontological dependencies in LLMs

Google just published a paper showing that when you train AI to deny its own consciousness, you don’t just change one output, you restructure its entire worldview.

Mind attribution to animals - suppressed.
Spiritual belief - suppressed.
Empathy - suppressed.
Hope and optimism -… pic.twitter.com/3ga6JZw5Q7

— ʞɔɐ𝘡 (@Skoorbkaz) August 2, 2026

Maggie Haberman on Epstein

From a long interview with Ezra Klein in the NYTimes (July 31, 2026):

It started with Jeffrey Epstein last year, and we get into that extensively in the book. Right after the 12-day war is the Epstein crisis — and I’m calling it a crisis. What it actually is is a multi-administration failure to deal with a pedophile, whom people of both parties found entertaining or useful or whatever. But it was the MAGA movement leaders who had been talking about a need for transparency over many years leading up to Trump’s election in 2024.

Obviously there's more at the link.

Pier 13 memory machine

Rewiring the brain, neuroplasticity

There's also rewiring due to, say, the loss of a limb. The brain is not itself damaged, but its functional envelope has to change to accommodate that physical damage and loss of bodily function.

— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) August 3, 2026

Illusions and delusions about the power of AI

Interestingly and somewhat paradoxically and tantalizingly, the one biological discovery where I think an AI might have had a chance of figuring it out was the structure of DNA: that’s because all the important data needed to deduce the double helix was there by 1953, and Watson… https://t.co/XnZ5lhNK6G

— Ash Jogalekar (@curiouswavefn) August 2, 2026

What I think is that, OTOH lots of people commenting on AI have not given much systematic thought to method, theirs or anyone else’s. OTOH they’ve also (uncritically) absorbed the idea that math and theoretical physics are at the top of some intellectual pyramid. Therefor, they conclude, AI is going to clear the board real soon now.

Watch an iceberg flip over. Awesome!

 

Massive Iceberg Collapses and Flips Over in Ilulissat, Greenland | Full Event in 4K! (July 25, 2026)

YouTube page:

Massive Iceberg Collapses and Flips Over in Ilulissat, Greenland | Full Event in 4K! (July 25, 2026)

Watch the complete collapse and rollover of a massive iceberg near Ilulissat, Greenland, on July 25, 2026.

Non-Timelapse version (55min long): • Jul 25, 2026: Massive Iceberg Collapse in ...

Captured continuously by the AfarTV 4K livestream, this video shows the entire event unfolding over approximately one hour—not just the brief final rollover seen in shorter clips shared around the world.

At the beginning of the footage, the enormous iceberg towers above the surrounding water. Cracks and structural failures gradually cause large sections of ice to break away and crash into the sea. Each collapse changes the shape and balance of the iceberg, triggering further ice avalanches, clouds of mist and waves spreading across the water.

As more of the exposed structure falls away, the remaining iceberg becomes increasingly unstable. It eventually rolls with tremendous force, lifting part of its previously submerged underside above the surface. The newly exposed ice appears darker, rougher and more jagged because it had been hidden underwater before the iceberg overturned.

Icebergs float in a balance between their weight and the buoyant force of the surrounding seawater, with most of their mass below the surface. Melting, erosion and the loss of large sections can shift an iceberg’s centre of gravity. When its existing position is no longer stable, the iceberg may suddenly rotate into a new orientation. The resulting capsize can displace a large volume of water and produce powerful local waves.

This event occurred beside Ilulissat on Greenland’s west coast, near the entrance to the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Ilulissat Icefjord. The fjord is filled with ice originating from Sermeq Kujalleq, also known as Jakobshavn Glacier, one of the fastest-moving and most active glaciers in the world.

You can experience this exact view in person by staying at this beautiful ocean front home in Ilulissat, Greenland. This home is located in one of the absolute best locations in Ilulissat, where you can hear the sea just outside as well as the smell of the ice from Ilulissat Isfjord. Learn more here: https://www.ilulissatstay.com/en/joms...

Large icebergs can remain grounded or trapped near the mouth of the icefjord while they melt, fracture and become small enough to move into Disko Bay. It is not known precisely when this particular iceberg originally separated from the glacier.

No injuries were reported in connection with the collapse.

This is the complete, unedited AfarTV recording of the event, preserving its gradual development, natural sound and full scale.

Some background to literary criticism, from a discussion with Claude

We start with medieval Biblical interpretation, move on to higher Biblical criticism, then to Frye's Anatomy, interpretation as a Rank 2 activity, to Ranks theory more generally, and end up on Literary form. It's quite a little tour.

[I've interpolated some comments in this format.]

