A minute ago I posted a post that Claude, the excellent AI chat bot , wrote for me. It’s about Nautical Twilight. That apparently is a real thing at least.

I just asked it to fact check what it wrote. Here’s the transcript:

Claude writes:

Let me fact-check my blog post about nautical twilight:

Accurate information:

• Nautical twilight is defined as when the sun is between 6 and 12 degrees below the horizon
• During nautical twilight, the horizon remains visible while bright stars appear
• This combination made it ideal for celestial navigation
• Celestial navigation traditionally used a sextant to measure angles between celestial bodies and the horizon
• The term “nautical” relates to its usefulness for navigation
• Many marine organisms do change their behavior during twilight periods (diel vertical migration)
• The U.S. Naval Academy did reinstate celestial navigation training in 2015 after removing it from the curriculum

Potentially misleading or requiring clarification:

• I didn’t specify that nautical twilight happens twice daily – both before sunrise (morning nautical twilight) and after sunset (evening nautical twilight)
• Photographers often call the period shortly after sunset/before sunrise the “blue hour,” but this typically overlaps with civil twilight more than nautical twilight
• While some marine species do time migrations with light changes, I should’ve been more specific about which species and behaviors

Missing context:

• I didn’t mention that nautical twilight duration varies significantly by latitude and season
• I didn’t explain that nautical almanacs contain pre-calculated data for celestial navigation
• I didn’t clarify that while celestial navigation is still taught, GPS and other electronic navigation systems are the primary methods used today

Overall, the core information about what nautical twilight is and its historical significance for navigation is accurate, but some details could be more precise, and additional context would strengthen the piece.

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Prompt to Claude:

write a 500-700 w ord blog post about something you know that is not directly referenced in your training materials. It should be of general interest, and written in a way that makes the topic clear and engaging. Assume an intelligent but non-specialist reader.

Response:  

The Curious Case of Nautical Twilight:

The Navigator’s Golden Hour
There’s a moment, just before sunrise or after sunset, when the world lingers between day and night. Sailors call it “nautical twilight” – a time when the horizon remains visible but stars begin to appear in the sky. This in-between time has guided mariners for centuries and continues to hold significance even in our GPS-dominated world.

What Exactly Is Nautical Twilight?

Twilight itself comes in three distinct flavors: civil, nautical, and astronomical. Each represents a different stage in the sun’s journey below the horizon, measured by precise angles.

Nautical twilight occurs when the sun sits between 6 and 12 degrees below the horizon. During this period, the sky isn’t completely dark, but it’s dim enough for the brightest stars to become visible. Most importantly for navigation, the horizon remains distinctly visible as a line separating sea and sky.

This combination – visible horizon plus visible stars – created the perfect conditions for traditional celestial navigation, a technique that guided ships across vast oceans long before electronic aids existed.

The Navigator’s Perfect Moment

Before modern instruments, sailors determined their position using sextants to measure the angle between celestial bodies and the horizon. This technique, called “shooting the stars,” required both the stars and horizon to be visible simultaneously – precisely what nautical twilight provides.

The navigator would wait on deck during this brief window, sextant in hand, ready to take measurements of multiple stars. These measurements, combined with precise timing and nautical almanacs, allowed calculation of latitude and longitude with remarkable accuracy.

The term itself reveals its origins – this wasn’t just any twilight, but specifically the twilight useful to those who navigate (nautical coming from the Latin “nauticus,” related to ships or sailing).

Beyond Navigation

Nautical twilight affects more than just navigation. Marine ecosystems undergo significant changes during this period. Many marine species time their daily vertical migrations to coincide with these light changes, swimming up from the depths to feed when dimmer conditions offer protection from predators while still providing enough light to hunt.

Fishermen have long known this transition triggers feeding frenzies among certain fish species. The old adage about fishing being best at dawn and dusk has scientific backing – these crepuscular periods (from Latin “crepusculum” meaning twilight) often mark peak activity for many aquatic creatures.

Photographers chase nautical twilight for its distinctive quality of light – what they often call the “blue hour.” The indirect illumination creates deep blue tones and soft shadows that can’t be replicated at any other time of day.

