July 2001

Newsletter, July '01.

Busy, busy, busy!

Fano was excellent, as usual, and Scheveningen had the best weather we've seen there for at least 6 years. I'm back in Ashburton now for a month with an impossible number of things to get done before the next round of events.

Actually Fano was a bit of a failure in one way.  Careful forward planning based on extrapolation from previous years indicated that the correct answer was 42, or was that the question?, whoops, can't remember, but no matter.  Anyway we headed north from Germany with the requisite 42 bottles of wine, calculated to last our household for the entire 12 days of island incarceration- but we failed and had 10 or so left over at the end. The cause of failure was a distinct lack of effort even by people who should have been able to do better. After all, turning wine into water is easy, it's the reverse trick that's difficult.

In fact by the last day or two, beer, even water seemed preferable to wine. Even then our goal could have been achieved with a little more outside help- but getting good help is so difficult these days.  

While still in Holland for a few days after the Scheveningen Festival, (officially for the purpose of becoming serially re-aquainted with Veronica's, our favourite restaurant but in reality to maybe sneak in a bit of kite-flying), one evening we headed out to the beach when Michel D. told us that according to the weather forecast there was going to be "strong wind for sure".

Now this is where I must digress a bit.

Ever heard of the Turing test for artificial intelligence?  Alan Turing was one of the 20th century's most accomplished mathematicians, pioneer in games theory, central to the birth of the electronic computer, and a leading player in the breaking of the WW2 "Enigma" code.  He suggested that any machine with sufficient verbal skills to convince an interviewer that it was human deserved to be regarded as intelligent.

So then there is David Sulzer,  professor of  neurology at Columbia and Richard Lair an elephant expert from San Francisco who have this project in Thailand developing musical instruments for an elephant band.  They (the elephants) sell a lot of CD's, but is it really "music". Well apparently gullible listeners who aren't aware of it provenance assume the musician's are human. 

And, there are examples of gorilla art that get rave reviews by contemporary art experts who minutely analyse their sophisticated communication of complex human issues, er, until they meet the artist that is.

Also, share picking competitions, and especially one famous one between a child, a professional share analyst and a chimpanzee, have been won by chimp's (the professional analyst was dismally last). 

Taking a Turing view of this, elephants, gorilla's and chimps therefore qualify as intelligent- but the alternate view is that these are really Turing tests in reverse, the human participants  FAILED the test rather than the non-human's passing.

So, back to Scheveningen and our evening's kite flying with Michel and Artur. 

In my opinion, anyone who is gullible (a word that isn't even in the dictionary by the way) enough to believe weather forecasts is in the same category as people sucked in by elephant music, gorilla art and chimpanzee stock picking- that is, DUMB!

There wasn't any wind of course-

-but the new kite we went to test was quite incredible just the same.

WATCH THIS SPACE!  

New things this month?

New Developments: YES

Available now: Sorry, not yet.

Peter Lynn,

Ashburton July 2, '01.

PS. . If you're one of those who do believe weather forecasts, the elephant music is available on the "Mulatta" label.