The Formula (1)

Photo of F1 steering wheel: The Sports Rush

                   Photo of F1 steering wheel: The Sports Rush

     What exactly is that word "formula"?  Put "baby" in front of it and you sort of know what it is, although does anyone really know what goes into baby formula?  Or throw a few chemicals or math equations together and you may come up with a new "formula."  So the question I had to ask was, where did auto racing pick up the word?  Of course, this sort of question came up because of watching an aging Brad Pitt playing an aging character named Sonny Hayes in the Apple film, F1, a film weak on plot but full of action (IF you're into Formula One racing), something which could almost be said about the aging Tom Cruise ending his own aging MI series.  But while the effects and all were well done in the F1 movie, what caught my eye more was the money involved in the sport (in Formula One, NASCAR, Indy and others, there are a lot of devoted fans, enough to rival other professional sports).  Consider that Formula One rules not only require that tires be changed out during a race, but need to be simply because they don't last that long,  Each team can get about 20 sets of tires, with each set costing an average of $11,000 and, well, you do the math.  In the movie, a single part flying off Pitt's car costs $200,000 to replace, and the part comes off twice (and there are over 14,000 parts in a Formula One car).  Throw in the glitter of Dubai and Vegas and all the other Grand Prix sites, and there are some big $$$ in this sport.  But even all of that money invested paled when the first shot of the dashboard appeared in the movie (above is the actual steering column for professional F1 champion Lewis Hamilton).  With over 250 sensors sending a million data points each second, each F1 racing machine is analyzed in milliseconds (a more detailed explanation is in this video).  So where am I going with all of this?  Not into the world of auto racing, but into the world of data...

Airbus 380 photo: Simple Flying

     Modern commercial jets often have 20 times that amount of sensors, with some larger aircraft such as the A380 having over 25,000 (I might add that my wife and I had the occasion to fly on that double-decker aircraft and found it to be the smoothest takeoff and landing we've ever experienced, another modern marvel).  Land at most any major airport and you'll enter a world of facial and biometric data, your passport scan following you as you travel.  My own state now requires every restaurant or place which serves any alcohol to scan, vs. just look at, your drivers license)...more data.  And as noted in earlier posts, think of the sat-nav system in your car, times the number of vehicles out there (to say nothing of the number of aircraft flying), the number of books you can read digitally, the numberr of documents and emails and texts being sent worldwide, the amount of music and movies being streamed, or the number of people --800 million-- who use ChatGPT each week.  Noted Sierra. A large data center can guzzle up as much as 5 million gallons of water a day, the equivalent usage of a town with 50,000 people.   As a piece in The New Yorker noted: The modern approach to A.I. development has been to vacuum up any online data available --including audio, video, practically all published work in English, and more than three billion web pages-- and let lawyers sort through the mess.  But there is now talk of a data shortage.  There are thought to be about four hundred trillion words on the indexed internet, but, as the OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has noted, much of that is “total garbage.”  High-quality text is harder to find.  If trends continue, researchers say, A.I. developers could exhaust the usable supply of human text between 2026 and 2032.  Wait, soaring past gigabytes and terabytes, we're now moving into even higher data storage  such as  petabytes, perhaps even onto exa, zetta and yotta...and yet we're running out of data?

     Consider me old school but already the language of computers is quickly moving past me and my days of simply tryng to block cookies and trackers: LLMs, transformers (the T in Chat GPT stands for "transformer"), high-dimensional space, vectors, features, gradient descent, high-token prediction.  Those words are common to today's world of computing, but relatively new to me.  Who knew that predictive reasoning in AI (such as composing a poem that rhymes) works backwards to ensure those words at the end will match?  When AI is shown a photograph, it has compressed it and picked up only the key important features, wrote another piece in The New Yorker: That vector served as an address for calling up nearby words and concepts.  Those ideas, in turn, called up others as the model built up a sense of the situation.  It composed its response with those images "in mind."  The article has you imagine seeing a number in your adult life and how it can sometimes bring up a memory of the address from a childhood home, that sort of thing.  But because AI cannot process a banana in the same way a baby child can (do I eat this?  what does it taste like?  is this too ripe?), AI may be missing a crucial element.  As the author noted after talking to many neuroscientists: Maybe truly understanding the world requires participating in it.

