More than words: how to think about writing in the Age of AI

Posted on October 17, 2026 by tkflor

“If ChatGPT can do it, it’s probably not worth doing by humans, and it very well may not be worth doing at all.”
From More than words: how to think about writing in the Age of AI
by John Warner

Writing, according to Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus is: 1) A group or sequence of letters or symbols; 2) Handwriting; 3) The art or profession of literary composition.
AI generated text concurs with the first definition, the second is irrelevant, and according to Mr. Warner, the author of More than words: how to think about writing in the Age of AI, it fails the third definition, because “large language models do not ‘write.’ They generate syntax.”

The book opens with a survey of leading views on AI’s intelligence, then discusses whether text-generating Large Language Models (LLMs) can eliminate the “rote work” of writing in the way that calculators did for math. The author’s verdict is an unequivocal “NO”. Only Humans Write.

Writing, according to Mr. Warner, is not the end product, but first and foremost a complex process that involves memories, thought, and insight “spontaneously” emerging from our subconsciousness. LLMs, on the other hand, are simulations trained on billions of texts written by humans to generate texts that mimic human output. As these texts are plausible and sometimes even engaging, they appear to people accustomed to anthropomorphize like “writing.” As AI’s response to prompts is almost instantaneous, it’s efficient and cost saving.

Efficiency and cost-saving may have little place in a book about writing, but unfortunately, they are the ugly elephant that crowds and blocks the room. LLMs were created using copyrighted text without owners’ consent, compensation, or even knowledge. OpenAI, Anthropic, and other tech companies that have been dedicating mind-boggling resources to create and run LLMs have vested interest to (mis)represent AI as the ultimate solution for every problem, and push it everywhere in total disregard of human and environmental cost. This elephant keeps ballooning as the companies race to create larger models and more data centers, and one can only hope that its uncontrolled expansion would be stopped before it will explode causing unimaginable suffering to people and to the planet. However, as the main thesis of the book is not decrying Sam Altman and his ilk, I’ll try to ignore the elephant. But first a few words about those who inadvertently nourish it: a chapter titled “Writing is feeling” relates how a university used ChatGPT to help draft a heartless statement of condolence following a mass shooting. The story shows that LLMs are not the only ones lacking in both the department of thinking and of feelings. Sometimes the problem is the users and not the tool.

The meat of the book is the usage of LLMs for writing, and since Mr. Warner wears two hats, that of an English instructor at a college and that of a writer, he addresses both the issue of students’ use of LLMs in lieu of doing actual writing and of the effects of the shenanigans of “AI slop” on professional writing.

Some people enjoy the process of writing. Many more relate with the quote: “I hate to write, but I love having written.” There is no argument that at school, students’ acquisition of writing skills is by far more important than the end product, and that their use of LLMs for writing (and other) assignments results in their learning nothing. The question is: What are teachers willing and able to do about it? There are two problems. The first, which existed long before LLMs, is that students are taught superfluous skills. The second is that, due to LLMs, students are not acquiring any writing skills.

The author admits: “I incentivized the production of bullshit by students for many years. I engaged in a highly prescriptive teaching process that had students jumping through hoops with me coaching them every step along the way in an effort to get them to write something for which I could give a good grade.” That sounds like better instruction than I remember from my school days or what I saw with my children, who were inundated with writing what we all agreed was “busywork.” No one argues that proficiency requires practice, but it appears that only after educators had to read copious amounts of LLMs’ generated “essays”, they started to question how much practice should be required from kids unlikely to write a single essay after their graduation. Mr. Warner’s own words: “If we’re going to confront what ChatGPT means for the kind of reading and writing students should be doing in school, we have to get down to the root values of what is important and meaningful about the writing we ask students to do.” Finally, the new problem caused educators to ask what is essential to teach about writing.

The chapters about “Content vs. Writing” and “On the Future of Writing for Money” brought the elephant back to my mind. Over the last three years, the shenanigans of “AI slop” have taken central stage in many conversations, so the book didn’t add anything new to me. It still was interesting to read the author’s perspective and his own story. Also, something seemed to be missing. As I’ve read the physical book, I cannot check whether the word “talent” appears in the text. My impression is that it’s no longer a prerequisite, nor a key to success, in professional writing.

The last part of the book, titled “A Framework for Action” was disappointing, for it felt detached from reality, and even condescending. Mr. Warner might be well justified to “have very little fear we’re going to be left behind,” but I find it disingenuous to argue that “we’re in charge of what we allow AI to do to our world and to our lives” when so many people were made redundant and lost employment prospects in professions they have studied for many years. He cites Tolstoy’s, What Is Art?, then asks, “…but without any original feeling driving the impulse to create, and then without any intention driving the creation, why should we find any meaning to it?”
Well, people seem to find as much meaning looking at the lines and colors of an original painting as on a good forgery as long as they don’t know that one is fake. A novel written with LLM recently won a respected literary prize, and several other novels became best-sellers. These anecdotes don’t necessarily mean that Tolstoy was wrong, but they do suggest that the count’s deep thoughts and writings about Art while illiterate peasants tended his estate, may not align with modern public taste.

an image from Blake's illuminated manuscript

Left: a page from William Blake’s illuminated book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Image from William Blake Archive. Right: Jean Miélot was an author, translator, manuscript illuminator, scribe, and priest. He lived in the fifteen century, and was mainly employed in the production of de luxe illuminated manuscripts for dukes of Burgundy library. Image from Wikipedia.