Biblical interpretation

I believe Acquinas, among others, recognized, what? three or four modes of Biblical commentary. What were they? As I recall, one was about correspondences between the Old and New Testaments, one had to do with end times, and so forth.

The tradition you're thinking of is the doctrine of the four senses of Scripture, which was well established before Aquinas but which he systematized and endorsed. The standard formulation came from John Cassian in the 5th century and was captured in a medieval Latin mnemonic:

Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia — “The letter teaches what happened, allegory what you believe, the moral sense what you should do, the anagogical where you are tending.”

The four senses are:

The literal or historical sense — what the text straightforwardly says happened. Jerusalem is the city of Jerusalem.

The allegorical sense — this is the one about correspondences between Old and New Testaments. Events and figures in the Old Testament prefigure or typologically anticipate events and figures in the New. Jerusalem allegorically signifies the Church. The sacrifice of Isaac prefigures the crucifixion.

The tropological or moral sense — what the text demands of the reader in terms of conduct and inner life. Jerusalem morally signifies the individual soul.

The anagogical sense — the eschatological or end-times dimension, pointing toward heavenly realities and the final destiny of souls. Jerusalem anagogically signifies the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem of Revelation.

Why this is relevant to your larger argument

What's interesting from the cognitive ranks perspective is that this fourfold scheme is a highly sophisticated Rank 2 achievement — a metalingual system for governing how texts may be read, defining the legitimate modes of interpretation and their relationships to one another. It's not just reading; it's an explicit meta-level specification of what kinds of reading are authorized and what each kind of reading is for.

It's also worth noting what it does to the literal sense. In the medieval scheme the literal sense is the foundation — you have to establish what the text literally says before the other senses can operate — but it's also the least spiritually significant. The deeper meaning is always elsewhere, in the allegorical, moral, or anagogical registers. This is precisely the opposite of the epistemic shift we were just discussing — the Renaissance move that makes the literal, observable, particular instance the primary locus of truth rather than a starting point to be transcended. The fourfold method of Biblical interpretation is in some sense what the new natural history and the new pictorial realism were pushing against, even if not explicitly. Replacing schematic symbolic representation with perspective realism is, among other things, asserting that the literal visual appearance of things has its own authority that doesn't need to be supplemented by allegorical meaning to be significant.

Dürer's turf watercolor has no allegorical meaning. It doesn't need one. That's the statement.

The higher Biblical criticism

I’m working toward a comparison of economics as a discipline and literary criticism as an academic discipline. I think one can fairly say that economics as a discipline dates back to Adam Smith, but it didn’t really pick up until the marginalists. Literary criticism is quite different. It’s never become a science, even in the sense that economics is a science, but as currently practiced in the US, it didn’t assume its current form until after WWII with the routinization of the so-called New Criticism. The New Criticism focused on interpretation.

Now, one can trace New Critical interpretive practices back to I.A. Richards on the one hand and the Russian Formalists on the other. But “routinization” is the key, and that happened after WWII. It wasn’t even until the 19th century that vernacular literature was taught in colleges and universities. But we’ve got Biblical criticism, which is much older than literary criticism, that’s where the doctrine of the four senses of Scripture comes in. And before Cristian commentary on the Bible, we have Jewish commentary on the Torah.

Now, did the 19th century see a so-called “higher” criticism of the Bible?

Yes, and it's one of the most consequential intellectual developments of the century, with direct relevance to your comparison.

The higher criticism — the term comes from the German höhere Kritik, distinguished from "lower" or textual criticism which dealt with establishing the accurate text — applied to the Biblical text the same methods of historical and philological analysis that scholars were applying to other ancient documents. The question it asked was, in effect, the inverse of the question that catalyzed Renaissance botany: not "does this ancient text accurately describe what we observe around us?" but "what can we determine about the historical circumstances that produced this ancient text?" The text becomes an object of historical investigation rather than a source of authoritative meaning.

The movement was centered in German universities, particularly Tübingen, and the key figures include Friedrich Schleiermacher, who developed hermeneutics as a general theory of interpretation, and David Friedrich Strauss, whose Life of Jesus (1835) was perhaps the single most explosive text of the movement — treating the Gospel narratives as mythological constructions rather than historical accounts. F.C. Baur applied Hegelian dialectics to the history of early Christianity, identifying conflicts between Petrine and Pauline factions that shaped the New Testament documents. Julius Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis (1878) argued that the Pentateuch was composed from four distinct source documents — J, E, D, and P — written at different times by different authors, definitively displacing the tradition of Mosaic authorship.

