Erik Satie's Umbrellas

Portrait d'Erik Satie 1892-1893
by Suzanne Valadon (Wikimedia)

You have heard music written by Erik Satie. Maybe it was on a TV commercial or in a film. Listen to some of his work...

Does it sound familiar? The Gymnopédies, published starting in 1888, are three famous Satie piano compositions that I have been listening to ever since I stumbled upon an album of them in a library record rack. 

His music is very relaxing. It is sad and a bit lonely. It fit my high school years. It works well on rainy days.

Erik Satie died in 1925. Even his closest friends were shocked to find that this man, who was quite fashionable in public (a "velvet gentleman"), lived in a filthy, threadbare room. He had not allowed visitors for 27 years.

The lodging is now a museum dedicated to his life and work, but when he died, it was filled with newspapers and hoarded junk. There were two grand pianos placed one on top of the other. He played the bottom one, but the top piano was used as storage for letters and parcels.

I have always been intrigued by the fact that he collected many umbrellas. There was a room filled with umbrellas. I don't know if they were all closed, but I like to imagine they were all open.

His music, which evokes rainy days for me, might have been inspired by such days, and I can imagine him taking his daily walk on rainy days with a different umbrella each day. Maybe he "borrowed" some that were left at a cafe door.

His apartment may have been a mess, but when he went out for his daily 10km stroll to cafés and local Parisian haunts, he was immaculately groomed in one of seven identical grey suits he owned.

Satie was a colorful figure in the early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde. He was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music, and the Theatre of the Absurd.

The secretive and introverted Satie was an alcoholic who died from cirrhosis of the liver.

Moulin de la Galette,1891 (detail of Erik Satie)
by Ramon Casas

Satie was introduced to the world as a "gymnopedist" in 1887, just before he wrote his Gymnopédies.

The title came from a made-up profession Satie invented for himself when asked what his occupation was. "I am a gymnopedist," he said. The word was highly esoteric — and the following year, Satie gave that title to three short piano pieces. What is a gymnopedist? One who writes the Gymnopédies, of course. The pieces were accompanied by a piece of verse written by Satie's friend J.P. Contamine de Latour, and it remains unclear whether the poem or the music was written first. The word "gymnopédie" appears in the poem, and had previously been identified by Rousseau as a piece of music to which young Spartans danced naked. (source)

Later, he also referred to himself as a "phonometrograph" or "phonometrician" - meaning "someone who measures and writes down sounds." They were designations that he preferred to that of "musician."

Since my youthful encounters with Satie's music, I have come to read more about him. There is a book of his writings, A Mammal’s Notebook: The Writings of Erik Satie. It's an odd and interesting book. Here is its description:

Although once dismissed as an eccentric, Satie has come to be seen as a key influence on modern music, and his writings reveal him as one of the most beguiling of absurdists, in the mode of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear--but with a strong streak of Dadaism (a movement in which he participated). 

The nonconformism of Satie's private life seems deliberately calculated: he assumed various personae at different periods of his life, from the mystical "velvet gentleman" to the Dadaist disguised as quizzical bureaucrat. His poignant, sly and witty writings embody all of his contradictions. Included here are his "autobiographical" "Memoirs of an Amnesic"; gnomic annotations to his musical scores ("For the Shrivelled and the Dimwits, I have written a suitably ponderous chorale … I dedicate this chorale to those who do not like me"); the publications of his private church; his absurdist play Medusa's Snare; advertising copy for his local suburban newspaper; and the mysterious, calligraphed "private advertisements" found stuffed behind his piano after his death. 

Satie referred to himself as "a man in the manner of Adam (he of Paradise)" and added: "My humor is reminiscent of Cromwell's. I am also indebted to Christopher Columbus, as the American spirit has sometimes tapped me on the shoulder, and I have joyfully felt its ironically icy bite." He died as he lived: "without quite ceasing to smile."

There are many ways to listen to Satie, from YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, from your local library's collection (they probably have at least one collection) or you might actually buy your own copy. The latter is a quaint idea these days but one Erik would probably prefer.

The Chatbot From 6 Decades Ago

In the 1960s, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created a “chatterbot” called ELIZA. The program was meant to parody the era’s psychotherapists with its pat replies, but instead, it ended up fooling many users into thinking it had real intelligence. Many users of  ELIZA attributed a surprising degree of understanding to even its repetitive diction. Weizenbaum had intended ELIZA to be a parody but it captivated users.