My greatest disagreement with the book is the hypothesis that if something can be automated then it’s not worth for humans to be doing. An example may show what I mean. For centuries, scribes copied texts that kept Greek and other ancient knowledge from oblivion. Their work, time consuming and labor intensive, become economically nonviable after the invention and spread of printing. William Blake’s illuminated poems, however, show that this practically obsolete endeavor, is, in special occasions, not only worth doing by humans, but in a hand of a genius is a unique work of Art. My conclusion is that there is no general principle of what is worth for people to be doing, and that the matter is more nuanced than what the book posits. Forgers of artwork are prosecuted when caught not because their forgeries render art meaningless, but because art’s monetary value is determined by demand and supply (e.g. a thousand Mona Lisas could smile as enigmatically as the one in Louvre, but their monetary value would be completely different). AI nowadays does more effectively what scientists and artists have been doing for years. Does this render the outcome valueless? According to Mr. Warner, “Generative AI content is, by definition, a great averaging of what’s in the world. An embrace of this output is a kind of capitulation to the machine, rather than staying true to our nature as creatures.” Is this statement correct even when the outputs include proofs that eluded mathematicians for years? Or books that draw non-readers to read? Does it change when the output is a combination of human/AI contribution? Will a discovery that saves lives also be meaningless?

The book does not address these questions, which I consider relevant to any discussion on AI’s value to its users and society as a whole. Additionally, I find the assertion that work made partially or completely redundant by AI is not “worth doing at all” to be insensitive, and not what I’d have expected from the author. Mr. Warner does as he preaches when thought is involved: he eloquently summarized others’ work and views. His writing showed feelings when it was about his family, about teachers who influenced him. But great writers like Tolstoy wrote convincingly about fictional humans whose experiences they never shared, their imagination and humanity substituting for the lack of personal experience. Such writing is art, and possibly what differentiates us as humans from animals and from machines.

To sum up these musings, the book made valid points about the damage done by AI to individuals and communities, and was pretty clear that indiscriminate use of LLMs would result in students leaving classrooms without acquiring basic skills. I believe that the conjecture that “If ChatGPT can do it, it’s probably not worth doing by humans, and it very well may not be worth doing at all” should be more nuanced to be of any actual use to people and organizations when they weigh in the human cost and long term consequences of using AI vs. its benefits.

a typical school library
A school library. Image from Wikipedia.

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MESS: perfectionism, disillusionment, and a dollop of love

Posted on September 20, 2026 by tkflor

“You can ask him to stay, Jane—it’s not the same as a marriage proposal.”
“Are you sure? It’s a big move, and—I have no idea what is best for him, or for me…What do you think I should do?”
Anna gave Jane an incredulous look. “Are you kidding? I have no clue.”
Jane was grateful that Anna hadn’t presumed to have the answer. It wasn’t math; there wasn’t one correct solution.
This morning, staring at the blank page of her diary, she was musing about To thine own self be true again. What if one were sort of a mess…dyspeptic, surly, anhedonic? Why would you want to be true to that?”
From  Mess: A Novel  by Michael Chessler

It took almost the entire book for Jane Brown, the protagonist of the novel MESS, to realize that it is not only the closets of her rich and glamorous clients that are filled with stuff they have no use for. Then, instead of showing a heroine’s qualities and luring back her wayward boyfriend, Jane turns to her best friend Anna for advice. Such vacillation may be understandable if Jane were a teenager, but not for a woman in her early thirties who has lived in Los Angeles since she had graduated from “an East Coast college with an endowment larger than the gross domestic product of many developing nations” with a degree in literature. Early in the story, the readers are told that Jane’s first job in LA was an assistant at one of the top TV and film talent agencies. She proceeded to the “development” world, where “most of what Jane read was dreck, and she soon realized that if she liked something, it was doomed.” A string of “insufferable” bosses left Jane disillusioned about her chances to achieve anything meaningful. She agonized over “futile and exhausting” compromises, but showed a knack for decluttering and “enjoyed creating order out of chaos.” At some point before the novel begins, the aforementioned boyfriend encouraged her to throw away her degree and switch careers, so with “jumbled feelings of regret and relief, of sadness and elation, Jane quit showbiz and started her own organizing business.”

The novel begins with Jane at work as a “professional organizer.” That day, she’s hired to cull an overstuffed closet of a dog with “two hundred thousand followers on Instagram.” The pay is good, but is it really a wonder that Jane represses her needs and emotions to keep doing this kind of job on a daily basis? Or that, faced with ridiculous excesses, she steals from her clueless clients, but only one item at a time, something they’d discard and never miss? Such antics could point to a socially aware, feisty and badass heroine, but the author defies the expectations created by the vibrant pink cover and sassy tagline: She can organize everything—except her own life. Jane comes across as a cynical and overly judgmental automaton, on one hand haughty and pretentious, but on the other hand disillusioned and resentful. She is healthy, attractive and has a good mind, yet all she sees around is stupidity and shallowness. All she does is drive around LA’s posh neighborhoods to organize and discard other people’s belongings. On the face of it, she could have worked on her own script, and joined a literary group where her fancy degree and extensive vocabulary might have been appreciated. But Jane is a romantic caught between a rock and a hard place: she is certain that nothing worthwhile can succeed in Hollywood, but being a perfectionist, she chooses to repress her own creativity over making crap. Jane is good at what she does, but there is no contentment on the horizon. Meanwhile, Jane squanders her free time on fretting over her weight and finding faults in her boyfriend, her mother, her co-workers and the wealthy people she works for.