      

     So bringing this all back down to Earth.  My clutter.  I decided to go through a few of my past writings, pieces I had written decades earlier, some published, others just completed drafts or nearly so.  And lo and behold, my one and only attempt at writing a novel appeared (when you're young, one tends to think "how hard can it be?").  There it was, a one-page summary, a 10-page synopsis, and the first 100 or so pages.  Hmm, I remember starting that way, way back.  It was titled, The Cure, about a synthesized "formula" that somehow blended Amazonian plant sequences of DNA with other altered genetics and produced amazing results against many forms of cancer...the cure.  But of course, it was all a scam, a massive one on a national scale that made powerful people very wealthy...until it begins to be exposed (typical government cover-up Hollywood formula).  Wow, instant best seller, I thought at the time.  Big money all around (but obviously not that good since it now sat buried in a forgotten file).  But really, why was I still hanging onto such scribblings?  At my age?  (indeed, I wrote it in the days of actually typing it out on a typewriter, then running those pages down to an expensive copy shop, since few places even carried copy machines, and the word "copy" meant only one thing, Xerox)  When the time came to cash in my chips on life's crap table, would anyone even want to peek at my earlier writings, even --or especially-- a semi-thought-out book proposal?  Uh, no.  That was just reality.  So into the recycling bin it all went, along with batches of slides and photos, and the addresses and phone numbers of people I hadn't contacted in years.  But all of that was just a drop in the bucket because it was all just data and, like me, would likely be termed "total garbage" by outside eyes.  An ordinary life, people might say, a Joe Blow but one who felt nothing but gratitude at the chance to witness life and partake in it, but one who also realized that it was time to acknowledge that he was now another Sonny Hayes and that it was time to make way for the new.  To paraphrase the late Hunter Thompson, it was time to join the crowd of those who have been fortunate enough to have had one wild ride on this circuit.  

     Stop!  Don't feel that any of this is depressing to me.  Rather, it has proved exhilarating.  I bring this up (my justification for hanging onto all those old writings) because long ago I heard Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame tell our class to "never throw any of your writings out because once you become famous, they'll want everything, even your junk" (or something along those lines).  It was a grand time back then.  At this "experimental" college (yes, I wrote a piece about it), you could pay just $35 (which was pricey for a college student back then) and join a small group of 20 to 40 people (for college credits, no less) and hear talks and participate in Q&A sessions with people such as Serling, Jonathan Winters, Madeline Kahn, composer Marvin Hamlisch, and even the fresh-out-of-college and up & coming comedian, Steve Martin (only 12 people were in that class since he was just starting out, having just had an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson).*  Excitedly I remember rushing up to Rod Serling at the end of the class (I was the only one interested, which surprised me) and asked if I could interview him.  "You find the magazine, I'll give the interview," he told me.  He also knew that his Sonny Hayes days had arrived, despite a stellar career.  And yet, none of that diminished how I viewed this chain-smoking champion of writing in front of me.  Like the words of the esteemed 93-year old surgeon, M.E. Hecht (and her co- contributer, Whoopi Goldberg) in the book, Two Old Broads, you grow into old age, not out of it.  She was proud to be called "an old broad," writing: ...if you feel like you are missing out on the time you have left, remember: much of what you may have missed is not life and death, not even earthshaking; so take in what you can, pursue things that are interesting, new, or educational, and always find new ways to laugh...is a Broad feisty?  You bet.  Fun?  You bet.  Gutsy?  You bet.  Incisive?  You bet.  Original?  You bet.  Even, off color?  You bet.  Call me a Broad?  Please!  Call you a Broad?  Consider this your invitation to join the club.