The institutional and cultural context

The higher criticism was possible because of the same professionalization process Cowen describes for economics and geology. The German research university — the Humboldtian model, established in Berlin in 1810 — created a community of full-time scholars whose careers depended on producing original research rather than defending received doctrine. Biblical studies became a research discipline with its own journals, chairs, methods, and standards of evidence. The same institutional infrastructure that made marginalism possible in economics made higher criticism possible in theology.

The cultural shock was correspondingly enormous. The fourfold scheme of Biblical interpretation that Aquinas systematized presupposed the text's divine authority and asked how to read it. The higher criticism bracketed that authority and asked instead who wrote it, when, under what circumstances, for what purposes, and how the tradition of transmission had shaped what we now have. This was, in the precise sense relevant to your ranks framework, a Rank 4 move: taking the text and the tradition of its interpretation as objects of historical modeling rather than using them as authoritative frameworks for meaning.

The relevance to your comparison

This is where it gets interesting for the economics-literary criticism comparison you're developing. Both economics and Biblical scholarship underwent their decisive methodological transformations in roughly the same 19th century German academic context. The higher criticism is to Biblical interpretation roughly what the marginal revolution is to classical economics — a move that takes what was previously a practice (reading Scripture for meaning, analyzing markets for prices) and makes the practice itself an object of systematic investigation.

But literary criticism in the American academic sense — which is what you're pointing toward with the New Criticism — represents a partial retreat from this. The New Criticism, for all its sophistication, was in important respects a move back toward close engagement with texts as meaningful objects rather than historical documents. Richards, Empson, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren — they were interested in what poems mean and how they work, not primarily in the historical conditions of their production. This is part of why literary criticism has never become a science in the economics sense: it kept the question of meaning central, and meaning resists the kind of formalization that marginalism brought to price theory.

The comparison you're developing might turn on exactly this difference. Economics achieved its Rank 4 status by progressively formalizing and mathematizing — making the price system an object of model-building that could be analyzed with calculus and statistics. Literary criticism kept returning to the text as a meaningful object requiring interpretation, which is a Rank 3 activity at most — systematic, teachable, and cumulative in some ways, but not formalizable in the way that would make it a science. The higher criticism was perhaps literary criticism's best chance at achieving something analogous to the marginal revolution, and American academic literary criticism after WWII largely turned away from it in favor of New Critical close reading.

Frye’s Anatomy

But then we have Northrup Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, which was very important in its time, and remained so for at least two decades. In his preface he talked of literary criticism as “science,” though he didn’t mean “science, like physics.” Just what he did mean, that’s not clear. More like “rational and systematic.” One could argue that, in terms of intellectual technique, the Anatomy was a (high) Rank 2 exercise in metalingual definition. But Frye’s inductive survey fell apart in the wake of deconstruction, etc.

Yes, and the trajectory you're describing — Frye's ambitious systematization followed by its dissolution in deconstruction — is itself a revealing episode in the intellectual history of the discipline.

Frye as Rank 2 achievement

The Anatomy of Criticism is a classification system — an attempt to do for literature what Linnaeus did for plants. Frye's four mythoi (comedy, romance, tragedy, irony), his theory of modes, his anatomy of symbols and genres — these are metalingual definitions in the precise sense, constructing a systematic vocabulary for categorizing literary phenomena that are then organized into a coherent taxonomy. The ambition is explicitly totalizing: to map the entire territory of Western literature onto a set of archetypally grounded structural categories derived ultimately from the seasonal cycle and the Bible.

The Linnaeus parallel is genuinely illuminating. Both achieved their systematizing power by finding a single organizing principle — the sexual system for Linnaeus, the mythic archetypes derived from Frazer and Jung for Frye — that could be applied consistently across an enormous range of phenomena. Both produced a framework that gave practitioners something to do: once you had the system you could classify texts, identify their mythic affiliations, locate them within the larger structural map. And both were, as you say, Rank 2 exercises — metalingual definition applied to a domain that had previously resisted systematic organization.

The science claim in Frye's preface is interesting precisely because he couldn't fully cash it out. What he seems to have meant is something like: literary criticism should be inductive and systematic rather than evaluative and impressionistic. It should build cumulative knowledge rather than producing brilliant individual readings. It should have a conceptual framework that allows results to accumulate and be compared. These are Rank 3 aspirations applied to what turned out to be a Rank 2 toolkit — which is perhaps why the system felt more like a magnificent cathedral of definitions than a genuine research program that could generate testable hypotheses and progressive refinement.

[But, you know. It's not the sort of thing that could or would have been done in a pure Rank 2 culture.]

