Using Claude for science communication: The case of the genome as autoencoder
July 28, 2024
I am just back from a walk thinking about Kevin Mitchell and Nick Cheney’s recent paper (preprint) on the genome as autoencoder, rather than a blueprint or recipe. This paper caused quite a stir and you can find a good summary in this post by Jessica Hamzelou for the MIT Technology Review. Walking along, I …
Large language models, meaning and maths
July 26, 2024
I was reading an article in The Guardian about two novels by Benjamin Labatut. One novel, published in 2020, is entitled When We Cease to Understand the World and deals with quantum mechanics and war. The second novel The Maniac, published in 2023 and just out in paperback, is about John von Neumann, which brings …
Talking with Claude about machine metaphors in biology
July 12, 2024
In my last blog post I said that I had writer’s block – and I still have. I said so to my son and whined a bit. He said: “Remember Christmas 2022? You were complaining about the same thing and I said, go and play with ChatGPT, which had just come out, and that got …
Being all at sea
It’s summer, but it isn’t. It is intermittently grey and rainy and stormy, with a few days of sunshine in between. In another year without a summer, namely 1816, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or so the myth goes* …. If she could sit in the Villa Diodati in gloomy weather and write, why can’t I, …
Blueprints, postmen and a bit of metaphor archaeology
July 4, 2024
At the end of June, the NHS announced a new gene therapy for haemophilia B. Gene therapy replaces a faulty gene or adds a new gene to correct a mutation (genetic fault). People with haemophilia B lack the blood clotting protein factor IX and can bleed severely from even a slight injury. Some therefore need frequent …
Metaphor identification: From manual to automatic
June 28, 2024
I have written about metaphors for AIs and LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT, but I don’t know much about what one might call the mechanics of metaphor recognition, identification and interpretation inside LLMs. So, I wanted to find out and went down a rabbit hole – I never quite reached the bottom…. Metaphor and …
How to do things with prompts: Magic words, speech acts and AI
June 21, 2024
Looking at what’s going on in AI sometimes makes me feel like the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, When he first visited the Trobriand Islands of then British New Guinea about a century ago, he became fascinated by the magic words that the islanders used and the actions they were believed to perform. Visiting the land of …
A new language for a new biology? Let’s talk about it!
June 14, 2024
Philip Ball has written a book that introduces lay readers to entirely new dimensions of biology and reveals the intricate complexity of living organism: How Life Works. In the process of detailing the biological complexities of life, Phil also does something else; he scrutinises old ways if talking about life and takes apart old metaphors …
Biochar in the news
June 7, 2024
In this blog post Carol Morris, Catherine Price and I want to present two articles on a rather niche topic relating to climate change mitigation – niche but nevertheless interesting and important: biochar. What is biochar? Biochar is amongst a growing suite of approaches developed to address the climate crisis by removing carbon dioxide from …
Mud, metaphors and politics: Meaning-making during the 2021 German floods
May 27, 2024
This post is a brief summary of an article Rusi Jaspal and I wrote in the aftermath of the 2021 floods in Germany. Many more floods have happened since then in many more parts of the world. The article was published online in 2023 and has only just come out in print, in June 2024, …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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