Boston Marathon Strava-verse: Paul Revere's ride

In seventh grade, Miss Phillips had me memorize "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. So I did. After finishing "Jabberwocky" to start off the year of run naming, it seemed obvious what my next effort would be. I calculated that I could arrange to end it on the day of the Boston Marathon, thus neatly tying the verse with the running. And to top it off, the "18th of April" cited in the poem was exactly 250 years ago on Friday.

"Paul Revere's Ride" was first published
in The Atlantic Monthly in 1861.

On looking up the poem, also titled "The Landlord's Tale", I discovered the poem's political undertones. It was written in the leadup to the Civil War, and Longfellow had been outspoken as an abolishionist. The poem was a call to action to Northerners, recalling their role in the American Revolution. So not irrelevant to the current situation.

Listen my children and you shall hear

of the midnight ride of Paul Revere

and of my runs like this one here.

On the eighteenth of April, in seventy-five

Hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year,

or when the end of this poem shall arrive.

He said to his friend, "If the British march

By land or sea from the town to-night”

They be lost in New Jersey, no turnpike in sight.

Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch

of the North Church tower as a signal light,—

One, if by land, and two, if by sea;

But if it be 'puter, then ye shall put three.

And I on the opposite shore will be,

ready to ride and spread the alarm

the royalists are coming and they mean to do harm!

Through every Middlesex village and farm,

For the country folk to be up and to arm.

On up the Park Street and down by the pond

to Chester, where merriment and good folk were found.

Then he said, "Good night!" and with muffled oar

Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore

safe from the royalists and and their childish roar.

Just as the moon rose over the bay,

Where swinging wide at her moorings lay

An emperor who would have his way

The Somerset, British man-of-war; A phantom ship

... with each mast and spar

across the moon like a prison bar,

that traitorous rogue will go too far.

And a huge black hulk, that was magnified

by its own reflection in the tide,

For the pacer and the patriot,

there's no place left to hide.

Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street

Wanders and watches with eager ears,

wondering what we can do in these years.

Till in the silence around him he hears

the muster of men at the barrack door,

while the good folk of the country wish back on before.

Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Forgetting their watches, they ran point eight four.

The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet

and the measured tread of the grenadiers,

...already tired of the next few years.

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church

By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,

the view kept coming, no need to search

To the belfry-chamber overhead,

"Resist! Resist!" he angrily said

And startled the pigeons from their perch.

On the sombre rafters, that round him made masses

and moving shapes of shade,

seen through hay-air glasses.

By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,

to the highest window in the wall

for in the coming fateful brawl,

he will see the mighty fall.

Where he paused to listen and look down

A moment on the roofs of the town

the sun would soon rise and the breads would be round.

And the moonlight flowing over all.

Crescent and full, they're having a ball.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead

in their night-encampment on the hill

Warning lights blaring red,

this couldn't be a drill.

Wrapped in silence so deep and still

that he could hear,

like a sentinel's tread,

the muskrat's sneer

as he left them for dead.

The watchful night-wind, as it went

creeping along from tent to tent,

And seeming to whisper, "All is well!",

but veterans all, ’twas bad news to tell.

A moment only he feels the spell

of the place and the hour,

A code for unlocking the library’s power.

and the secret dread of the lonely belfry and the dead;

Sixteen falcons thundering overhead

For suddenly all his thoughts are bent

on a shadowy something far away

Put in the water, a drone menace on the quay.

Where the river widens to meet the bay,

three walkers ramble in a state of dismay.

A line of black that bends and floats on the rising tide

like a bridge of boats coming to destroy, despite our votes.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride, booted and spurred

with a heavy stride he knew that those soldiers were on the wrong side.

On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.

Now he patted his horse's side,

no yielding today,

he was wholly without fear.

Now gazed at the landscape far and near

Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,

Hoping present horrors would give way to rebirth.

And turned and tightened his saddle girth

But mostly he watched with eager search

Five or six hundred? He wondered the worth.

