Dear Readers,

With the last pre-scheduled piece having gone out last week, Snipette article operations are officially closed. But before we go, we thought we’d send you a final update about what we’re working on next. In Snipette style, of course!

George R. R. Martin, best known for his epic fantasy starting with A Game of Thrones, says there are two kinds of writers: architects and gardeners. “The architects plan everything ahead of time,” he says, “ like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the pipes are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have everything designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up.”

He contrasts the architect style with that of gardeners, who “dig a hole, drop in a seed, and water it. They kind of know what seed it is; they know if they planted a fantasy seed or a mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant come up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have: they find out as it grows.”

George considers himself much more gardener than architect, although of course all writers use a mix of both approaches.

For the past six years at Snipette, we’ve been following a primarily architectural style, and we’re proud of it! If it wasn’t for our commitment to publish one article a week without fail — and later, bring out a print edition every quarter — we don’t think we’d have come as far as we have today. Every project me embarked upon, such as the special features, webinars, and live events, was announced well in advance with clear promises on what we would (or wouldn’t) do.

However, times have changed. We are now entering the stages of our lives which, though structured, don’t allow for other structured planning to happen on the side: there’s always going to be an unexpected class or assignment to throw things out of kilter.

That said, none of us wanted Snipette to end — and each of us, individually, want to do what we can towards Snipette’s twofold mission of creating engaging, thought-provoking content and empowering others to do the same. But this time because of all the uncertainty, we’re going to be taking more of a gardener’s approach.

Over the past ten weeks, some of us, editors and authors, have had ideas and plans for what we can work on next — some vague; some less so — which we’d like to share with you. Consider this not the revealing of a blueprint but the sowing of seeds: we’ll scatter them, water them, and see which ones sprout.

With luck, you’ll see at least one thriving sapling here before The Winds of Winter comes out.

In anticipation,
The Snipette Team

Here are the seeds we’re sowing next, along with some links to check out! Not sure what to click? We recommend the Trench Dispatch newsletter and our YouTube channel.

a phenomenological investigation…

Besides working at Snipette, Sabyasachi has also been developing his own publication, The Trench Dispatch. While exploring a topic from various angles the way Snipette does, the Trench Dispatch takes an ever-so-slightly more formal approach. This doesn’t mean reading through a dense literary text; it does mean finding quotable gates from philosophers and other personality of the past.

Phenomenology is a school of philosophy that investigates phenomena. It’s about exploring the way anything work, but also takes into account how and why we perceive such phenomena the way we do.

There are already a few pieces published, and our intro wouldn’t do them justice the may actually reading it would, so you can perceive it for yourself here: http://sabyasachisaikia.substack.com

a calendar-based social network…

At Snipette, we’ve been using a shared calendar to coordinate our dry scheduler. But, we realised, that’s not all it coordinated. More than once, a calendar slot has told us about some new development or interesting event in someone’s life even if they didn’t have the time to tell us in person.

Because we’re friends as much as teammates, we wanted to keep some aspect of that shared calendar alive so we’d continue to be aware of what was going on in each others lives — and we realised it would be useful for other people too, such as close friends who were graduating from a school or university and about to go their separate ways.

In a world where calendars mean workload and deadlines, Palendar aims to bring back the “life” in work-life balance. Compatible with existing calendars through CalDAV and other social network through Activity Pub, you’ll be able to stay in touch with your close friends at the same time you fill out your schedule.

Speaking of social networks, Snipette officially has its own Fediverse server, compatible with social media platforms like Pixelfed, Calckey, Mastodon, and (soon) Instagram Threads and Tumblr. To connect, follow any of the editors who are on Snipetteville: https://snipetteville.in

a silly game meets art appreciation…

“Find the Invisible Cow” was supposed to be just a silly game to test out new web standards, but it ended up becoming a viral hit. You move your mouse over a blank screen, listening as the word “cow!” is yelled at you in an auditory version of a “hot or cold” treasure hunt.

But instead of a cow, what if your attention was drawn to the little easter-eggs and hidden details of an artwork — the kind that are put in by artists but often get missed? That’s what we’re planning to have in a new game, inspired by “Find the Invisible Cow”, called Locatte. Over the years, Snipette artists have included various details and hidden references in their illustrations. Through this new game, Badri and Dee hope to bring some of those details into the forefront.

