Minute Cryptic - 24 June, 2026 “Hermit perhaps returning alone, wandering city” (9) 🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 🏆 0 hints – 3 under the community par (81,255 solvers so far). www.minutecryptic.com
Tough one, this. My first instinct was right, but I made a wrong guess.
This is what we’re faced with as the year hinges into its second half. Astronomically, if not by the calendar.
Just realised I hadn’t added Moby Dick to my C ‘currently reading’ list. I’m only about a third in, totally loving it, and wondering why people think it’s hard. 📚
Selfish Genetics but No AI
As I said, we went to see Richard Dawkins at the Barbican last night. He was being interviewed by Rowan Hooper, a geneticist, New Scientist writer, and the author of Togetherness.
The reason for the event was the celebration of fifty years since The Selfish Gene was published. The talk, as you might expect, was all about genetics, and the book and its effects over the time. Dawkins is amazingly sharp at 85. He impressed me with just how many names he remembered — of people, books, and species. It was very impressive.
The most interesting part for me was his explanation of what he calls the ‘extended phenotype’ (also the title of one of his books), which explains how the things organisms build or do form part of the carrier of their genes. For example birds' nests. They are not part of a bird’s body — its phenotype — but the better a nest is, the better the bird’s chances of survival and the passing on of its genes. Other examples include parasites that affect the behaviour of species they inhabit.
As I sat there in the Barbican Hall, which is more familiar to classical music performances, I wondered if humanity’s extended phenotype — or rather we’d need a word that matches phenotype at the species level. — includes the construction of better concert halls, of culture more generally. There’s an idea there, I’m sure, but I’d need the brain of a Richard Dawkins to formulate it fully
In the second half there was a Q&A. We had to submit questions using the Slido web app, which removed the ability for ‘This is not so much a question as a comment’ and other long-winded interruptions, but felt a little disconnected. I submitted a question, but didn’t expect it to be used, as it was a big switch from what the event was about, being about Dawkins’s recent thoughts on ‘AI’ (archive.is link), which I wrote about before. Questions were restricted to 160 characters, which seems shockingly short nowadays. I managed to condense mine down to:
You wrote that you believed AIs are alive. If a computer model of the climate is not the climate, is a computer model of some part of a mind a mind?
Which gets at the question, keeps the analogy, but doesn’t quite express all I wanted.
No matter, it was a very enjoyable event, and there’s no way Dawkins has lost his mind.
Going to see Richard Dawkins at the Barbican tonight. The title of his talk is ‘Genes & the Meaning of Life’. It’ll be interesting to see — among other things — if his beliefs about the aliveness of ‘AI’ have changed.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 🎥 is a lot funnier and also more compact than I remembered.
More compact, because in my memory the business of trying to decode ‘POE’/‘OPE’ etc, went on for much longer than the few seconds it actually takes. And trying to get through to the President on the phone: that just happened offstage, no messing about with underlings.
An aside: there’s a line, ‘He made a payphone call to the Pentagon’, in the Clash’s ‘Ivan Meets GI Joe’, which I realised is almost certainly a reference to this.
There was also far less of the titular doctor and his attempts to suppress his Nazi instincts than I recalled.
In contrast, I thought the final scene of the bomber on its fatal flight went on a bit too long. But who am I to judge?
If you haven’t seen this film, you owe it to yourself to watch it.
Sad to read of the death of Anthony Head (or Anthony Stewart Head, as he always used to be credited).
We watched: North by Northwest 🎥 a week or two ago. Somehow I’d never seen it before.
Let’s discuss the famous, poster-worthy, famous scene. Clearly if you believe someone is a government agent about to bust your soviet spy ring, you have to assassinate them. And what better way to do that than trick them into catching a bus to a bus stop on the open prairie, miles from anywhere; and then chase them with a crop-spraying plane and try to shoot them from it?
Many better ways. Many, many better ways.
I didn’t realise Hitchcock was making a farce. Well, maybe that’s unfair. It’s a kind-of spy story, it’s kind of a romance, it’s pretty funny in places. In fact, its main flaw may be that it doesn’t really know what it wants to be. And that it spells things out too much. We, the viewer, can work some things out: have a little more respect for us, Alfred.
All that said, I enjoyed it quite a lot.
We are in strange times when the Pope makes more sense about technology than Richard Dawkins. From Pope Leo’s encyclical, as quoted by Kottke:
It is not possible to provide a single, comprehensive definition of AI. What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence.
While Dawkins seems to have fallen completely into a vat of kool-aid:
I gave Claude the text of a novel I am writing. He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!”
Interesting to hear he’s writing a novel, and the whole text of his piece (archive.is link) is interesting. I don’t really think he’s lost his mind. But he would know, I’m sure, that a computer model of the climate, say, is not the actual climate. Similarly a large language model of an intelligence is not an intelligence in any sense we would normally use the term.
We’re going to see him this summer, in an event at the Barbican. It should be interesting.
📚 Books 2026, 13: Keep the Giraffe Burning, by John Sladek
Keep the Giraffe Burning is a collection of Sladek’s short stories, published in 1977 (so nearly 50 hears ago, which is going to take some getting used to). I don’t know when I started reading it, but don’t think it was this year. No matter, though, I finished it the other day, and that’s all that matters for counting it as one of this year’s books.
It’s a strange one. I remember hearing of Sladek as being one of the few writers who successfully mixed SF with humour. I read two or three novels by him, so long ago that I remember basically nothing about them, but I don’t recall them being particularly funny.
The same is true here. They’re surreal, certainly; mildly humorous; but a long way from laugh-out-loud funny. Which is fine. I guess I enjoyed them enough to keep going, but really, I wouldn’t bother with them again.
More nonsense and more ‘Naked Gun’ fun last night: The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear 🎥. I couldn’t honestly tell whether I’d seen this before or not. I think I probably saw it back in the day, but the jokes are so spot-on and predictable (and the plot matters so little) it’s hard to be sure. Just what you want when you want it.
I just discovered a feature in Apple Music for iOS. I had lyrics scrolling and I touched the screen to dismiss them. The song jumped back to the point in the lyrics I touched.
Could be useful when you want it, though it’s mildly annoying by accident. I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it before.
An American Pickle 🎥 is a strange, daft, fun wee movie, in which Seth Rogen plays Herschel Greenbaum, a refugee from a Polish stetl in the 1920s. A freak accident at a pickling factory means he is pickled for 100 years. Waking up in 2020s Brooklyn, he meets his great-grandson Ben (also played by Rogen).
But hey, it’s Brooklyn: what are you gonna do, except make artisanal pickles?
I mean, it’s the Eurovision Song Contest, not the Eurovision Dance and Dramatic Staging Contest.
Maybe I should listen to it on the Radio.
I sometimes think, with Eurovision, they should have to perform standing on a plain stage, with no fancy stuff. I mean Greece, tonight!