The belfry-tower of the Old North Church, as it rose

above the graves on the hill,

his fear for his country grows and grows.

Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.

And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height,

a somber thought. might is not right.

A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!

He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns;

danger approaches with heighted concerns.

But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight

a second lamp in the belfry burns!

By sea it will be

that good people defeat the tyrant's might.

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,

a shape in the moonlight,

a bulk in the dark,

a sheet on the mark.

And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark

Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet

Feet flying forward like a harley in heat.

That was all!

And yet, through the gloom and the light,

the fate of a nation was riding that night;

in two years or late, all will be put right.

And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight

Kindled the land into flame with its heat

for justice and doing all that is right.

He has left the village and mounted the steep

And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,

are the values and promises we keep.

Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;

And under the alders, that skirt its edge,

trouble may be coming but still hope resides

Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,

Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

Our trusty band stay true to their pledge.

It was twelve by the village clock

When he crossed the bridge into Medford town,

he heard the crowing of the cock,

running round and roun' the anserine flock

And the barking of the farmer's dog,

Who sniffed a rat come into town

And felt the damp of the river fog,

That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,

when he galloped into Lexington

while everything had gone amok,

way down in Washington

He saw the gilded weathercock swim

in the moonlight as he passed

No time for talk, too late now,

the tyranny would not last.

And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,

gaze at him with a spectral glare

It was two by the village clock,

When he came to the bridge in Concord town.

With a figure of love he took the walk

He heard the bleating of the flock

and the twitter of birds among the trees

the sheep felt a shock

and the twitter said "Oh Please!"

And felt the breath of the morning breeze

blowing over the meadows brown.

Till the running faeries squeeze

colors over cap and gown.

And one was safe and asleep in his bed

Who at the bridge would be first to fall,

Not from the sleet pelting on his head

Nor from fog depressing us all

Who that day would be lying dead,

pierced by a British musket-ball.

Facing a taxing dread,

against a tyrant we must still stand tall.

You know the rest. In the books you have read,

how the British Regulars fired and fled,

They failed the test as shall we all,

if we don't heed the siren call.

How the farmers gave them ball for ball,

From behind each fence and farm-yard wall,

Poor souls trapped in the tyrant's thrall.

Chasing the red-coats down the lane,

Then crossing the fields to emerge again

Confused by the tumult of where and when.

Under the trees at the turn of the road

They’ve trampled good faith,

ignored all the code.

And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;

hoping to save values we hold dear.

And so through the night went his cry of alarm

To every Middlesex village and farm,

by Essex schools in hurried flight.

A cry of defiance and not of fear

Shouting a message so powerful, so clear.

A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,

And a word that shall echo forevermore!

Two hundred fifty years to the day

That echo rings, it won't go away.

For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,

Through all our history, to the last

The present is tiny, our future is vast.

In the hour of darkness and peril and need

The people will waken and listen to hear

No matter their sex, gender, color race or creed

A message so powerful, so urgent and clear.

The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,

The crowds of townsfolk who shout and cheer

Those who run today and speed

the midnight message of Paul Revere.

I came up with a name for what I'm doing: "intercalated verse". Look it up.

Why I'm doing it? Sometimes I get an idea and I am unable not to do it.

AI bots are destroying Open Access

There's a war going on on the Internet. AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, non-profit organizations, and scholarly publishers, anyone who is working to make quality information universally available on the internet. And the technologists defending against this broad-based attack are doing everything they can to preserve their outlets while trying to remain true to the mission of providing the digital lifeblood of science and culture to the world.

Yes, many of these beloved institutions are under financial pressures in the current political environment, but politics swings back and forth. The AI armies are only growing more aggressive, more rapacious, more deceitful and ever more numerous.

I'm talking about the voracious hunger of AI companies for good data to train Large Language Models (LLMs). These are the trillion-parameter sets of statistical weights that power things like Claude, ChatGPT and hundreds of systems you've never heard of. Good training data has lots of text, lots of metadata, is reliable and unbiased. It's unsullied by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practitioners. It doesn't constantly interrupt the narrative flow to try to get you to buy stuff. It's multilingual, subject specific, and written by experts. In other words, it's like a library.

