As the title suggests, so forth.
Copenhagen Cycling Culture
I nearly got run over by a cyclist twice in the last few weeks. And it made me think about the attempts to impose a cycling culture on Dublin, as if Copenhagen’s century of cycling culture could simply be imposed by fiat. I nearly got flattened in Copenhagen straight off the airport train, as did another tourist beside me. We were simply not prepared for this level of cycling. Packs of cyclists, moving at speed, and assured of their right of way. This was not familiar territory. In my walks around the Southside there are rarely packs of cyclists. The busiest cycle lanes that come to mind are along the canals. One simply does not expect cyclists on cycle lanes in this city. A dangerous habit of mind to bring to Copenhagen; where entire city quarters can initially seem closed, until you realise it’s simply the absence of car noise. The thing about imposing a culture by fiat is the dangerous God complex that very quickly develops in those thus humoured. I got off the bus in Donnybrook and was almost flattened by a cyclist, who was moving in the opposite direction of the cars in his cycle lane. He seemed unbelieving that I could have been so f***ing stupid as to get in his way. Except… At that bus stop the cycle lane is the only way to get out from the bus stop to the pedestrian walkway. Uh… Surely this problem has occurred before my misfortune. But no, all common sense and basic caution, and decency, goes out the window. By God sir, rights must be embraced to their fullest. This is a cycle lane! Death to all who would be looking in the expected direction, and not expecting someone to steam by at full speed at an obvious chokepoint, mere seconds after a bus has pulled away. THIS IS A CYCLE LANE! Sigh.
Shovelling cultural snow
The rise of AI has made me wonder about the value of that sub-species of pointless journalistic copy that a character in Dance Dance Dance memorably described as ‘shovelling cultural snow’. The “Five exciting new restaurants in Berlin that you simply must check out” piece, that you idly read on a plane’s in-flight magazine, was what Haruki Murakami had in mind. Could an AI like ChatGPT write this sort of perfunctory copy just as well as a bored, underpaid, overworked human? In a past life as a film critic I was often surprised to see press releases reappear untouched in national newspapers. I always ran them thru my word processor first so that some critical thought would’ve been expended on them, and, more importantly, that some trace of my personal take on the material would appear on my blog. (Which led in one instance to the funniest thing that ever happened to me on Twitter) But if that is not as important as I thought it was, and clearly some professional journalists a decade ago already thought it really wasn’t, could we then end up (and rather soon at that) with a LLM AI generating bland press releases that another LLM AI then seamlessly slots into the newspapers? If machines are just talking to each other, do we even need to listen?
Talking Movies 