2022 Year in Review: Books, Music Algorithms, and AI Art

Welcome to the 132 folks who have subscribed since my last post!

Whenever I am forced to introduce myself in an awkward big group, I like to say that, in addition to being a geologist and a Texan, I am a big reader. Last year I read 42 books, and my readers may find some of them relevant. So, I have chosen a few to surface to you, along with some self-indulgent highlights of the music and AI art I consumed this year.¹

Given the technical focus of this newsletter, I will start with the most relevant items and gradually move on to less-directly-applicable content. Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy it!

Book of the Year: Where is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall

This book hit me like a lightning bolt. I picked it up on the flight to our honeymoon in New Orleans, so my lovely wife had to deal with my constantly talking about and processing the mind-blowing portions directly to her.

The author starts with a very simple premise — asking why the imagined future of flying cars never arrived — and broadens out more generally to interrogate why scientific and material progress has stalled over the past fifty years, compared to the previous centuries.

The author identifies three main factors that have hindered progress. First, the expansion of the scientific bureaucracy has favored safe, incremental advancements over disruptive breakthroughs. Second, environmental movements that are driven by a pseudo-religious fervor impede technological advancements, particularly in the energy sector. Lastly, an increase in regulations that began in the 1970s has constrained progress.

The key image of the book is this: going back through at least 1800, we had ~7% annualized growth of usable energy². This trend stopped cold in the 1970s:

The Adams Curve, with US per capita energy consumption. Reproduced from Where is My Flying Car? by Works in Progress, who ran a whole issue on the book.

The astute reader will note that this coincides with the Arab oil embargo, which marked the end of cheap oil. But J. Storrs Hall, correctly, is more interested in why nuclear energy and nanotechnology never took off, rather than interrogating the history of oil and gas.

Any reader interested in human progress, energy, or innovation should read this book. As with many of the most distinctive thinkers, Adams does include some superfluous tangents, and some chapters I disagree with, but on the whole, it’s a remarkable book.

Honorable mentions:

The World For Sale, by Jack Farchy and Javier Blas

An engrossing survey of the commodity traders, the most important group that you don’t know much about. Required reading for anyone in hydrocarbons or mining.

How the Mountains Grew, by John Dvorak

A lovely book covering the history of the earth, with a focus on North America. Manages to be both scientifically accurate and highly readable, something we can all aspire to.

Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson

Geoengineering offers the potential of stopping climate change without the costs of immediately abandoning fossil fuels, but it has long been a taboo subject in polite company. However, the costs of placing reflective sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere are low enough that a sufficiently motivated country — or even an individual billionaire — could launch their own geoengineering program.

Stephenson’s page turner novelizes that exact premise with funding from a Texas gas station magnate, political support from Dutch royalty, and a good dose of covert action from the Chinese and the Indian governments.

The book has become all the more relevant after a VC-backed startup turned geoengineering into a carbon offset business (in retrospect, it’s obvious this would be tackled by former Y Combinator entrepreneurs)³.

Salka Valka, by Halldor Laxness, translated by Philip Roughton

I had to throw some classic fiction on here. Reading Salka Valka, a coming of age story set in a remote Icelandic fishing village, was like drinking pure, refreshing spring water.

The book reminded me of the importance of translation. I picked up other works by Laxness not translated by Roughton, but found them lacking the warmth and vitality found in Salka Valka.

The experience reminded me of my earlier encounters with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle, translated by Don Bartlett. The books drip and drawl across Knausgaard’s mostly uneventful life, but I was so gripped, so compelled that I mapped them out in painstaking detail for The Millions. I have read the full 3,000+ page series three times, which might not be something I should admit publicly. When I tried other books by Knausgaard not translated by Bartlett, I found them, like the non-Roughton Laxness, lacking the spark that made My Struggle so special.

Be thankful for translators.

Music in 2022: the year of the algorithm

Spotify’s Wrapped delivered me a surprise: I only recognized the names of two of my top five most played songs of 2022.