At last week's Code4lib conference hosted by Princeton University Library, technologists from across the library world gathered to share information about library systems, how to make them better, how to manage them, and how to keep them running. The hot topic, the thing everyone wanted to talk about, was how to deal with bots from the dark side.

Bots on the internet are nothing new, but a sea change has occurred over the past year. For the past 25 years, anyone running a web server knew that the bulk of traffic was one sort of bot or another. There was googlebot, which was quite polite, and everyone learned to feed it - otherwise no one would ever find the delicious treats we were trying to give away. There were lots of search engine crawlers working to develop this or that service. You'd get "script kiddies" trying thousands of prepackaged exploits. A server secured and patched by a reasonably competent technologist would have no difficulty ignoring these.

The old style bots were rarely a problem. They respected robot exclusions and "nofollow" warnings. The warning helped bots avoid volatile resources and infinite parameter spaces. Even when they ignored exclusions they seemed to be careful about it. They declared their identity in "user-agent" headers. They limited the request rate and number of simultaneous requests to any particular server. Occasionally there would be a malicious bot like a card-tester or a registration spammer. You'd often have to block these based on IP address. It was part of the landscape, not the dominant feature.

The current generation of bots is mindless. They use as many connections as you have room for. If you add capacity, they just ramp up their requests. They use randomly generated user-agent strings. They come from large blocks of IP addresses. They get trapped in endless hallways. I observed one bot asking for 200,000 nofollow redirect links pointing at Onedrive, Google Drive and Dropbox. (which of course didn't work, but Onedrive decided to stop serving our Canadian human users). They use up server resources - one speaker at Code4lib described a bug where software they were running was using 32 bit integers for session identifiers, and it ran out!

The good guys are trying their best. They're sharing block lists and bot signatures. Many libraries are routinely blocking entire countries (nobody in china could possibly want books!) just to be able to serve a trickle of local requests. They are using commercial services such as Cloudflare to outsource their bot-blocking and captchas, without knowing for sure what these services are blocking, how they're doing it, or whether user privacy and accessibility is being flushed down the toilet. But nothing seems to offer anything but temporary relief. Not that there's anything bad about temporary relief, but we know the bots just intensify their attack on other content stores.

The view of MIT Press's Open-Access site from the Wayback Machine.

The surge of AI bots has hit Open Access sites particularly hard, as their mission conflicts with the need to block bots. Consider that Internet Archive can no longer save snapshots of one of the best open-access publishers, MIT Press because of cloudflare blocking. (see above) Who know how many books will be lost this way?  Or consider that the bots took down OAPEN, the worlds most important repository of Scholarly OA books, for a day or two. That's 34,000 books that AI "checked out" for two days. Or recent outages at Project Gutenberg, which serves 2 million dynamic pages and a half million downloads per day. That's hundreds of thousands of downloads blocked! The link checker at doab-check.ebookfoundation.org (a project I worked on for OAPEN) is now showing 1,534 books that are unreachable due to "too many requests". That's 1,534 books that AI has stolen from us! And it's getting worse.

Thousands of developer hours are being spent on defense against the dark bots and those hours are lost to us forever. We'll never see the wonderful projects and features they would have come up with in that time.

The thing that gets me REALLY mad is how unnecessary this carnage is. Project Gutenberg makes all its content available with one click on a file in its feeds directory. OAPEN makes all its books available via an API. There's no need to make a million requests to get this stuff!! Who (or what) is programming these idiot scraping bots? Have they never heard of a sitemap??? Are they summer interns using ChatGPT to write all their code? Who gave them infinite memory, CPUs and bandwidth to run these monstrosities? (Don't answer.)

