Another trip around the sun OR Raphael's deadly debauchery and the AI Zebras

In the immortal words of Dwight Schrute: "It is your birthday." I'm spending part of it with you fine folk, giving your brains something that I hope will be worthy of celebrating.

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. In this edition, we’ll learn about birthdays before getting into some excellent brain food to satiate your mind.

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I am pleased to report that, as of today, I have survived yet another trip around the sun.

Some birthdays, alas, are not so fortuitous.

The Renaissance painter Raphael, for example, celebrated his birthday in 1520 by dying, achieving the same age as me before his demise. But the parallels don’t end there. Giorgio Vasari reports that Raphael, edging toward his birthday, having “summoned up all his powers…to show the supreme force of his art” became exhausted in producing his masterpiece and “never again touched a brush,” which is precisely how I feel with my “brush”/keyboard after I have mustered up the mental and finger strength to write a rollicking and profound Substack post.

Raphael has The School of Athens. I have Why don’t humans have tails? Equally timeless.

Now, Raphael’s birthday expiry, Vasari reports, wasn’t all bad. His end reportedly befell him due to the relentless pressures of excessive lovemaking. “Raffaello continued to divert himself beyond measure with the pleasures of love; whence it happened that, having on one occasion indulged in more than his usual excess, he returned to his house in a violent fever.” An aspirational birthday death worthy of remembrance.¹

Birthday deaths aren’t rare. It turns out that—I’m recklessly tempting fate here!—people do seem to be disproportionately likely to die on their birthday. Who knew!? It’s called the birthday effect.²

Perhaps it’s because people party too much, engaging in riskier behavior once intoxicated. Perhaps it’s because dying people want to hang on for one last chance to blow out the candles. Or, perhaps, according to some zanier hypotheses such as terror management theory, birthdays force us to contemplate our fragile mortality, which produces spikes in stress that create a deadly self-fulfilling prophecy.

Morbidity aside, birthdays can be extraordinarily lovely, profound moments in which people who care about you and value your friendship/existence/writing/newsletter show you—in extremely concrete ways—that they value you so much that you are worth at least $4/month to them.

But it wasn’t always so easy to use birthdays as a way to show someone you care. Because, as we’ll now see, our birthday celebrations are a relatively novel human experience.

The History of Birthdays

It may not be obvious, but birthdays are a technological innovation. To celebrate a birthday of June 29th, as I do, you must know the date—and that requires not just a sophisticated calendar system, but a clear sense of how long one year lasts. Using rudimentary solar or lunar methods, there may be some evidence that birthday celebrations began as imprecise pagan rituals in the pre-Christian period, but as Orly Redlich explains, they were a bit unlike our current parties:

“people tended to believe that evil spirits visited man on his birthday; hence they used to surround him during the celebration in order to protect him from the evil eye. These celebrations were also characterized by loud singing and noisy dancing that would drive away the evil spirits. Therefore, in those times it was not customary to bring gifts to the celebrant, only good wishes, and pure intentions”³

The Romans were weirder still. They believed that every person was born with an alter-ego who dictated one’s fortunes in life. The alter-ego lives when you live and dies when you die—so you had better feed and celebrate it. And what better way to celebrate your alter-ego than with a birthday celebration, in which you “sacrifice some of the family’s food in the form of a bread cake and wine” to satiate the parallel spirit that controls your destiny. As Hizky Shoham writes: “Because the deity controlled the celebrant’s good fortune in life, the latter traditionally ‘made a wish’ as part of the ceremony.”

Upon their bread cake, the Romans were said to have included a “symbolic number of festive candles,” which is the origin story of modern children covering extremely expensive, highly-decorated cakes—festooned with tacky plastic cars and superheroes and Disney princesses—with their spittle. And as is so often the case with children, it’s now all about them. We’ve just completely jettisoned the alter-ego, left to starve without bread cake, devoid of wine or even grape juice, alone and forgotten, in the celebratory ether.

The continued presence of birthday cake, for its part, has contested origins. Perhaps the loveliest and most appetizing scholarly explanation is that Germans used to make “bread in the shape of the baby Jesus' diapers,” which later became birthday cake. Yum!

In early Catholicism, Shoham notes, birthdays were marked out in relation to Saints Days, the communal gatherings that brought people together because they were comparatively uniform across Christendom. But they were often seen as narcissistic celebrations of individuals rather than godliness, so their self-indulgence didn’t catch on.

And, as you’ll have likely already noted from your prior in-depth reading of the seminal article on Korean birthday rituals in the widely read Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, many Asian cultures throughout history have specifically rejected individual birthday celebrations and instead advanced entire cohorts of children by one year during New Year celebrations.

In Europe, the apathy toward individual birthday celebrations started to change—slowly—by the 15th and 16th century, as the printing press made calendars more commonplace in the daily life of a larger slice of the population. Even then, however, it just wasn’t that big of a deal. Exact dates had little relevance to the lives of ordinary people in pre-industrial Europe. Knowing that it was, for example, October 3rd, wouldn’t confer any particular social advantage.

Then, a perfect storm—a tempest of social reorganization that launched the modern birthday—crashed into European society. The rise of the bureaucratic state meant that governments began to count everything, coinciding with the rise of social science. Citizens became classified, criminals were registered, and all this data collection included age as a variable worthy of scrutiny. At the same time, life became far more dominated by time markers—particularly new ones that were human constructs.

Whereas most societies were governed by cycles on Earth and space (day and night, seasons, movements of the stars, lunar cycles, etc.), the advent of train timetables and industrial work shifts meant that time had to be standardized across vast stretches of space. Demarcations of time that were arbitrary human-made subdivisions—seven day weeks and hours—became central to life in ways that would have been alien to everyone who came before.