So how could I enjoy a novel about this negativity-oozing woman? My guess is that I’m tired of the cookie-cutter romantic heroines, who overcome abuse, childhood trauma, and whatnot to become witty and fun-loving adults, a cohort of strong women who transform broody and self-centered stars/dukes/billionaires into prime husband material. Jane is their opposite. She’s stiff and detached, and so critical she drives away the man she loves. And yes, it’s annoying that Jane criticizes her and others’ shortcomings ad nauseam and flaunts her taste and vocabulary. But it is refreshing to read about a female protagonist who “could look over someone’s closet and compile a dossier worthy of the CIA.” Jane is judgmental, but she also learns from her experiences at the houses she works at. She is unlikable, but she is not a moron, and I respected her for refusing to settle on less than what she believes is her due.

It’s hard to find books with protagonists of different personality types, who do not blindly follow the expected “hero’s journey.” MESS is particularly gratifying because the author is a Hollywood pro, who could have sugarcoated his experiences in the industry to feed his readers with a saccharine fairy tale worthy of thousands of five stars on Goodreads. I appreciate that he created a heroine no less complex and intriguing than male protagonists, a woman allowed to think for herself, to brood, and to stubbornly—albeit not always wisely—choose a path that does not compromise her needs and her ideals.

I recommend this book to those who like to meet a cynical woman who takes her time to realize what is obvious to readers from the get go.

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Burnout: physics, sexism and fiction

Posted on July 31, 2026 by tkflor

“Sharing space with anyone else means sharing energy—literally. Connection moves us at the level of our atoms. Each particle we are made of influences and is influenced by the particle next to it in an unending chain that exists on the smallest and largest scales you can imagine, and every scale in between…We’re made of energy. The nature of energy is to be shared, to spread, to connect one thing to another. Sharing space with other people means that our energy influences theirs, and their influences ours. It’s physics. It’s psychology. And unavoidable. And amazing.”
From Burnout the secret to unlocking the stress cycle by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

It is amazing that the nature of energy was not unlocked in a groundbreaking research paper, but was revealed in passing on the page of a self-help book intended for female audience. But was it unavoidable that the authors were not added to the tiny list of women laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physics? “The Real Enemy”— the authors’ shorthand for patriarchy, the beauty industry and similar sources of sexism — might be the culprit for the omission. Or maybe, there is a less catchy explanation that separates fiction from physics.

In a literary work, “We’re made of energy” may be taken as a metaphor. Burnout is a self-help book. It begins with a promise to be “different from anything else you’ll read about burnout. We’ll figure out what wellness can look like in your actual real life, and we’ll confront the barriers that stand between you and your own well-being… With science.” The paragraph cited at the top is an antithesis to science. There is a fundamental difference between atoms composing the human body and the living organism itself. Atoms of the same element (stable isotope) are interchangeable and don’t change over time. Humans are way more complex.

Burnout, according to Psychology Today, is a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress. The term was coined in 1970s by Herbert Freudenberger to describe emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and a deep sense of futility experienced by caregiving professionals. It was later recognized that burnout is not limited by career type, and is not a byproduct of being overworked. Atoms’ interactions are fully described by equations. People, on the other hand, often react differently in the same conditions. Some thrive under continuous pressure and achieve greatness. Others under-perform and become mentally and physically sick. Some professions are statistically more prone to burnout, but until I’ve read Burnout: the secret to unlocking the stress cycle, I never suspected that being born and raised as a female was a professional hazard.

“Womanhood as a ‘chronic, low-level stress’ is even messier than it sounds, for two reasons: First, it’s very possible that female and male biologies respond differently to that stress. When male rats are exposed to these chronic, mild stressors, their swim time in the forced swim drops in half pretty much right away. After six weeks, it drops in half again. Female rats, by contrast, take three weeks to drop their swim time in half…and it does not change after six weeks. Female rats exposed to chronic, mild stressors persist more than males do. They work harder in the face of difficulty; it takes twice as long for their brains to shift into helplessness. Even female rats, it seems, #persist.
And second, one of the stressors we experience is being told that we’re not experiencing any more or different stress than men. One aspect of the patriarchy (ugh) in the modern West is that it says it doesn’t exist anymore.”

The analogy between humans and rats is not so far-fetched as that between us and atoms, yet a question immediately arises: how does this experiment prove women’s susceptibility to burnout under continuous stress? I really wanted to find out whether sex is a significant factor in burnout, and waited for data-based evidence for the claim that being a female increases one’s odds of developing burnout. I did not see the hypothesis supported with rigorous research and statistically meaningful data. The anecdotal evidence and fictional stories in the book might have value as entertainment, but in terms of validity, they reminded me of the joke about dads fainting in the delivery room and being treated by the medical staff while the women give birth.

Facetious comments aside, there are two reasons why I’m writing this blog post. First, it annoyed me that affirmation was conflated with empowerment. Most women do not succumb to stress even when they face problems much more serious than the threats posed by “The Real Enemy.” If the book were written by misogynists set out to prove that women cannot “man up”, I would stop reading right away. I persevered to the end of the book because the authors were not guys who try to disguise their testosterone-infused superiority complex with science-y terminology. On the contrary, they were caring women set out to “inspire and empower.” Still, I cannot fathom why arguing that women are set to fail is either inspiring or empowering, nor why the authors choose to further degrade their female readers, by suggesting that women cannot see that they are screwed. There is nothing new about men claiming that women are whiny idiots, but when other women profess that their sex cannot cope with fast-paced, demanding modern lives, they add insult to injury.

The second reason why I write this post is the authors’ advice to thwart burnout with rest, physical activity, and positive connection with friends and family. There is nothing wrong with these common-sense suggestions, but again analogies based on a common denominator (like sex) can be misleading. According to NIH, “The symptoms that are said to be a result of burnout can generally also have other causes, including mental or psychosomatic illnesses like depression or anxiety disorders. But physical illnesses or certain medications can cause symptoms such as exhaustion and tiredness too. So it’s important to consider other possible causes first together with a doctor.”