This year, more than another other year, I simply handed the keys to Spotify’s algorithm and let it drive. I incessantly play their suggested Daily Mixes, usually choosing one that includes my favored music for working: ambient / post-classical / instrumental. After hundreds of days doing this, my top songs ended up being less those intentionally played by me and more the music most selected by the Spotify algorithm, given my usage behavior.

Search engine optimization has changed online writing and drives many of the choices that popular YouTubers make. What about algorithmic optimization for music? The field is very young, but entrepreneurial artists and labels are starting to think about algorithmic strategy. It will be interesting to see what impact this ultimately has on the music that is produced.

One great joy of mine this year has been discovering the music of the Hardanger fiddle, an instrument similar to the violin, but with the addition of “sympathetic” strings that resonate as the main strings are played. This gives the Hardanger fiddle a richer sound, which is also enhanced by a taller, wider bridge that makes it easier to play two strings at once.

I found this music through, what else, the Spotify algorithm, which likely keyed off of my interest in violin and cello music from the post-classical and American folk genres. The Hardanger fiddle, originally from Norway, is played in Celtic and Scandinavian music, including some rather abstract and pleasingly difficult songs.

I recommend listening to Wanderer by Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Thomas Bartlett for an introduction to how rich this music can sound⁴. A few other to highlight: Nils Økland, Charlie Grey, and Benedicte Maurseth.

Balmorhea - The Wind (Live in Marfa)

My fellow Texans may be familiar with the band Balmorhea, a local favorite that played instrumental, post-rock music (imagine Explosions in the Sky, but folk music). The band followed a familiar trajectory, with some modest success on a string of albums released from 2007-2012⁵. But in 2021, the group broke in a whole new direction, releasing The Wind to great acclaim on the prestigious label Deutsche Grammophon⁶.

I listened to The Wind many times in 2021, but in 2022, I continued to marvel at their artistic evolution, a trend reinforced by their release of a live album and accompanying arthouse film, recorded at Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa.

I struggle to think of other artists who have broken away from relatively mainstream and moderately successful to highbrow, niche, critical acclaim. It is as if the animator of a beloved Netflix adult cartoon show went on to exhibit at the Gagosian gallery.

Kudos to Balmorhea—an inspiration to us all.

AI art

weirddalle

Like many of you, I followed the developments in AI art this year. There was a brief when DALL-E 2 was in very limited release, and the public turned to off-brand solutions like craiyon.ai. This gave rise to the rather hilarious subreddit “weirddalle”, which leaned into the uncanny valley. Nothing made me laugh harder in 2022. To give you an idea:

Video & Poetry

Of course, generative AI will have many commercial applications, but I really appreciated some of the artwork being done, especially in the video space, where the slight differences between images generated in sequence could be a feature, not a bug. Consider 'Consonance' by Glenn Marshall, using the words of James Joyce as source for a visual poem:

Or this video, using Bonobo’s song Kerala (note, NSFW):

It will be really exciting to see where this goes next year.

Thanks again for reading Unearthed over the past few months, and I hope you enjoyed this digressive post. Please reach out with any ideas or suggestions for topics for 2023!

1. I had meant to get this out earlier, but, well, COVID finally caught up with me, and I was pretty useless for a few weeks there.

2. This comprises about 3% population growth, about 2% growth in energy efficiency, and about 2% growth in energy used per capita.

3. Their website is makesunsets.com. My favorite part of the website is the “As featured on” section, which includes very negative coverage. But hey, all publicity is good publicity.

4. Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh plays a five-stringed version of the instrument that he calls a Hardanger d’Amore.

5. The band was slightly active between 2012 & 2020, releasing Clear Language in 2017, was a continuation of their previous style

6. Deutsche Grammophon, aka “DG” was the label featured in the movie Tár, which I really liked but don’t really have much to say about. In fact that goes for all the movies from 2022, which I just generally didn’t find very inspiring. It feels like the innovation has gone to television, with great, original shows like Severance, The White Lotus, Atlanta, The Bear, and The Rehearsal.