I’m the sweetest of voices in orchestra heard,
But yet in an orchestra never have been.
I’m a bird of fine plumage, but less like a bird
Nothing ever in Nature was seen.
Touching earth I expire; in water I die;
Though I do progress, I can run, swim and fly.
Darkness destroys me, and light is my death;
And I can't keep alive without stopping my breath.
If my name can’t be guessed by a boy or a man,
By a woman or girl it certainly can.
I sort of get "Whale" and "Angel" (assuming those definitions are real), but I don't get the others, so I'd like to propose a different solution: "The HMS Kestrel".
The ship did exist in Wilberforce's time (in case he did write the riddle): it was launched in 1856 when Wilberforce was 51 (he died in 1873, aged 68) and it was sold in 1866 after seeing some action in the 1850s and 1860s.
My analysis:
I’m the sweetest of voices in orchestra heard,
But yet in an orchestra never have been.
"Kestrel" is a play on the prominent sound ("sweetest sound") in "Orchestra," but the ship was never in an orchestra.
I’m a bird of fine plumage, but less like a bird
Nothing ever in Nature was seen.
A kestrel is "the common name give to several species of predatory birds," so its a "bird of fine plumage". A ship looks nothing like a bird.
Touching earth I expire; in water I die;
Though I do progress, I can run, swim and fly.
The HMS Kestrel was a Clown-class gunboat which had a wood hull, steam power, and sails. They were often used for shallow water bombardment.
The dangers of running aground ("touching earth") and sinking ("in water") were real (see next item). The "run" of the steam engine helped "swim" (in water) while the sails let it "fly" (by air).
Darkness destroys me, and light is my death;
And I can't keep alive without stopping my breath.
Bit of a stretch, but with ChatGPT's help: Night operations ("darkness") and being discovered by the enemy ("light") were both operational hazards. Indeed, the HMS Kestrel was part of the second Battle of Taku Forts:
The attack was a bloody shambles, and it was clear that retreat was the only alternative to complete annihilation. Lee had grounded, and Kestrel had sunk halfway to its funnels in the Hai’s brown waters. Cormorant was a loss, and the shattered Plover was grounded and abandoned. The Kestrel was later recovered, but the other three were written off as total losses.
To avoid detection, perhaps the ship had to turn off the loud steam engine ("stopping my breath").
If my name can’t be guessed by a boy or a man,
By a woman or girl it certainly can.
📝 Literacy lag: We start reading too late (Erik Hoel / The Intrinsic Perspective). I'm not saying you need to force parents to teach their 3 year-olds to read, but claiming it's not "developmentally appropriate" seems crazy.
You are probably content with a Copenhagen-like interpretation.
You enjoy the idea that quantum mechanics is, in some way, able to describe the real world and you enjoy that there is some inherent randomness in the Universe. For you, the observer of quantum objects, and their classical world, is distinct from the quantum systems they interact with; a quantum particle's location and other attributes are not pre-defined, but emerge as well-defined states when an observer measures them.
Exactly why a measurement triggers a shift from a probabilistic to a well-defined state is not clear, but our brains are macroscopic, so you don’t let that bother you.
You might be among the 10% of researchers who, according to our survey, said that the Copenhagen interpretation was their favourite approach, but who also think that the wavefunction represents reality in some way.
📝 Fell in a hole, got out. (Tony Stubblebine). I had no idea about the tumultuous story of how Medium got to profitability in August 2024. Lots of basics had to be aligned.
Don’t revile a king even among your intimates.
Don’t revile a rich man even in your bedchamber;
For a bird of the air may carry the utterance,
And a winged creature may report the word.
📝 Joining Noetik (Abhishaike Mahajan; via Shalev NessAiver). Nice enumeration of reasons why the ML-Bio field is collapsing and a company (Noetik) possibly bucking the trend.
📝 Everything I know about good system design (Sean Goedecke). This is about system design; it's a programming article, but it uses a lot of intuition about what makes programs feel good (proper caching, hot path optimization, etc.).
📝 On agency (Henrik Karlsson / Escaping Flatland).
Often, agency is almost gentle—an attunement to the world and the self, a feeling out the details of reality, and a finding of the path of least resistance.
📝 I Deleted My Second Brain (Joan Westenberg). I don't love the "second brain" nomenclature, but I agree that carefully cataloging everything, but never using it is just another form of navel-gazing.
📝 How to Fix Your Context (Drew Breunig; via Simon Willison). Drew is coining lots of little phrases around the problems of LLM context (even in huge 1M context windows). Better yet, he's describing how to fix those problems.
📝 Your Review: Alpha School (Redacted / ACX). This is the most detail I've gotten about Alpha School since I heard about them a few years ago. This review actually immediately changed my perspective on what I could have my son accomplish over the summer and we started implementing it yesterday. Let's see how this goes.