A self-help book should not give the illusion of providing a reliable diagnosis. One can be annoyed or amused by the tirade about “The Real Enemy”, but when one is advised by complete strangers that everything will be OK once you sleep and exercise instead of smiling and dieting, this crosses a line. Burnout can have serious consequences, so one should be wary of anything and anyone that presumes to prescribe general one-size-fits-all solutions. Seriously, humans are too complex for simplistic guidance.

To see why it’s important to get a professional perspective for the specific case, I recommend reading a physician’s experience with burnout and what it took to treat it: After Burnout: Reigniting the Flame.

To sum up, I think that it’s good to remember that the fair-sex—that is about half of humanity—is not as fragile and easily put-down as the Burnout book claims, but if you, or someone you care about shows signs of burnout and cannot cope with everyday life, it might be a good idea to get professional help.


Image: Worn Out: At Eternity’s Gate, by Vincent Van Gogh, 1890.
The painting was completed two months before Van Gogh’s death, when he was convalescing from a severe relapse in his health. He was 37 years old. Source: Wikipedia

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WRITING CREATIVITY AND SOUL: a memoir of writing life

Posted on April 11, 2026 by tkflor

“I wanted to throw my whole self into writing, believing I could make a go of it, while simultaneously doubting it was possible. I’d reached one of those edges, when you can’t fathom remaining where you are, but neither can you imagine going forward.”
From WRITING CREATIVITY AND SOUL, a book by Sue Monk Kidd.

WRITING CREATIVITY AND SOUL is partly a memoir of Sue Monk Kidd’s long and rewarding writer’s journey, and partly an introspection about the inner forces that compelled her to write and about the external forces that shaped her writing.
“Geography is fate,” Sue Monk Kidd (SMK) cites Heraclitus, adding “This was true of me.” Her writing odyssey began with a clash between her “impulse of the heart” to write and the societal expectations of “the pre-feminist, pre-civil rights, religion-possessed South,” where a girl from her background went to a charm school to polish her manners and studied in an all-girl home economics class how to cook, sew, entertain, please her husband and raise their children. At fifteen, Sue was certain that she meant to be a writer; after high school, she studied nursing in college, married and began a family.

Finding the light, then losing the light—it happens to writers all the time. Circumstances intervene that extinguish it, or the radiance flickers out from lack of attention or a belief that we aren’t capable enough. John Gardener suggested that the true search in a writer’s life is for “the necessary fire.” I believe he meant that the writer must search for a conviction in herself, for the place of combustion inside that enables her to say with certitude, This is my path.

SMK believed in herself, yet as a mother of two young children who juggled writing with night shifts at hospital, she realized that while keeping all the balls in the air, she basically gave up on her dream. Longing to reclaim the creativity she had felt in her youth, and having a supportive husband who was willing to make financial adjustments, she left nursing to write full-time. In stories, taking the leap starts an alchemical chain of events that transforms a heroine into a much better version of herself. In real life, it took more than dedication and having time to write to alleviate the self-doubts of a woman discouraged to believe in her abilities. The memoir discusses other ingredients that made a difference. For me, the most interesting one is creativity.

The book starts with a premise that creativity is an instinct that seeks conscious expression in the world, and proceeds to Jung’s distinction between writing that originates from the unconscious (“the deep inner world of the author”) and writing that draws from the “conscious mind and rational intellect.” Creativity has an unconscious part where stories are conceived, and a focused, goal-oriented one that brings order to and shapes the disconnected figments of imagination. Both are necessary for writing.

The unconscious “mystery beneath the words” that writers sometime call the Muse generates images, conjures dreams, and creates epiphanies when one is stuck in their work. Although it’s impossible to summon inspiration, the Muse’s appearance is not completely unpredictable. Good work habits, motivation, and routine are oft-quoted suggestions to train her to show up. To these, SMK adds taking time from actively looking for a solution, and cites Einstein who made breakthroughs while not being actively engaged in productive work. Apparently, an indolent mind frees our imagination to browse around, to find new connections and discover meaning that eludes us when we are focused on coming up with results. Subconscious creativity, however, cannot create tangible work. Ideas are like seeds, or possibilities; merely combining figments of imagination generates chaos rather than art.

“In literature,” she cites a writing teacher, “madness uncontrolled is madness, madness controlled is genius.” Achieving such control while crafting stories that resonate with readers is both art and craft.

The book’s largest section is on the craft of writing. Those who have read other books on the subject would be familiar with most of the content, but any novice who believes that having a story to tell is the most important part of the process is bound to be disillusioned. I especially liked SMK’s description of the bored reader in the chapter “Hurry Slowly.” A passenger on a cross-country flight does not care how action is paced with explorations of the characters and with world-building, or whether the story is imbued with meaning. All she notes is that “This thing is so-o-o slow.”

The last section of WRITING CREATIVITY AND SOUL is about meaning. In this part, I discovered the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist who studied creativity and a phenomenon he called “flow.” I have encountered the term in craft books and in podcasts about writing, but SMK’s introduction caused me to want to know more about this blissful “state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” (from https://news.uchicago.edu/story/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-pioneering-psychologist-and-father-flow-1934-2021)

I recommend WRITING CREATIVITY AND SOUL to readers interested in an introspective view on the “heart and soul” and the craft of writing, and to writers tempted to substitute chunks of lengthy and often unpredictable process with AI-generated text based on their ideas. As Sue Monk Kidd shows, writing is more than ideas and craft. It offers and requires creativity and self-discovery.

