Mrs. Davis was the wife of Chandler Davis, an editor of
The Mathematical Intelligencer .
Related reading —
* Vide "Mrs. Davis" in this journal.
Monday, October 23, 2023
Saturday, September 30, 2023
The Algorithm and Mrs. Davis
On the recent Peacock series "Mrs. Davis" —
"The algorithm is known as Mrs. Davis … and is
the all-seeing, all-knowing, not-quite-all-merciful
manifestation of artificial intelligence to whom
humanity has plighted its troth in this eight-part
manifestation of real intelligence from creators
Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof."
— John Anderson in The Wall Street Journal ,
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
For The Algorithm , see last evening's Michaelmas post and . . .
For a different Mrs. Davis, see . . .
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From Tom McCarthy's review yesterday of The Maniac , a novel about 1940s social life at Los Alamos — "The mathematician Martin Davis’s wife, Lydia, storms out of a Trinity dinner party, condemning the men’s failure to fully take on board the consequences of their atom splitting. Besides sharing her name with our own age’s great translator of Blanchot and Proust, this Lydia Davis is a textile artist — a hanging detail that points back toward the novel’s many looms and weavings. For the Greeks, the fates spinning the threads of human lives were female (as Conrad knew, recasting them as Belgian secretaries in 'Heart of Darkness'). So was Theseus’ wool-ball navigator, Ariadne. And so, too, was the Ithacan ur-weaver Penelope, whose perpetual making and unraveling of her tapestry beat Gödel to an incompleteness theory by thousands of years. 'Text,' by the way, means something woven, from which we get 'textile.' It might just be that Penelope was not only testing her own version of the ontological limit, but also embedding it — in absent form, a hole — within the weft and warp of what we would eventually call the novel." |
Martin Davis reportedly died this year on New Year's Day.
This journal on that date —
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Saturday, April 12, 2025
Merton College Barometer
A search in this journal for "Merton College" yields . . .
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"Speaking of artificial intelligence, it seems as if the creators of 'Mrs. Davis' have ironically chosen to utilize A.I. in the show's production. During a panel at the film festival South by Southwest, Lindelof mentioned how they used artificial intelligence and said, 'We thought it would be fun to build an A.I. that would title our episodes, and that we just basically said that whatever it comes up with, we have to stick to as long as it is appropriate for whatever barometers of appropriateness exist.' Damon Lindelof continued and explained that in the process of creating the A.I. that would title episodes for the upcoming 'Mrs. Davis,' the artificial intelligence struggled to understand what a title actually was, despite the information that was filtered through the program. Lindelof then said that the entire production crew learned a great deal about algorithms and how A.I. works while attempting to get it to generate episode titles. In the end, Lindelof and the rest of the crew were quite happy with the results, noting that Episode 7 is titled 'Great Gatsby: 2001: A Space Odyssey.' " |
Elsewhere, in the art room . . .
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"A banana in the hand is worth two in the box." — Plato
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Tuesday, December 3, 2024
Useless Academic Meditation: “Speed the Plough!”
Not so useless . . . A painting used as illustration in the above essay —
For those who, like me, enjoyed the "Mrs. Davis" series about AI . . .
Related song lyrics . . .
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Wednesday, May 17, 2023
Thursday, May 11, 2023
Beach Song for Sister Simone
Today's "Mrs. Davis" episode ends with Sister Simone
on a beach being sung to by a beachgoer choir.
This bizarre plot twist suggests some other images —
Also from March 8, 2020 —
The above Puchner remarks on the Communist Manifesto featured
a banner at the top crediting "California State University, Chico."
More recently, from this journal —
Besides "Mrs. Davis," this post was suggested by . . .
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/
is-multiculturalism-an-oxymoron-on-martin-puchners-culture/ .
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Sunday, May 7, 2023
Windows Programming: The Postman
From "The Postman," the most recent "Blacklist" episode —
Related material —
A Bosch Xmas
Cicely Tyson as the future Mrs. Davis … Mrs. Miles Davis —
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Dead Time: A Rabbit Hole Named Desire
For the above title, see a Log24 search.
Related material:
Oscar Hammerstein in Episode 6 of "Mrs. Davis" —
Flores para los Muertos
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Friday, April 28, 2023
The Large Language Model
"… sometimes large models undergo a 'discontinuous phase shift'
where the model suddenly acquires substantial abilities not seen
in smaller models. These are known as 'emergent abilities,' and
have been the subject of substantial study." — Wikipedia
See also the first five episodes of "Mrs. Davis."
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