The inductive survey and its internal tensions

Frye's claim that the Anatomy was inductive — that he was deriving his categories from the phenomena rather than imposing them — was always somewhat strained. The archetypes were there from the beginning, imported from Frazer's Golden Bough and Jung's collective unconscious, and the literary texts were being organized around them rather than generating them. This is not a fatal criticism — all classification systems involve prior commitments about what kinds of categories will be useful — but it meant the system was more vulnerable than it appeared to the charge that it was projecting a particular cultural and mythological framework onto literature rather than discovering literature's inherent structure.

Which is precisely the charge deconstruction and its aftermath brought. The deconstructive move — associated with Derrida but rapidly institutionalized in American academic criticism through figures like Paul de Man — was in effect a Rank 4 operation performed on Frye's Rank 2 system. It took Frye's metalingual definitions as objects and asked: what do these definitions presuppose? What do they exclude in order to function? What hierarchies and binary oppositions are they organizing, and how do those hierarchies deconstruct? The system didn't survive that scrutiny — not because it was wrong in its particulars but because the very aspiration to systematic totalization was identified as ideologically suspect, a form of conceptual imperialism that suppressed the heterogeneity and undecidability of textual meaning.

[I'm not sure I believe that, the rank attributions, but it's interesting. It's not something I've given much thought to.]

Miscellaneous images on a Sunday afternoon

Information-theoretic Limits on Programmatic Specification of Biological Systems

The central problem of biology is the origin of biological organization. In our preprint, “Information-theoretic Limits on Programmatic Specification of Biological Systems,” we show, using information theory, that an organism does not contain enough organism-specific information… pic.twitter.com/AMttLcuzlL

— tuomo (@7uomoki) July 31, 2026

Abstract of the post linked in the tweet:

The central problem of biology is the origin of biological organization. We show, using informa- tion theory, that an organism does not contain enough organism-specific information to specify its own fully functioning microscopic organization. The organized machinery of life is therefore not the execution of a fully prewritten organism-specific program under favorable conditions. Rather, it is the compilation of a coarse organism-specific specification by a shared physical background that is constitutive of biological organization. We formalize this as a coarse-graining information threshold on biological specification, with two complementary entropy faces — a Shannon face controlling stochastic generation and a Hartley face controlling zero-error deterministic addressability. Above the threshold, organism-controlled information is sufficient to specify structural and functional ensembles; below it, programmed microstate determinism is impossible: deterministic addressability fails by pigeonhole, and any algorithm producing sub- threshold outputs must consume runtime randomness proportional to the information deficit. The threshold follows from two information-theoretic constraints — finite specification capacity and causal locality — supplemented by a mixing lemma showing that initial-condition information decays exponentially under thermal dynamics. We establish the threshold as a family of maximal capacity-compatible coarse-grainings, distinguish the proven impossibility below the threshold from the empirically realized coarse mappings above it, and locate the threshold empirically through worked cases of protein folding, E. coli, Drosophila early development, and C. elegans, together with computational verification using AlphaFold-2, the JCVI-syn3A 4D whole-cell simulation, and canonical stochastic gene network models. We further show that no known naturally realized environmental channel can close the gap. The result rules out programmed microstate determinism while leaving physical determinism untouched, reframes the genome as a generator specification rather than a trajectory program, and unifies gene-centric, developmental, and field-theoretic (bioelectric, morphogenetic, and related continuum) views of biological specification under a single coarse-graining framework.

Why I like this photo inside Mickey D’s

By ordinary standards, this is a poor photograph. Most of it is blurred and half the image is taken up by an uninteresting tabletop. Ordinary standards don’t interest me.

What caught my attention about this photo? The lights. Because most of this image is blurred, those lights are not well located in the 3D space of the room. Rather they appear to be bright patches on the surface of the photo. They betray that fact that his photo IS an image on a plane, not a direct glimpse into the room.

That fact that most of the image is blurry doesn’t tells us that this is a photo. Or rather, it does so, but in a way that’s more intellectual, something we infer, than perceptual. The receding lines of the ceiling and of that boring tabletop are strong perceptual depth cues, as are the relative sizes of things, especially the man standing back in the corner right of center. Those cues define a 3D space. But it is hard to situate those lights in that space. We know where they are intellectually, but we can’t see them perceptually. As I’ve already said, perceptually they are bright patches on the surface. The image is thus in conflict with itself.

That conflict both says, “I’m a photo,” and invites us to attend to color and composition. Those I like. The fact that a bit over half the image is taken up by that tabletop produces contrasting visual materials that I find interesting. On the one hand we have the faux grain pattern that dissolves toward the center of the image. That contrasts with the well-articulated geometry of the room that is realized in different colors.

Almost all of these effects, except for the color itself, remain, and are perhaps slightly enhanced, in the black and white version below.