We are headed for a world in which all good information is locked up behind secure registration barriers and paywalls, and it won't be to make money, it will be for survival. Captchas will only be solvable by advanced AIs and only the wealthy will be able to use internet libraries.

Or maybe we can find ways to destroy the bad bots from within. I'm thinking a billion rickrolls?

Notes:

1. I've found that I can no longer offer more than 2 facets of faceted search. Another problematic feature is "did you mean" links. AI bots try to follow every link you offer even if there are a billion different ones.
2. Two projects, iocaine and nepenthes are enabling the construction of "tarpits" for bots. These are automated infinite mazes that bots get stuck in, perhaps keeping the bots occupied and not bothering anyone else. I'm skeptical.
3. Here is an implementation of the Cloudflare Turnstyle service (supposedly free) that was mentioned favorably at the conference.
4. It's not just open access, it's also Open Source.
5. Cloudflare has announced an "AI honeypot". Should be interesting.
6. One way for Open Access site to encourage good bot behavior is to provide carrots to good robots. For this reason, it would be good to add Common Crawl to greenlists: https://commoncrawl.org/ccbot
7. Ian Mulvaney (BMJ) concurs. 

Strava Verse

The internet gives us new ways to express ourselves. One of the more strenuously esoteric forms of artistic expression is Strava art, in which people do runs that, when mapped, draw pictures. None of my strava art was particularly good, but my running club friends in Stockholm regularly run "elefanten". I spent a year attempting "Found Strava Art", where you just run a new route and give the run a name based on what it looks like. I ran a lot of flowers and space ships, but meh. Last year I named each run with a line of a song that came up on my iPod. Too obscure.

This year I decided to serialize poems with my Strava runs. I didn't have a plan, but I started with Jabberwocky. It seemed appropriate to comment using nonsense words, because, Jabberwocky. I ended up with this:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

I love running with my slithy toves!

All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe.

My right knee was a grobble mimsy today, but mome what a rath!  

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

Also, the Jabberrun can be hard on the knees.

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

ERC hosted run had quiche to bite and George to catch.

He took his vorpal sword in hand

New York Sirens game. Women with vorpal sticks. Slain by the Charge 3-2.

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch!

Definitely well salted and frumious out there today.

Long time the manxome foe he sought

But quick the manxless chill he caught

So rested he by the Tumtum tree

Covered with snow in filagree

And stood a while in thought.

Though clabbercing in a profunctional dot!

And, as in uffish thought he stood

Trolloping thru the Brookdale wood.

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame

Cheld and hord, a glistering name…

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood

And caught the two burblygums because he could.

And burbled as it came!

So late the Jabberrun slept

For Eight Muyibles passed as though aflame

O'er Curbles and Nonces the pluffy sheep leapt.

One, two! One, two! And through and through

Three four! Three four! Sankofa’s coffee’s fit to pour.

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

The Icebeest of Hoth kept blobbering back.

He went galumphing back.

He left it dead, and with its head

... the Garmind sprang to life

And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

The ice, the snow, it's hard as rock.

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

Think of my knees! Oy oy oy oy.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

O jousbarf night! The fluss! The fright!

He chortled in his joy.

(And padoodled the rest of of the way!)

‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves

Did not, had not, could not loave.

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe

“Dunno.” said the wormly autoclave

All mimsy were the borogoves,

Again and again, beloo and aboave

And the mome raths outgrabe.

The end. Ooh ooh Babe!

Terrible right? But it has its moments.

I've started a new one. I fear it will get more topical.

Notes:

• I previously invented "clickstream poetry". It never caught on.

Thank you, New York City

fresh off the bus

It was 11:15AM in the pink D corral of the fifth wave, and surrounding me were runners of all shapes and sizes, from around the world, all of us waiting for our race to start in 15 minutes. We had waited through the morning (five hours for me) as our faster friends drifted away excitedly and cannons sounded the starts of earlier waves. There was a determined silence as each of us thought ahead to our 2024 New York City Marathon.