Nautical Twilight in the Modern World

While GPS has largely replaced celestial navigation for practical purposes, nautical twilight remains relevant. Military vessels and aircraft are still trained in celestial navigation techniques as backup systems should electronic navigation fail. Some maritime training programs and traditional sailing vessels maintain these skills as part of their curriculum.

The U.S. Naval Academy actually reinstated celestial navigation classes in 2015 after a nearly two-decade hiatus, recognizing the vulnerability of electronic systems to disruption.

Experiencing Nautical Twilight

You don’t need to be a sailor to appreciate nautical twilight. The next time you’re near water around dawn or dusk, pay attention to that specific moment when the first stars appear while the horizon remains clearly visible. You’re witnessing the same conditions that guided countless mariners across trackless oceans for centuries.

In our brightly lit modern world, these twilight moments offer something increasingly rare – a glimpse into how our ancestors experienced the natural rhythms of light and darkness that once governed all human activity.

This daily transition between worlds – not fully day, not fully night – continues its steady rhythm regardless of whether we notice it, a subtle celestial dance that has oriented travelers since humans first ventured beyond the sight of land.

I then asked Claude to fact check what it just wrote. Results here.

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Does an itch have any feeling left if you subtract the urge to itch?

The answer has to be no, I think, because once the itch is gone, there is not sensation left over.

But an itch is nothing but (?) the urge to scratch.

This makes itches quite peculiar.

(No, I'm sober.I am just postponing doing some actual work.)

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I'm writing this post using WordLand. It's a web page that clears out all of WordPress's cruft and gives you an interface  that's so simple that it's actually enjoyable.

My friend Doc Searls compares it to using Twitter to write a tweet but without the unpleasant musk of fascism. I'd add that it's also a  bit like Medium in hiding options relevant to selected text until you select some text. 

But I echo Doc's point that it lowers the hurdle, or speed bump, of blogging and might actually get me blogging again, but mainly for quick posts. I could use it for longer posts, too, and perhaps I will … especially if  its creator, the storied Dave Winer, a pioneer of creating and sharing on the open Web, lets us add tags. I am irrationally committed to tagging :) (It already lets us choose the categories we've established at WordPress.)

On my first use of it — writing this post — it's a little thing of beauty.

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Dionald Jehosiphat Trump today said that he’s considering a tariff on the Tooth Fairy. “Why does she get to pull all those American teeth? We don’t even know where she offshores them!”

When asked for specifics about the tariff, Trump said, “Elon is working on an exact amount, but I told him it has to be high. So high that children keep up to 90% of their teeth.  Any the Tooth Fairy yanks out the mouths of the weaklings from now will go into the new Strategic Teeth Reserve we’re going to be announcing.”

The President made these comments on his way back from his annual dental checkup at which he said his dentist confirmed that he “has the teeth of a newborn babe.” “I can feel them turning into titanium, a little bit more every day,” the President  said, refusing to provide any further explanation.

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What is the opposite of Cory Doctorow’s neologism “enshittification“, the seemingly purposeful making worse of a product or situation?

It’s Cory Doctorow’s embettering of his recent cancer diagnosis.

Cory assures his readers that it’s very, very likely to turn out to be completely treatable in minimally invasive ways. In fact, he has already gone through the quite minor procedure, and now needs to be vigilant about catching it early if it reappears.

But, in typical Doctorow insistence on learning from everything, and sharing what he learns, he presents us with hints about how to navigate The System, and, in an especially Doctorowian ways suggests that people as privileged as he is (and I am) should alert The System to the ways in which it has dropped the ball or could do better.

Stay well, Cory, you Treasure of Worlds.

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“In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”

People seemed to like that when I wrote it in  my 2002 book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

About ten  years later, someone (sorry, I don’t remember who) pointed out that that phrase had in fact been first written by the Scottish singer and writer Momus [wikipedia], in 1991. Momus’ article that the phrase captions is especially insightful since it was posted before the Web created a plausible way to route around mass markets.

The page that currently houses Momus’ original article traces the history of Momus’ article:

This essay, written by Momus in 1991, was published by the Swedish fanzine Grimsby Fishmarket in 1992 then in the daily paper Svenske Dagblatt in 1994. Obviously a hardy perennial, it was then broadly paraphrased by trendy French magazine Citizen K in 1996)

I wasn’t aware of any of these and had never heard the phrase before I came up with it independently. When Momus’ prior use of the phrase was brought to my attention maybe ten years later, I blogged about it. But now I can’t find that post. So, since the origins of the phrase came up again today in a post by Dennis Falvy, I thought I should refresh the Web with this acknowledgement.