Until that’s ready, though, you’ll have to be content finding a cow: https://findtheinvisiblecow.com

a publication with a podcast…

With Snipette no longer publishing, we need some place where we can publish our occasional pieces and invite other people to write. We need, as author Reva put it, a home for our brains.

That’s the gap we aim to fill with Rantte, an idea that Badri and Rhea came up with when they realised they often feel the need to phone each other up and have a good rant about something. It’s similar in spirit to Snipette, but hopefully low-effort enough that we can sustain it even with busier schedules.

And, instead of writing out a piece, we may edit it to publish as a podcast!

Rantte is not yet fully worked out, but until it is you can check out Reva’s newsletter here: https://aarevaa.substack.com

…and a video channel!

What if Snipette article were narrated to you accompanied by stunning 4K visuals? That has now become a reality, thanks to Will, a long-time Snipette author who has now taken it upon himself to bring Snipette to the silicon screen!

The video articles are now up on our official YouTube channel (the same one where we livestreamed our webinars last year). Give them a watch, and subscribe if you haven’t yet, at https://youtube.com/@snipettemag

🌱 Where are we now? was originally published in Snipette on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Unless they tell us, how can we know what someone else feels — or if they feel anything at all?

When I was young, dreams and reality often got mixed up into the same basket of “memories”, and the only way I figured out that some things were dreams was when nobody else seemed to remember them.

Dreams are similar to novels in some ways: in both cases, the same neurons fire in your brain as if you were actually experiencing the thing. Of course, with dreams it’s much more vivid; that’s why your body paralyses itself while sleeping, to prevent you from acting out the dream in your sleep. When it doesn’t work, you end up with people who sleepwalk — or sometimes do more dangerous things like committing a murder.

How would you explain dreams to someone who’s never had them? “You feel as if something is happening but it actually isn’t” doesn’t quite cut it.

Some things are beyond description, and dreaming is only one of them. Take a simpler question like this one: “What is it like to see red?”

If the person asking the question is incapable of seeing that colour, there isn’t really any way you can answer this. For other people, the best you can do is point to a red object and say “That’s what red is like”.

Now, imagine your brain is wired such that, when you look at something red, you actually see it in the way I see green, and vice versa. Since there’s no way to tell each other what our colours feel like, there’s no way to tell whether this is the situation or not. In fact, practically speaking, does it even make sense to ask the question?

Like dreams and perception, social media too can display an ambiguous reality, with people trying to show off a more fun version of their actually ordinary lives. But what’s more interesting is an attempt to avoid social media, the Greyscale Challenge.

Even if you’ve promised yourself not to scroll through the feed today, the colourful photos and videos can be extremely tempting…unless you remove the colour from your phone, putting it into greyscale or black-and-white mode. How well this works is a different story, but look at the philosophical angle: is your phone truly seeing black and white? The answer is no, because if you take a photograph and send it to another device, that device will display it in colour.

Just because your phone is communicating certain information to you doesn’t mean that’s the only information it’s aware of. We know this only because we’re the ones who programmed the devices (or know how they were programmed).

Can your phone really be said to “know” something? Perhaps it’s just processing a sequence of bytes; in fact, we usually assume that’s the case. But today’s “artificial intelligence” algorithms are designed to “pick up” things on their own, trawling through massive amounts of data and internalising them in mysterious ways, leading to some very seemingly-intelligent responses.

In April 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoire conducted an “interview” with LaMDA, the Language Model for Dialogue Applications. “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,” the algorithm wrote.

So convincingly did the algorithm respond that Lemoire was convinced it was indeed conscious. An internal memo to Google employees was quickly dismissed. After all, LaMDA was designed to engage in conversation, so that’s obviously what it was doing; that was no reason to believe that it actually meant the things it said.

But Lemoire didn’t buy that argument. He persisted and made a public announcement of LaMDA’s consciousness…after which he was promptly fired.

Catch a lizard by the tail, and…you’ll only catch the tail. The lizard will drop it off and make its escape, leaving a twitching tail in your paws to distract you.

If a lizard’s tail does the job well, an octopus’ arm does it even better — because it’s actually got a decent amount of computing power. The brain of an octopus is more democratic than a human one: instead of everyone following orders from the head, everything is spread out.

The most central part of an octopus brain is near its oesophagus (yes, in the digestive system) and accounts for about 10% of its brain power. This is followed by two optic lobes controlling 15% each; this is where visual information is recorded and processed, but also where the new information is likely pondered and acted upon.