A few meters to my right I saw a woman wearing a large pink button proclaiming her status as a "Birthday Girl". Her shirt had the name "HEATHER" across the front. I shouted "HAPPY BIRTHDAY HEATHER!", and she turned to look at me, a bit startled. I walked over and we chatted a bit. She was from the UK, and was running New York to celebrate turning 50. I told her she was going to have fun, and that the crowd would be calling to her the whole way. "Really?" she said. "Hey, this is New York", I reassured her. "You don't have to know someone 10 years before you can talk to them on a first name basis!"

Then, over to the side of the corral, I saw another woman, wearing a BIRTHDAY GIRL shirt. "Heather, you must go over and wish her happy birthday!" Heather hesitated, but I said "Aw come on!" and led her through the crowd to the other birthday girl. The two marathon twins hugged, and everything felt right with the world. I looked around and the crowd seemed a bit anxious waiting. I shouted "Hey everyone! We have two birthday girls running with us! Let's sing Happy Birthday!"

And so I led a happy chorus of more than a thousand runners in a joyful rendition of "Happy Birthday". Miraculous. My whole day was like that. From start to end, the crowd was shouting my name. They got riled up when I acknowledged them, sometimes chanting "ERIC, ERIC, ERIC" as I gave them high fives. 

I had decided to run the 2024 New York City Marathon about ten months earlier. A friend heard me talk about running and suggested that I get a fundraising entry through the charity he was involved with. At that point I had just run my 11th Half Marathon but never a marathon. A marathon seemed an unnecessary stretch for me and my creaky legs. But I decided in an instant. Two days later I told a running friend, Janell, and a few others about my decision. I knew I couldn't back out after that.

still looking good at mile 9

The first 10 miles of the race flew by as I ran at a pace that was faster than I expected (I was doing a 3:1 run:walk). Axel and Karen were there rooting for me at mile 9 with my Fleet Feet friends and then again around mile 12. The crowd on 1st Avenue at mile 16 made me forget that I had never raced that far.  More running friends were waiting at mile 18 where it really helped. At mile 21 my 3:1 cycle became 2:1, and at mile 23 it was 1:1. On Fifth Avenue it seemed like everyone I knew was there cheering me on. The bearded prophet with "The End is Near" on a sign could have been a hallucination. Coming out of the Bronx I had switched to my running playlist, and in the Park I started "singing" the lyrics out loud: "It's the End of the World and We Know It!". I wasn't feeling that fine and I switched to 100% brisk walk.

Re-entering the park for the last half mile, I was determined to finish it running. BIG MISTAKE! I cramped up immediately and could barely stagger on. But after a few minutes, my legs consented to a sloooow walk and finally relented on a brisk finish. Then a second miracle occurred. I knew I had friends who were volunteering at the finish line, but to see and hug them all was a blessing I had not expected. And to get the medal from my friend Janell! 

Back of the medal with braille text "TCS New York City Marathon"

Thank you to everyone who donated to my fundraiser for Amref Health Africa. Thank you to Karen and Axel for getting me home with my cramping legs. Thank you to the coaches, runners and PTs who helped my get through the training. Thank you to all the spectators and to the volunteers who got me from the start to the finish, and thank you to the zombies that trudged with me for the long long long walk out of the park. 

Strava: All my friends are in New York

This series of posts:

• We'll run till we drop
• Running song of the day 
• All the Streets in Montclair
• Running away from home
• Thank You, New York City

I Fondled Salvador Dalí's Earrings

 Content Warning: AI

My Uncle Henry was a Professor of Chemistry at NYU. He lived, for the most part, in his sister-in-law Barbara's 7-story townhouse on East 67th street in Manhattan. He acted as the caretaker of this mansion when Barbara went off living her socialite life in Paris or wherever. My family would stay in the townhouse whenever we came to New York to visit my favorite uncle.