By the 1800s, states were increasingly organizing traditions—one prominent example is the English Football Cup—in which organizers began promoting its longevity as a tradition that had been running for a certain number of anniversaries. Soon, everything was being marked and classified by time. The annual celebration of another cycle of life—or of football matches—became embedded in social tradition. Birthdays soon followed, trickling down from an aristocratic excuse for a party, to one that was widely shared by even the lowest social classes. And, as with so much else, colonialism helped it spread as a more common ritual far afield, blending European birthday traditions with local ones.

With the explosion of birthday parties, one couldn’t be expected to attend all of them, so many in polite English society began to send apology cards to people celebrating birthdays. The birthday card was born.

In 1926, one card read as follows:

I know your age / But I’ll keep it mum / If you’ll do the same / When my birthdays come

Today, we have innovated. Now you can send a horrifically tacky, lame commercialized joke—perhaps one that inexplicably has elderly people naked or Donald Trump on the front cover—to someone you care about (though I can think of at least one better way to spend $4).

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BRAIN FOOD

Let’s borrow a colossal metaphor for rich people’s hubris from 1912 and repeat it! (WIRED)

Okay, that’s not actually the title of the article in Wired by Mark Harris. But this deep dive—see what I did there (too soon?)—on the ways in which the Titan submersible was inevitably doomed to implode is riveting, maddening, and tragic.

Stockton Rush (which sounds like an AI generated name for a pompous rich guy—the surname also seems to be no coincidence) refused to take the necessary time to make sure that his experimental vessel was safe before putting actual human beings inside of it and diving to a murderously dangerous depth. He was warned over, and over, and over. When you read this piece, it’s hard not to conclude that Rush recklessly caused the deaths of multiple innocent people, with himself also paying the ultimate price for his hubris.

When will these self-proclaimed “visionaries” learn that there are actually reasons for safety checks and regulations in extremely dangerous contexts and that experts are actually right quite a lot of the time?

How AI Can Save the Zebras (Nautilus)

It’s 2024. People can’t stop talking about AI. Annoying people on LinkedIn who couldn’t string together a single coherent thought on, say, a GAN or how machine learning actually works really love talking about AI. The Venn Diagram showcasing two circles of 1) crypto bros; and 2) crypto bros who use the word “revolutionary” or “revolutionize” or “revolution” when talking about AI is, in fact, just one circle. And okay, sure, artificial intelligence is profoundly changing the world.

But I’m particularly interested in how it will better serve zebras.

Researchers, you see, were looking for fresh ways to protect zebra populations. They needed a way to track the zebras. But shooting them with tranquilizers and painting big numbers on them isn’t very nice, nor is it humane. Plus, that all costs a lot of money.⁴ But then, suddenly, these scholars had a flash of brilliance, the kind of simple solution that is the hallmark of genius.

“Don’t their bodies look a bit like giant barcodes?” one researcher said to another.

“By gum, you’re right!” the other replied.

“What if we got a giant supermarket barcode scanner and just pointed it at the zebras! We already have the workforce. We just need to train them on the larger scanner gun and how to point it at a live zebra rather than a bag of frozen peas!” the first researcher exclaimed, excitement building in his voice.⁵

This is, you may be surprised to learn, a dramatization and I have taken some artistic license with the events as they actually transpired, but the point is this: inspired by barcode scanning, conservationists have developed innovative digital tools—assisted by AI—to keep track of and protect zebra populations using only their barcode-like markings. They can easily scan and build a database for each individual, their markings acting a bit like a unique fingerprint, which makes it far easier to preserve the population and understand how it’s changing across time in ways that are relevant and useful for better ecology and conservation.

Now that, my dear crypto bro readers, is worthy of a LinkedIn post.

Or, alternatively, wish me a happy birthday for just 0.000617856 bitcoin per month.⁶

Thank you for reading—and a special thank you to those who support my work by being a paid subscriber to The Garden of Forking Paths or for those who have read FLUKE. Happy birthday to any readers out there who were also born on that finest of dates: June 29th. If that’s you, be careful today!

1. Okay, okay, there have been reports that Raphael died from syphilis and other revisionist histories using new research suggest it was actually pneumonia, worsened by overly aggressive bloodletting, which is a bit less glamorous than exhaustive lovemaking, but can you just let us have this one, historians? It’s much more fun for us in the original version and he’s been dead for like 500 years so I don’t think he’ll mind.

2. Some researchers and statisticians continue to be skeptical of the studies that establish the birthday effect, but it does seem to show up in several analyses of diverse data.

3. This is the modern world. Not sure if you noticed, but the pagans are mostly gone! “Pure intentions” weren’t good enough. And in this economy, “pure intentions” can’t be used to buy dog toys for Zorro. I—on behalf of Zorro (who yes, always has a dog birthday party, thank you very much)—will happily accept the most impure, depraved intentions, packaged together with a recurring payment of $4/month.

4. One can only assume that, at a very minimum, the UK price of tranquilizer darts, like many staples of modern life, spiked considerably due to inflation after the disastrous “mini budget” ushered in by Liz Truss.

5. We can imagine that if this excellent plan had been enacted, the Big Supermarket lobby would have inevitably ruined it, replacing the pleasant and highly effective human-operated barcode scanner gun with a lifeless maddening automated machine that keeps repeating at you, over and over: “Unexpected Zebra in savanna area. Please seek assistance.”

6. I don’t think Substack actually takes bitcoin.