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Euclid’s Window: a smorgasbord of geometry, history and anecdotes about famous scientists

Posted on February 28, 2026 by tkflor

“The discovery that mathematics is more than algorithms for calculating volumes of dirt or the magnitude of taxes is credited to a lone Greek merchant-turned-philosopher named Thales a bit more than 2,500 years ago.”
From Euclid’s Window, a book by Leonard Mlodinow.

Euclid’s Window is a brief and non too-serious history of the development of geometry, that highlights conceptual breakthroughs from Thales (5th century BC) to the emergence of M-theory at the end of the 20th century. The book is divided into five stories — Euclid’s, Descartes’s, Gauss’s, Einstein’s and Witten’s — but also emphasizes that none of those trailblazers lived in a vacuum.

The author begins with a claim that “Euclid was a man who possibly did not discover even one significant law of geometry. Yet he is the most famous geometer ever known and for good reason.” Then he goes on to describe how ancient Greeks transformed the practical knowledge of earlier Egyptian and Babylonian mathematicians into a much broader understanding of “earth measurement”, or in Greek, geometry. The former worked to find solutions to specific problems. Thales and his successors saw beyond particularities. They introduced abstract concepts that apply to many unrelated circumstances. Euclid’s story begins with Thales and Pythagoras, and continues after the introduction of Euclid’s famed postulates. For example, in 212 B.C., Erasosthenes, the chief librarian of Alexandria, calculated the circumference of the earth by employing geometry. Surprisingly, his calculation was so accurate that his error was within 4% of the correct value!

The second story is that of René Descartes, a French philosopher from the seventeenth century. Descartes’s greatest contribution to geometry is connecting it to algebra. His discovery replaced descriptions of curves like circles and ellipses with equations, and his coordinate system revolutionized how distances between points in space are recorded. Historians of science can probably explain why it took so long for mathematicians to start using algebraic equations to describe curves given that scientists, well versed both in Geometry and in Algebra, flourished during the middle ages. Euclid’s Window does not go into such speculations, but it mentions some of the challenges Descartes faced, before, during and after he developed his new method to describe positions in space in terms of algebra.

Mlodinow calls his next choice, the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, “the greatest revolution in Geometry since the Greeks.” Non-Euclidean geometry is much harder to visualize than Euclidean geometry, as it’s not a concept readers encounter in everyday life, or are familiar with from high school math. For over 2000 years many mathematicians deemed that Euclid’s parallel postulate (for any given line, only one parallel line can be drawn through any given external point) was not as intuitive as his other assumptions. However, all attempts to prove it failed. It took the genius and the self-confidence of Gauss to make the leap to a different geometry. Gauss did not show that Euclidean geometry is wrong. Instead, he made a different assumption and discovered a new geometry that describes a curved space where the sum of the three angles of a triangle is less than 180º. In curved space, for any given line, there are not just one, but many parallel lines through any given external point.

Gauss’s idea that the curvature of a space could be studied solely on the surface itself is even less intuitive, but Mlodinow uses his sons (repeated characters in the book) to illustrate what this means. Gauss’s final stroke of genius was to compel Riemann to work “On the Hypotheses Which Lie at the Foundation of Geometry.” Riemann’s consequent work expanded Gauss’s curved spaces, and set the stage for Einstein’s general theory of relativity which entwines physical concepts like energy, mass, and momentum with space itself.Image from Feymann Lectures

Einstein’s story is the best known one, so I won’t repeat any of it here.

The last story, that of the string theorists, stands out in many ways. First, unlike the previous stories, here the author personally knows the protagonists and had a front seat view of the evolution of their work. Second, I know nothing about M-theory, but the author claims that its predictions are relevant for physics. It seems to me that if there was observational evidence for any incarnation of string theory, the news would have spread beyond the small community of mathematicians and theoretical physicists. A quarter of century has passed since Euclid’s Window was published, yet I did not hear about any such observation.

In all, I enjoyed reading Euclid’s Window. I found the book easy to read, despite its topic (geometry was my least favorite math subject in school). And what is rarer, it made me want to continue to read to the end. I recommend this book to those who want a glimpse at the evolution of geometry’s fundamental ideas, who are curious about scientists’ understanding of what space is. The book does not assume that readers have a mathematical background, and does not offer scientific rigor. I think that it makes the book not only comprehensible, but interesting. In that, I completely disagree with the distinguished mathematician who opened his review of the book with: “This is a shallow book on deep matters, about which the author knows next to nothing.” Mlodinow’s scientific career shows that he does understand something about geometry. He could have sprinkled his book with expressions like “conformal invariance of Euclidean geometry” and “a Riemannian manifold is Euclidean if and only if it is flat.” Such additions were unlikely to increase readers’ understanding of these “deep matters”. But maybe then the reviewer would have omitted some of the accusations that “the author shrinks from nothing in his desperation to be ‘readable and entertaining’”.

I do have one last nitpick: Whoever edited the book shouldn’t have missed the incorrect attribution of “To see a world in a grain of sand” to Keats. Obviously, it’s not a blasphemy to confuse between two romantic English poets, but only Blake could begin the Augeries of Innocence with

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

To me, writing that the “poetry fits the mathematics,” adds insult to injury. I appreciate Mlodinow’s explanations of Euclid’s, Descartes’s, Gauss’s, Einstein’s and Witten’s groundbreaking discoveries. Trailblazers, however, are not the sole prerogative of mathematics and sciences. William Blake was a visionary poet who elevated imagination and abhorred logic. As his song attests, he perceived curved space and time that ticked differently. As Blake’s poem preceded Gauss’s discovery of curved spaces and that much later work that connected space with time, I don’t think that Blake would have appreciated the arrogance of scientists who fit his song into mathematics. Maybe Blake would not have objected if the conclusion was that math fits poetry.