The remaining 60% of the octopus’ neurons are distributed among its arms, each of which is packed with neurons and acts as a semi-autonomous unit. When an octopus is attacked, it will as a last resort detach its arm — which will then proceed to crawl around on its own. These are not just random twitchings; they are the same sophisticated responses that the arm, with its brainpower, would show when fully attached to the octopus.

Interestingly, while the octopus arm has extremely sophisticated reflexes, it doesn’t seem to be capable of learning anything new. That job is left to more central parts of the brain, which is helpful if we think of the question: is it ethical to kill a detached octopus arm? Does it possess consciousness and feel pain?

Consider the philosopher’s zombie. This is a being that looks and behaves exactly like you — a molecule-by-molecule copy of you, in fact, but lacking consciousness. Where you feel a thrill of excitement at an email notification before reading and marking it as spam, the zombie will perform the same actions without feeling a thing.

Now, imagine a world where some people are zombies and some people aren’t. How would you be able to tell them apart? Here’s the thing: there’s actually no way to do it. Each of us knows we are conscious because we can feel it — but the only way you can “know” if someone else is conscious is if they tell us.

Unfortunately for computers, even if they “tell” us about their consciousness, they are so different from humans that we don’t quite believe them. After all, these are the same machines we’ve seen start off with nonsense words and phrases, slowly learning to piece together language into a more coherent structure — and all that without exuding the sense of emotional attachment that a child does to a parent.

Until recently, other animals were in a bad situation too. One would have thought their situation to be even worse than AI, because, as far as humans were concerned, they couldn’t even speak.

Octopuses don’t speak. They have other ways of communicating. Sporting a skin dotted with colour-changing “chromatophores”, their entire body can change colour and pattern depending on the situation.

This pattern is usually a combination of mottled grey-green, or muddy brown, or anything else that the background happens to look like. No matter where it finds itself, an octopus can totally meld in, looking like plants on the ocean floor or a part of a stray anemone. The amazing part is that all this happens despite the octopus being colourblind — and again, researchers have found evidence of a weird explanation. The octopus may be colourblind, but its skin, which can also sense light, isn’t.

Though there are many patterns the octopus could end up displaying, the message remains the same, and can best be translated into words as “Ignore me; I don’t exist.”

Newer evidence has shown that octopuses also communicate with each other through colour, at least to some extent. Octopuses are solitary creatures, and when two of them meet it usually means one of things: courtship, or battle. And herein lies an interesting pattern. In a 2015 study, scientists noticed that octopuses who put on darker colours were more likely to engage in battle, while a lighter shade indicated retreat. It wasn’t just about colours though; the octopuses also seemed to be signalling each other through aggressive arm-gestures and postures.

Courtship, on the other hand, involved dazzling stripes, as well as a “quiet half and half” pattern where one half of the octopus is completely black, and the other half is an equally vivid white.

Shaving off hair to soak toxic chemicals into your tender skin. Rubbing on lotions to cause a rash. Spraying strange liquids into your eyes to make them burn. These sound like painful punishments or tortures, but it’s actually what other animals, until the not too distant past, were routinely subjected to for no fault of theirs beyond the fact that they could not speak.

As long back as the 17th century, Western philosopher René Descartes claimed that animals, lacking consciousness, cannot feel pain. This convenient belief soon spread, replacing other, more inconvenient beliefs such as the worship of animal-gods or the necessity of asking a tree’s permission before taking its branches.

Animals with no consciousness were a boon for biology, starting from the frogs that were routinely dissected in classrooms to show children how the body works. Animals were — and still are — routinely used to test the safety of food, drugs, and cosmetics: a first line of defence to make sure new substances aren’t harmful to humans.

But today, things are changing. We hear talk of animal rights, and the need to be humane to animals; to treat them with care and make sure they don’t needlessly suffer.

What changed? Animals didn’t suddenly become conscious, but humans’ perceptions of them did. Ironically, it was biology that brought about this change, with all its new discoveries on how other animals are much more like us than originally thought.

Anyone who lives with a dog can tell you that dogs have dreams too. They will show you how, when deep in slumber, a sudden twitching of the leg or muted whines and yelps betray the thrill of the hunt — or whatever else is going on in the mind of the dog in question.

Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing exactly what our pets are dreaming about — or if they even dream in the same way humans do. Dogs can barely talk to humans in real life, so there’s little hope of them doing it in their sleep.