This is how my parents ended up being at a fancy party attended by Salvador Dalí. It seems that Barbara had commissioned a portrait of herself, and the occasion of the party was the painting's unveiling. I was there too; I was a few months old. The great painter was amused to see a baby at this party and the baby was extremely amused at this strange looking adult. More accurately, I was captivated by his shiny earrings and reached out to play with them as though they were a mobile hanging in my crib. Or so I have been told. So many times.

Dalí and Eric as hallucinated by DALL-E

My dad was presented to Dalí as a brilliant young engineer, which he was. Dad was born in Gary, Indiana, but moved to Sweden with his family when he was 7 years old. (That's a whole 'nother story!) After graduation from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, he decided to take a job with Goodyear Aerospace in Akron, Ohio, because that way he didn't have to serve in the Swedish Army and give up his American citizenship. He worked on semiconductor devices before anyone had ever heard of semiconductors.

Maybe brilliant engineers were exotic creatures in that fancy New York City party circuit, because Salvador Dalí buttonholed my dad. He wanted my dad to invent something for him. The conversation went something like this (imagine me sitting in Dalí's lap, not paying attention to the conversation at all):

Dalí: "Tell me, young man, do you invent things?"

Dad: "As a matter of fact, I'm working on what they call a buffered amp..."

Dalí: "Never mind that, I have an idea I want you to work on..."

Dad: "Yes?"

Dalí: "I want you to invent a paint gun..."

Dad: "That doesn't sound too hard..."

Dalí: "... that will paint what I see in my mind."

Dad: "??"

Dalí: "I paint, but the paintings are never what I want."

Dad: "That's not how..."

Dalí: "I want to press a button and have the paint go in the right place."

Dad: "Well maybe someday..."

Dalí: "You start working on it, let me know how it goes"

Eric: "Waaaaaaaaa!"

Apparently, the paint gun was a bit of an obsession with Dalí. He created a technique called "bulletism" that involved using an antique gun (an "arquebus") to shoot vials of paint at a canvas. A couple of months after the fancy party, he appeared on the Ed Sullivan show firing a paint gun at a canvas! 

Sixty-four years later, we sort of know how to build Dalí's mind reading paint-gun. We have technologies that let us see the brain think (functional brain imaging combined with deep learning), and technologies that can make pictures from human thoughts (when expressed as LLM prompts). It's now easy to imagine a device that uses your brain to control an AI image generator (see the image above!). Such a device could take advantage of the brain's plasticity to give Dalís of the future the power to make images from activity that exists only in their brains.

People are arguing about whether AI can make art. There's even a copyright case in which the US copyright office is saying, effectively, that you can't copyright what you tell an AI to create.

It seems clear to me, at least, that AI, wielded as a tool, can make art, in the same way that a Stradivarius, wielded by a musician, can make art, or that a camera, wielded by a photographer, can make art, or that computer program, wielded by a poet, can make art. 

Salvador Dalí was just ahead of his time. 

Notes:

1. While OpenAI's "DALL-E" is supposed to be a combination of "Dalí" And "WALL-E", I've not been able to find any mention of Dalí's interest in brain-computer interfaces!
2. I couldn't find an image of the painting "Portrait of Bobo Rockefeller" on the web; a study for the painting is in the Dalí Museun in Spain. Dalí had a policy of not allowing his subjects to see their portrait before is was unveiled, and my understanding is that Barbara was never really fond of the painting. It had an prominent place in her living room though.
3. Researchers have studied the use of brain-scanning techniques to develop brain-computer interfaces for uses such as the development of speech prostheses that convert brain activity into intelligible speech. 
4. Openwater is combining infrared and acoustic imaging to see brain activity for neurological diagnosis. But they can see the potential for mind reading using the help of deep learning pattern recognition. Founder May Lou Jepsen says “I think the mind-reading scenarios are farther out, but the reason I'm talking about them early is because they do have profound ethical and legal implications.” 

Comments. I encourage comment on the Fediverse or on Bluesky. I've turned off commenting here.

Reminder: I'm earning my way into the NYC Marathon by raising money for Amref Health Africa.