A fragment of the second book of the Elements of Euclid. Source: Wikipedia

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Thank you to an anonymous person

Posted on November 26, 2025 by tkflor

This post is directed to someone I do not know who yesterday found a wallet at ShopRite.
It was the last store we went to before returning home, and I didn’t notice that my wallet was missing until I was back in the house. A hectic couple of hours followed as we searched the car and the driveway hoping that the wallet fell there. It barely drizzled for the entire month, but yesterday, it rained. Finally, I had to accept that the wallet was lost, and call to cancel my credit cards. Later, we went back to the shops and asked if anyone returned a wallet. By the time we reached our last stop, this felt rather pointless, yet we asked, and instead of the shake of a head, the guy at customer service went into another room and returned with my wallet. I cried, thanked him, and cried more when I found that EVERYTHING, including cash, was inside. So, a very big Thank You to the kind Anonymous Person.

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Three Tomorrows: Be careful what you wish for

Posted on October 25, 2025 by tkflor

“She could tell you exactly what was wrong with any game, but she didn’t necessarily know how to make a great game herself. There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.”
From Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,
a novel by Gabrielle Zevin

I am pretty sure that I can identify what draws me to read a work of fiction. And Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was full of promise: two protagonists, one is an undergrad majoring in math at Harvard and another studies computer science at MIT. Both are exceptional (is any other kind accepted to these venerable universities?) and yet neither fits where they are. At first, the encounter of two gifted misfits with baggage to overcome suggested to me a love story, but the novel is certainly not a romance.

It turns out that the protagonists, Sadie and Sam, have known each other since childhood, but haven’t been in touch, until a chance meeting in their early twenties. Although they have not spoken for years, it quickly becomes clear that Sam and Sadie deeply care about each other. Nevertheless, a childhood grudge weighs on their friendship. Still, both are avid gamers, and ambition pushes them to collaborate on creating a game that would raise them above hordes of game developers and propel their careers.

The first part of the book is a story of how Sam and Sadie follow this goal, and it’s an engaging read. Zevin alternates between “present” and “past”, so I could appreciate Sam’s willpower and be amazed that he managed to be in Harvard despite what life had thrown at him. Sadie was harder to like, yet I sympathized with her because in the competitive, male dominated environment of MIT’s computer science department in 1990s, she faced choices that none of the male students had to deal with. The plot thickened and was broadened by the presence of Marx, Sam’s benevolent roommate who bankrolled the enterprise, and Dov, a professor at MIT with whom Sadie has a very unhealthy, yet professionally rewarding, relationship.

As noted above, to create a great game, Sam and Sadie had to hone their abilities. Time, however, is a major issue for undergrads in very demanding academic programs. A choice had to be made: a degree from Harvard/MIT or following a risky dream.
ʻIf I were youʼ Dov said, ʻI would take the next semester off.ʼ
Sadie was listening, nodding.
ʻYou and your crew. You’ve got something here,ʼ Dov said, ʻI really believe that.ʼ
ʻBut school…ʼ Sadie’s voice was barely audible. ʻMy parents…ʼ
Taking that break and not graduating with their class was the first, but not the only, tough decision Sam and Sadie made for the small chance to make a splash with their game. Closed in a room for months, “…Sadie and Sam had programmed Ichigo, nonstop, until their fingers bled. Literally, in Sam’s case…Sadie had stared at her computer screen so long she burst a blood vessel in her right eye. She didn’t even go to the doctor; she just sent Marx to the drugstore for eyedrops and Advil, and soldiered on.” There were other sacrifices, and Sam’s and Sadie’s determination to complete and sell (the game) Ichigo took a heavy toll on their physical and mental health.

If Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow ended fulfilling the ancient promise “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy,” it would have been only a third as long as the actual novel and the message would be clear: the tremendous effort and the sacrifices were worth it. But reading on, I became confused about what the author was trying to convey. My disenchantment with the characters was gradual, but as Sam and Sadie became more and more miserable, I lost interest in the twists and turns of their misunderstandings and dissatisfaction. After a major tragedy toward the end of the story, I could not stand either of the protagonists and left the last sixty pages of the novel unread.

After closing the book and putting it aside, I tried to figure out why it didn’t deliver on its promise. The increasingly depressing tone contributed, yet I neither expect nor ask novels to lead to happy endings. The disengagement seems to be a consequence of the straining of the tenuous balance between the story’s events and the protagonists’ response to them. The deal breaker was the death of the character who kept the others in check; I saw no hope for the remaining cast. To say it more plainly, it was interesting to read about unusual people who worked hard to reach a position where they could reap the fruits of their talent and labor. When these people, having the advantages of still being young, well connected, and without financial worries, cannot find joy in their life, it becomes quite boring to read on and on about their petty grudges, endless squabbles and other ways they make themselves and each other unhappy. Then I reached Marx’s favorite speech from Macbeth:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Those lines explained the aptly chosen title. They also seemed to say that there is no point in reading further, that the rest of the story would give me nothing.

A scene from Macbeth, Banquo’s Ghost by Théodore Chassériau 1855,
image from Wikimedia.

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Arboretum and Yogurt

Posted on June 7, 2025 by tkflor

After a rainy May, suburban central New Jersey is lush with greenery. The landscape is pretty, albeit quite monotonous: lawns, seasonal flowers, common shrubs and trees. An arboretum, on the other hand, aims for more than a pleasant impression. Its collection of plants requires knowledge of horticulture, acreage beyond small suburban plots, and many years of development. The Barnes Arboretum at Saint Joseph’s University is located near Philadelphia. The oasis of 12 acres had started when the site’s previous owner, Joseph Lapsley Wilson, began to assemble a collection of trees in the 1880s. He sold the arboretum in 1922, yet remained its director until his death in 1928. Laura Barnes, the new owner’s wife, continued and expanded the arboretum’s collections.

