This piece by K’eguro Macharia may be the single best thing ever written about vegetables.

Or at least about beets:

I have roasted beets. I have roasted them when they are wrapped in foil and I have roasted them when they are wrapped in banana leaves and I have roasted them without any covering. I have roasted them on a bed of whole spices and I have roasted them on their own. Roasting does nothing magical. Roasted beets still taste like beet. And beets taste like dirt and despair.

Macharia has no love for cabbage either, which should cause my friend Ann, doyen of cabbage, to spring into restorative action.

All the experimenting I was doing yesterday with AI-generated images almost filled up my Google Drive. Fortuitously, Kris Howard pointed to this helpful Google tool to assist with identifying and pruning storage hogs.

Andy Baio posted Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model today, and I immediately followed his lead and used this (very helpful, clear) YouTube tutorial to train an AI model on the essence of Peter Rukavina, and then produced AI-generated images derived from that essence.

Here are the 18 images I used to train the model:

An hour later, Stable Diffusion was generating images like this:

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Here’s a sampling of the 100 or so images that I generated, using prompts that evolved as I went along:

The thing about all this is that nobody really knows how it works. It’s like the anaesthetic of the digital world, a magic potion that does what it says on the tin, but by means unknown.

Almost all of the generated images look like me—if you know me, and you were shown one of them, you’d likely guess it was me. How does it do that? You’ve got me. I have no idea.

What’s clear is that the AI uses photos of me to train a model, a model that is enough to generate other images of me. Does the model “know about people.” I have no idea. Maybe it has just been fed a lot of photos of people, and it’s figured out the patterns. Regardless, it is all tantamount to magic.

And it’s frightening. Not in an Orwellian way, but more viscerally in a personal way: the AI is distilling the visual parts of what makes me me.

In my case, more often than not the AI comes up with derivatives that make me look like an old man. I am an old(ish) man, of course. But the ways in which this is true are accentuated in the distillation: receding hairline, grey hair, prevalent sweaters and button-down shirts. There’s no hiding from it.

We exist in the world—we survive in the world—through a combination of confronting both the reality of ourselves, and the magical thinking we tell ourselves about ourselves: the AI has no such need, and simply plays the cards it’s dealt.

The ramifications of this “digital mirror that shows us who we really are” for our mental health, individually and collectively, are far more concerning to me than losing my job to a machine, robot cars run amuck, and animatronic presidents.

The Favourites page that I set up in 2019 to automatically generate from the RSS reader, stopped working in mid-July when I moved my RSS reader to a new host. I’ve patched things back together, so you’ll find all sorts of fresh favourites to enjoy, and, if you subscribe by RSS, your feedreader will suddenly be filled with a torrent of them. Apologies for the drought.

Recorded for the 2020 Celtic Colours, These Hands, featuring English, Mi’kmaw, Gaelic, and French by Dave Gunning, Darren Stevens, Mary Jane Lamond, Nicole LeBlanc, and Kaia Kater.

Link from my old friend Eve, who, among other things, will teach you ukulele and guitar.

By way of trying out Sane, I pulled some information from the PEI Home and School Federation candidate profiles for the Public School Branch trustee elections and put it in a graph.

It was a helpful exercise: not only did I learn a lot about the candidates—there are some estimable people standing for trustee—but I got a chance to get frustrated by, and excited about, Sane. I’ve signed up for a product walk-through tomorrow with an eye to expressing both.

Ida Josefiina, in Me (a brief history):

I moved to Shenzhen, China as a desperate attempt to immerse myself in the unknown. I wanted to feel like I was drowning in a pool of unfamiliarity and novelty, deprived of the air that was my known reality.

Hurricane Fiona spared our apple trees, and, indeed, almost spared the plum tree but for the large Norway maple that fell on top of it. 

The plum tree wasn’t snapped, however, and its roots stayed in the ground—it was simply smushed down from its regular 90º to the ground down to something closer to 20º.

With the help of our neighbour Doug, and some tie-down straps from Home Hardware, Lisa and I righted the tree, and lashed it in place at the original 90º, with hopes that nature will now take over and allow it to bear fruit another day.

Here’s its journey, from downed:

To raising it up, with Lisa’s help (it’s her arms and knees on the left!):

To holding the tree upright so that Lisa could ratchet it into place:

Here’s where it rests now. Godspeed, plum tree!

Norman and Heather have been neighbours, up the street in the brick building — “Peter Ghiz’s old office,” in Island parlance — for as long as I can recall. They’re dog people, and so they are ubiquitous in a way that only dog people are in a neigbourhood: I likely say hello to one or the other or both of them every day, sometimes more than once, as they walk Brandy, their current dog (“Whisky, Slivovitz, Tequila… Brandy! goes my thinking process every time I need to recall Brandy’s name). Heather and Norman’s building is at the far northern reaches of the C1A 4R4; in early-pandemic, during the creativity surge, Norman was a helpful postal facilitator for the neighbourhood newsletter. 

Heather and Norman are moving out of the neighbourhood this weekend, heading farther downtown, into the ‘4J7; I will miss their smiling faces and neighbourly chats, and hope that their canine strolls take them north from time to time.

From 1994 to 2000 we lived in a little house on the Kingston Road.

One day I was at home alone.

There was a knock on the door. A disheveled man was standing there when I answered; he asked if he could use the telephone.

I invited him in, showed him to the phone. He proceeded to conduct real estate business for what seemed an interminably long period; I don’t recall quite how long, but it was certainly longer than the generally accepted limit on telephone usage in a stranger’s house.

That man was Eddie Rice.

Over the years that followed Eddie came into my life in innumerable ways: he was my city councillor for 8 years (instrumental in getting new lights installed at an important intersection near to my heart); he led the effort to move all residences in Charlottetown from flat-rate to metered water; he was the real estate agent that sold my brother his first home, sold my neighbours theirs.

And, as my first meeting hinted, Eddie was, above and beyond anything else, a character. Irascible, profane, gentle, kind, honest (often too much so). He would often pull his car over if he saw me walking down the sidewalk, and have a chat; I thought this was something I benefited from uniquely until I talked to others and learned it was his metier (and that he’d often relay the stories of stop number one to the people of stop number two).

Eddie had strong opinions about downtown Charlottetown and its preservation, and feared — as some might argue has happened already — that we downtown livers would become primarily animatronic characters in a Disney-like heritage pageant put on for the benefit of cruise ship passengers.

What may have got lost in Eddie’s colourful, acerbic shuffle is that he was a very effective city councillor: engaged, in tune, opinionated, forthright, by times cooperative. He got things done.

Eddie died this week.

He will be missed.