Cartoon by Harry Bliss

     That "old broads" book was subtitled: Stuff You Need to Know That You Didn't Know You Needed to Know.  Sort of like the book In Case You Get Hit by a Bus, which started with this: The odds of getting hit by a bus are 495,000 to 1.  But the odds that you're going to die some day?  Exactly.   To be fair, the book was true to its subtitle in telling you "how to organize your life NOW for when you're not around later."  Gulp.  But here's what was surprising...the book opens with what it considered the most essential thing to do now: let someone know how to unlock your phone.  Wait, your phone?   The book notes that a Pew survey found that more than 25% of people don't lock their phone anyway, but that even  Apple advertised: There's more information on your phone than in your home.  And if you're like me, all those banking and health accounts need a secondary verification which means...a call or text to your phone (which is likely still locked).  Ah well, who needs all those reminders anyway because that same study showed that 65% of people simply keep all their passwords in their heads (only 18% write them down on paper).  Hello?  Get hit by a bus and ahem, where are those passwords again?  And without access to any of that, you may find that both the courts and the state are chomping at the bit to freeze all of your until things until it can be legally (and for the most part, expensively) sorted.  Banks will freeze access to your safe deposit box (so the book advises you to NOT place your will there), and likely your checking & savings accounts as well.  And your valuables and possessions inside your house or apartment?  Repeat after me: when you die and don't have anything written down, you might as well be saying that you'll be holding an open house, telling all involved to just grab and go.  Picture more family battles.  Oh the cat got out; that's okay, it'll survive.  And do I hear the words "estate sale?"  However, FREE emergency medical apps are out there, accessible to emergency personnel even IF your phone is locked (and you can put as much --or as little-- information on them as you want to reveal; I only list both an emergency contact, where my medical records are, and what I am allergic to)...install one of them NOW (I tend to use the free version of the Medical ID app, but there are many others available)..  

 

    It was William Faulkner who said: Do not bother to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.  Try to be better than yourself.  And while it is quite easy to get caught up in this new world of mega-data (the AI companies, banks and stock markets sure seem to have grabbed the ring on the merry-go-round), I find that I can get more information just from staring into my dog or cats' eyes.  In that space is patience, understanding, compassion, fulfillment, and something ChatGPT or even we humans may never understand, unconditional love.  And who knows, I may end up like another prolific writer, Sy Safransky, founder and editor of The Sun.  As a recent issue noted, it's founder came down with Alzheimer's and writing was now quite difficult, thus they featured one of his reflections from something he wrote back in 1993: I want to keep eating.  I want life.  More life.  I want to turn from the simple facts of my existence to consider bigger mysteries, to fret about what might be, to remember what is no more.  I want to imagine something other than this food in front of me, already a commodity on some assembly line, moving away from me.  Yesterday’s desire.  I want to be doing something more important than feeding Sy Safransky.  Added the current editor: In 2024 The Sun’s founder and editor, Sy Safransky, stepped back from the magazine after fifty years, following a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.  Though writing is now a challenge for Sy, he amassed reams of journal entries throughout his long career.  I couldn't help but think back to Rod Serling and his "save everything" advice.  But I was no Rod Serling.  I was no Sy Safransky.  Truth is, I was not even a Sonny Hayes.  And should I suddenly find myself having difficulty not only writing but remembering, would I even know who those people were, much less any of my old words?  But my dog's eyes told me to ignore all that.  He was here, by my side and wasn't that enough?  Wasn't the life I had had, and now have, enough?  Absolutely to both, in fact those were more than enough.  One thing I did pick up from the Brad Pitt movie was how the Formula One cars start their races.  No red, yellow, green lights like in drag racing; no guy on a stand waving a flag.  Today it was all highly automated, just three red lights illuminating one by one until all three were lit.  Then the signal to go --one or a few seconds later, randomly chosen-- is when all of the lights go off.   And perhaps that was how life would end in an ideal version, in my book at least.  On your marks, get set...lights out.

Pickles comic: Brian Crane

*A bit of trivia: a very young Paul Anka wrote the theme song to the Tonight Show (he also wrote My Way when he was 25, a song which basically brought Frank Sinatra out of a planned retirement).  Also in those early years of Johnny Carson, a young Glen Campbell was one of the studio musicians in Carson's band, headed by trumpeter Doc Severinson...and for a quick but thorough peek at what many are facing in today's world, that of a loved one experiencing dementia or Alzheimer's, Polar Vortex by cartoonist Denise Dorrance was listed by Library Journal as one of the top graphic novels of 2024...worth a look at the --in my opinion-- a hard-hitting but delicate presentation of caring for a solo family member facing dementia  but one who lives an ocean (or even a few states) away: the guilt, the decisions, the reality.  It's a quick but important read, if only to realize that what you may be experiencing as a possible caregiver is shared by many others.  As the song written by Harris Lloyd Seaton and made famous by The Rolling Stones: It's too much pain and too much sorrow; guess I'll feel the same tomorrow...here's a chance to change your mind.  I'll be gone a long, long time.  Well this could be the last time, this could be the last time, maybe the last time, I don't know.