A century later, it is a beautiful and peaceful place, where visitors can stroll on woodchip paths that meander between a variety of trees, ranging from California redwoods to pines from China, and visit a “formal garden” that looks as if it belongs in a British period drama. In late spring, the lilacs are past bloom, but the peonies and roses were magnificent. The native mountain laurel was also in bloom, reaching the size of a tree. The vast majority of trees and plants had name tags. I enjoyed what I saw without trying to memorize the plants’ names and countries of origin. We took hundreds of photos. Here are some:







Another matter I wanted to write about is plain, whole milk yogurt that recently has become hard to find on the shelves of local stores. I did find several organic, non-GMO, and occasionally grass-fed types of yogurt with hard to believe prices, and even these were not always available. Gradually, the idea of home-made yogurt seemed more appealing. Yogurt is a two-ingredients product, I reasoned, and if the preparation process was complicated, people in Eastern Europe and the Middle East would not have made it for millennia. Previous experience with stuff bought and used once or twice, then left to clutter the kitchen for years, taught me not to buy new equipment before I make sure that my family will eat the new food. That left out yogurt machines, special ceramic bowls, thermometers and whatnot.

Next step was to search the internet for an easy recipe. A video clip How to Make Homemade Yogurt – No Machine Required showed that this is doable and not time consuming. I decided to start with a small batch, so if it would turn out inedible, I could use the soured milk to make pancakes.

It worked!

To make five jars of yogurt I use four and half jars of warm milk (regular whole milk from local dairies that verify that the milk does not contain antibiotics) and half a jar of starter (initially I used a store brand of organic whole milk plain yogurt and later the yogurt I made).

Preparation method: It is common to scald the milk, then wait for it to cool, and only then mix in the starter. The very serious seriouseats.com provides a scientific explanation why scalding the milk for several minutes yields a better yogurt. I tried this way and also to warm it just until I could hold a finger inside the milk, and did not notice any difference in taste or texture. One time, I absentmindedly mixed the starter into cold milk. Although I was skeptical that this batch could turn into yogurt, I poured the mix into jars, closed their lids and let them reach a comfortable temperature in a bath of warm water (again the finger test, i.e. holding it in the water for a few seconds). The culture did not care that something was amiss and at the end of the day (about 10-12 hours later), each jar contained yogurt!

My conclusion is that what matters most to make a mild, creamy yogurt is a) to use milk that does not contain things that would inhibit the culture and b) to give the milk and starter mixture enough time to mature in a warm environment.

yogurt in jars yogurt on a spoon
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A Plague of Giants- high fantasy and an unexpected treat

Posted on March 20, 2025 by tkflor

“It is my life’s work to tell stories,” the bard continued, his smile gone now and replaced with an earnest tone. “And no one else can tell you what I have seen. This great war of our time has indeed been terrible, and I am still struck with its horrors, waking up in the night sweating and—well, I am sure I don’t have to tell you.”
From A Plague of Giants, a novel by Kevin Hearne.

When a book opens with a bard addressing refugees gathered at a place called Survival Field, I can either assume that the book is rife with death and gore and return it unread to the library, or assume that in this horrible situation the bard has something comforting to say to people already devastated by loss of their families and homes. Curious about the direction A Plague of Giants would take, I decided to give it a try. A Plague of Giants is a high-fantasy about 600 pages long, with eleven main characters. In my mind, long sagas with bards and mythical elements belong to ancient Greece and medieval Europe, whereas modern fiction is usually shorter and with fewer protagonists.* In novels I’ve read, main characters, even if they are scattered in different places and belong to different cultures, ARE UNITED by a main goal or event.

The beginning was not promising. I struggled to remember who is who and where different places are (there is a Dramatis Personae and a map, but flipping pages to check this or that was not conducive for immersing in the story). Even worse, the skeleton-like Bone Giants, whose deadly invasion on the eastern shores of the continent started the war, were a faceless, merciless evil without a glimmer of humanity. I did not want to know more about them. I continued to read because Hearne’s storytelling is engaging, the world-building is rich without being overly descriptive, and the magic is nuanced and intriguing. As the bard’s tale progressed, the Bone Giants’ thread turned out to be one of three. The other threads drew me to continue reading the story.

The Hathrim are fire-wielding giants (unrelated to Bone Giants) who settled without permission on a piece of land on the west coast of the continent. Strictly speaking, they’re trespassers, yet they are actual people with names, families, and human emotions. Most importantly, they did not sail to another country with the purpose to kill and conquer. They fled a volcanic eruption that made their island uninhabitable. Their ferocious and cunning Hearthfire (I think that’s their word for chieftain) made the most of the bad situation, and led the surviving Hathrim to a new place. Through a combination of physical strength, magic and deceit they occupied an uninhabited stretch of land and began to make it their home. Naturally, the local peoples took notice. Some wanted the newcomers to leave out of sheer nastiness. Others, mainly the plant-magic users of Forn, perceived a large settlement of giants armed with the destructive power of fire as a threat they could not accept.

The third thread is a tale of coming of age that seemed totally unrelated to any giants. In a country believed to be devoid of magic, a teenager decided to go against his family’s tradition and do everything differently. There was nothing world-shattering about the lad’s choice to inform his domineering father about his decision at the worst possible timing. However, the ramifications of a commonplace confrontation were unpredictable when untapped magic was involved.