Today’s large language models, pioneered by Google, were popularized by researchers at OpenAI who noticed that the larger they made these models, the better the models scored on performance benchmarks. Ask ChatGPT to give alternative theories to dark matter, or to summarize the movie Bambi, or tell you who you are and you will get an almost instantaneous answer.

When they train these language models they force them to guess. They hide random words from content so that the programs learn to guess which words are likely to fill these gaps. Doing that it learns the complex web of dependencies that drive language. While they are doing that, they really don't care about truthfulness. That is scary.

One paper on all this was titled “ChatGPT is bullshit,” because they were using philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit as “speech intended to persuade without regard for truth.” 

ELIZA would accept user input and break it into sentences. It scanned each sentence for keywords or phrases. Then, ELIZA used a set of predefined rules (scripts) to match these keywords with "decomposition patterns," which helped it understand the structure of the sentence.

Based on the matched pattern, ELIZA would generate a response using "reassembly patterns." These responses often involved transforming the user's input into a question or statement.

For example, if a user said, "I feel sad," ELIZA might respond with, "Why do you feel sad?" This approach gave the illusion of understanding, even though ELIZA didn't truly comprehend the conversation. It was crude and limited, but people were amused or even fascinated.

I created a version of ELIZA when I was working at NJIT using the most famous ELIZA script called "DOCTOR" that simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist, reflecting the user's statements back to them in a non-directive manner. As of this writing, one version of that old program still exists at   https://web.njit.edu/~ronkowit/eliza.html 

9 Types of Paralell Universes

 I wrote a post about time travel and in researching the post I ended up delving into parallel universes as one possible way to time travel. 

Brian Greene, physicist and science writer, wrote The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos asking "Is our universe the only universe?" 

In the multiverse, there is a duplicate of every one of us. Greene discussed nine types of parallel universes. This is not simple.

The quilted multiverse conditions in an infinite universe necessarily repeat across space, yielding parallel worlds.

The inflationary multiverse says that eternal cosmological inflation yields an enormous network of bubble universes, of which our universe would be one.

The brane multiverse states that in M-theory, in the brane world scenario, our universe exists on one three-dimensional brane, which floats in a higher dimensional expanse potentially populated by other branes – other parallel universes.

The cyclic multiverse is saying that collisions between braneworlds can manifest as big bang-like beginnings, yielding universes that are parallel in time.

The landscape multiverse states that by combining inflationary cosmology and string theory, the many different shapes for string theory's extra dimensions give rise to many different bubble universes.

The quantum multiverse creates a new universe when a diversion in events occurs, as in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The holographic multiverse is derived from the theory that the surface area of a space can simulate the volume of the region.

The simulated multiverse implies that technological leaps suggest that the universe is just a simulation.

The ultimate multiverse is the ultimate theory, saying the principle of fecundity asserts that every possible universe is a real universe, thereby obviating the question of why one possibility – ours – is special. These universes instantiate all possible mathematical equations.

Tenochtitlan in 1325 AD

Tenochtitlan and Lake Texcoco in 1519 before it fell to the Spanish

The greatest empire of Mesoamerica, the Aztecs, developed in the Valley of Mexico where modern-day Mexico City is located. 

Aztecs were driven out of their previous home in Culhuacan and roamed central Mexico for a place to settle. In 1325 AD, they found an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco. There, they saw an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its mouth. They believed this was a sign from the gods that this was where they would live and founded the city of Tenochtitlan. 

Tenochtitlan was the center of the Aztec government and religion. It was also a very big trading center. When the Spanish arrived in 1519, they guessed that 60,000 people came to the market in Tenochtitlan every day. People bought and sold many things there, including slaves (prisoners of war from states the Aztecs had taken over). The entire city was decorated with art, architecture, and stone sculptures.

Aztecs built islands on the water and used the natural resources available to them to grow crops. Tenochtitlan was an incredibly well-planned and built city. The Aztecs built causeways, bridges, and canals to travel to and from the city. At its peak, it housed around 400,000 people.  

In 1521 AD, the Aztec Empire was conquered by Spanish conquistadors. Believing that he was the god Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec emperor Montezuma II welcomed Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortez, who later turned the Triple Alliance against the Aztecs and took over Tenochtitlan.