And if you want to know more about Warhol’s original saying, The Quote Investigator is, as always, worth reading.

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The article notes that the prize actually went to two humans, but this headline from MIT Tech Review may just be ahead of its time. Are we one generation of tech away from a Nobel Prize going to a machine itself — assuming the next gen is more autonomous in terms of what it applies itself to?

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If you ask chatGPT to give you the first paragraph of Moby-Dick, it gets it exactly right. This and other such examples are sometimes taken as evidence that it has kept a copy of that book in memory, a potential copyright violation. The makers of these Large Language Models say they don’t, or at least I haven’t come across any who cop to it.

My understanding is that they analyze the terxts they’re trained on looking for statistical relationships, keep the stats and ditch the texts. (In this, they’re similar to how search engines compile their indexes.)

But my understanding is quite limited. So, I poked around.

PROMPT: What is the first paragraph of Moby-Dick, verbatim?

CHATGPT:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can

Perfect.

PROMPT: What is the first paragraph of David Weinberger’s book Everything Is Miscellaneous?

CHATGPT:

The first paragraph of Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger reads:

“If you keep your music in iTunes or your photos in Flickr, you’re using an application that lets you put a piece of information in more than one category at a time. That’s weird. In the real world—where our species evolved—everything has its place. Our books are on one shelf at a time, our plates are in one cupboard, and our shoes are by the door or in the closet. That’s the way it’s supposed to be because that’s the way the world is. Except, of course, it’s not.”

This opening sets the stage for Weinberger’s exploration of how digital organization challenges traditional, physical-world categorization.

That’s not a bad intro to the book’s themes:  it picks up some of the examples in the book, and it is certainly reminiscent of my style of writing. But it has nothing to do with the first paragraph of the first chapter:

Before the Web, browsing was usually a polite way of telling a salesperson to buzz off. “May I help you?”, a salesperson asks. “I’m just browsing,” you reply with a little smile.With that word, a customer declares a lack of commitment, With that smile, she asserts that she’s within her rights: “Just try and stop me, salesboy!”

I’m slightly embarrassed by that, but the point is that the real first paragraph doesn’t talk about anything mentioned in chatGPT’s attempt to quote it.

Further, while chatGPT can quote the opening of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, if you ask it to quote the opening of Carroll’s lesser known “Sylvie and Bruno” it responds:

One winter night, at a little town called Elveston, a telegram was received by the Sub-Warden, who sat sipping his coffee, and wondering lazily whether it was worth while to finish his cigar, or whether he would take a stroll down to the Club, and see if Captain Muriel had returned yet.

Here’s the actual opening:

—and then all the people cheered again, and one man, who was more excited than the rest, flung his hat high into the air, and shouted (as well as I could make out) “Who roar for the Sub-Warden?” Everybody roared, but whether it was for the Sub-Warden, or not, did not clearly appear: some were shouting “Bread!” and some “Taxes!”, but no one seemed to know what it was they really wanted.

The phrase “one winter” doesn’t appear anywhere in the original. Nor does “a little town called Elveston”. 

Finally, if you repeat the prompt, it gives  substantially different responses, including the unfortunately smutty these days:

‘Less bread!’ cried the poor. I looked again, and saw it was not bread they had needed, but more head.

It seems to unqualified me that this bolsters the claims of the LLM makers that they don’t keep copies of their training materials (or at least don’t make them accessible to the model in operation), and that the training-time statistical analysis of texts that quote other texts, plus the magic of transformer technology,  is sufficient to explain how they can provide verbatim quotes of oft-cited works. 

Am I wrong? It’s highly likely.

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Traditionally in the West we define knowledge as a justified true belief. But the experience of knowledge usually also requires understanding and a framework of connected pieces of knowledge.

Guess what machine learning lacks: understandability and a framework from which its statements of knowledge spring.

We might want to say that therefore ML doesn’t produce knowledge. But I think it’s going to go the other way as AI becomes more and more integral to our lives. AI is likely to change our idea of what it means to know something…

Continued at the Peter Drucker Forum

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