Gradually, the disconnected tidbits about the war, various forms of magic and personal growth came together, and I could not put the book down. I enjoyed how the threads in A Plague of Giants were interwoven, how events followed “naturally” from previous ones, how magic was not an inborn trait of a few “chosen ones”. In this world, magic is a potential individuals choose to seek at a risk of their life. My only complaint is that this book ends abruptly on day nineteen of the bard’s tale, with one liner, “Continued in volume two, A Blight of Blackwings.”

* Obviously, I do not read much high fantasy, but I plowed through Lord of the Rings.

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The Death of the Artist – why artists deserve to get paid, amateurs suck, and the Big Tech kills Art

Posted on March 2, 2024 by tkflor

… when the sons of song descend to trade,
Their bays are sear, their former laurels fade.
Let such forego the poet’s sacred name,
Who rack their brains for lucre, not for fame:
Still for stern Mammon may they toil in vain!
And sadly gaze on gold they cannot gain!
Such be their meed, such still the just reward
Of prostituted muse and hireling bard!

From English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: A Satire by Lord Byron

Unlike the young Lord Byron (the satire was published when Byron was 21, recently graduated from Cambridge and about to embark on a Grand Tour), Deresiewicz, the author of The Death of the Artist argues that artists should be paid for their art. As far as I understand, the thrust of his reasoning goes like this:

  • Artists should be paid, because art is work and it deserves remuneration, like any other work.
  • Artists should be paid, because art is hard and it takes many years of focused dedication to reach an artistic level beyond amateurish. Although most artists are not in it to get rich, they still need food in their belly and a roof over their head.
  • Art has value, and therefore it ought to have financial value. While artists do not deserve compensation for doing what they love, “they do deserve to get paid for doing something you love, something other people love. That’s how markets work, by putting a price on other forms of value.”

But what happens when supply surpasses demand? The “starving artist” is not a new phenomenon. In the past, most artists did not eke a living off their art, but there was a considerable group of people who published books, exhibited in galleries or succeeded in other artistic pursuits while holding part-time (or full time) jobs. In the twenty-first century economy of “winner take all”, a tiny percent of artists grow very rich, and the rest are either forced to leave the field, risk starvation or turn into sellouts. The author blames Tech Giants for “the demonetization of content” by enabling the flow of cheap and often free art. This has devalued artistic work. Consequently, artists are either not compensated at all or barely compensated for the fruits of their talent and labor. Moreover, companies like Apple encouraged lay people to become “artists,” then Amazon and other Tech Giants let them flood the digital platforms with amateurish content. The glut of “art” obscured the much smaller offering of professional artists. To stay visible, they are coerced into working for exposure, to forgo pay for their work.

The Death of the Artist includes many interviews with artists and shows the human cost behind the statistics. The author clearly knows what he writes about, even though he calls himself a “snobbish old asshole”. Regardless of how he calls himself, I agree with him that people should be paid by those who consume their work and not be exploited by corporations. My qualm with the book is that it reads like an expanded essay on the evil tech companies and their useful idiots, the hobbyists, rather than a concise study of the field.

For example, The Death of the Artist claims that the traditional “culture industry” – publishers, music labels, art galleries, movie studios and so on – has successfully supported artists until a large chunk of their revenue was snatched by Amazon and other Tech Giants. The current plight of the artists, the author argues, is caused by the multi-billion culture industry’s inability to afford to nurture artistic talent. Obviously, the artists cannot depend on the new bosses, whose revenue is driven by algorithms. Tech behemoths monetize clicks and do not care about artistic merit.

This dire picture makes me wonder whether artists were better off before the balance of power had shifted from the culture industry to tech corporations. The author explains that capitalism enabled the emergence of the concept of “fine arts” in the Romantic age (end of eighteenth and early nineteen century), but says nothing about earlier cost-reducing technological advancements that erased entire disciplines. Movies are a cornerstone of the bastion of culture. A century ago, cheap cinema tickets had killed vaudeville shows. It is worth remembering that new technology was not the only source of artists’ growing woes. Consolidation through mergers and acquisitions in the “culture industry” in the second half of the twentieth century diminished the number of artistic venues even before Amazon entered the field. In publishing, the market was increasingly controlled by large corporations, until only six big publishers were left. The corporate practice to limit supply to below-demand, hurt the chances of new writers to get published and led to smaller advances (the payments for a work already done, but not published yet) for mid-list writers (i.e. professional writers who achieved recognition and had considerable readership in their genre, but who were not best-sellers).

Last but not least, the book repeatedly points to the harm caused by deluded hobbyists whose drivel cheapens art and diminishes the income of professional artists. These wannabes may not appeal to the highly-educated, elitist critics, but I am skeptical that legions of aspiring writers endanger literary careers. Professional artists do not merely vie for attention in an ocean of crap created by amateurs. They compete with the best in their field, dead and alive, from all over the world. For example, a work of literary fiction by an American author contends for readers with the ephemeral bestsellers, as well as with novels by Toni Morrison, Agatha Christie, J.R.R. Tolkien and many other classics (all available to be read with a single click). Talent and credentials like an MFA are insufficient to carve a career in the fine arts. Like Byron who had introduced the jaded, moody Byronic hero to readers weary of the endless Napoleonic wars, a modern artist may have a better chance to succeed if they have something new and relevant to say, something that will show off their genius and be both fresh and timeless.

PS. If the author of The Death of the Artist wants to explore a really scary scenario, he can update the book after AI gains the abilities to perform better than 99% of the artists.


Self-portraits by Picasso and Rembrandt
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