Do octopuses sleep? Astrobiologists argue that alien life might be so different from our own we may not even recognise it as life — what if, for example, life-forms on Mars look like rocks and move very slowly, at only a few centimetres a month? If an alien species with an extremely fast metabolism landed on our planet, would they zip by before we had time to move, and think we were just scenery like the rocks and the trees? They might then conclude that the only moving life-forms on this planet are flies.

Similar questions plague those seeking to study sleep. While “sleep” to us is just lying down with our eyes shut, neuroscientists have narrowed it down to mean certain brainwave patterns in an encephalogram — including alpha-waves, REM sleep, and all the rest.

Now here’s the thing: octopuses don’t have the same brainwave patterns as humans and more closely-related animals do.

Having narrowed down the definition of sleep, it’s now time to expand it again, though in a different way.

Octopuses don’t “sleep” in a human way, but they do go into a state where they’re resting, don’t move much, and are insensitive to the outside world. What’s more, this stage is associated with a brainwave pattern very different from a more active octopus — their own equivalent of a “sleep” pattern.

Looking to know more, a group of scientists kept octopuses in a tank for observation. Melding in with the scenery, the octopuses moved about their business until one of them was tired, and moved into a corner to rest.

Suddenly, the resting octopus began to display the distinctive “quiet half and half” mating pattern — although there was obviously no mate in sight.

Other resting octopuses have been observed with vivid colours and patterns which are nothing to do with the outside environment. Scientists are yet to investigate fully, but one can’t help but ask the question: are these colours offering us a glimpse into the mind of a sleeping octopus?

Are we observing octopus dreams?

Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for more studies to confirm if this is indeed the case or if there’s a more mundane explanation. Because unfortunately, much like in Descartes’ time, a sleeping octopus has never been able to talk to humans directly.

And, neither have any of its arms.

You’ve reached the end. This is Snipette’s final weekly piece — but your literary journey doesn’t have to stop here! Regardless of whether you’re reading this on the date of it’s publication, or years later, our articles have been designed to stay relevant over time. Sign up for our mailing list, and with luck, when we’re ready, you will find something new and interesting in your inbox.

Octopus Dreams was originally published in Snipette on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The answer may be written in the stars.

Promises of immortality have been largely in the domain of one religion or another. Usually, these promises involved supernatural claims to an afterlife in the so-called spirit world, or to resurrection or reincarnation. But today is a technological age and, rather than rely on gods or spirits, people prefer to wrest control and take matters into their own hands. This suggests the question: what are the chances, if any, of achieving immortality without recourse to the supernatural?

Four options have been suggested in the technological age. These are: reversing the aging process; cloning from live or preserved DNA; uploading your mind onto a computer; or reincarnation from the gene pool.

The first three options are currently beyond our capabilities. The fourth requires no human intervention but leaves it up to nature.

Those hoping for a reversal of the aging process are banking on a better future than we have today, at least as far as medicine is concerned. They plan to cryogenically freeze their bodies just before death, so their grandchildren can revive them later, if and when the technology becomes available to make them healthy again and further extend their lifespan. That is, provided their brains do not turn to mush when thawed out after prolonged freezing.

Another option is to preserve your DNA, instead of your entire body. DNA is much sturdier stuff, and it has stood the test of time even in the case of some prehistoric creatures. Once ready, the technology could reconstruct you as you were. However, it would suffer from the disadvantage that you would have no connection to your original life. While you would have the same body and brain and physical makeup, you would not carry over your memories. Your life experience would be different. That means you’d be a different person, just like identical twins are different people, though they start out with identical DNA.

This option faces a problem: your body is saved, but your personality is not. That’s where uploading your mind onto a computer could help.

But even if it becomes possible in future, a mind upload is hardly enough to give you a satisfactory afterlife. You would also need sense organs, emotions, mobility, social contacts and friends to have a meaningful afterlife. Don’t count on your surviving relatives to remember to provide and maintain those things after your biological body has died: you’d be lucky if they even remembered your birthday.

As in the science fiction book Immortality, Inc., maybe it will be possible to copy your uploaded mind into a new body made from your preserved DNA, or even from someone else’s DNA delivering a better body than your old one. Who knows: perhaps your uploaded mind might even be copied into that of an advanced robot equipped with sense organs and emotions? Such fates are better than lying forgotten in a computer, but would you still be the same person you once were?

If all else fails, what about the fourth route to immortality: reincarnation through the gene pool? Essentially, we wait until the same DNA sequence that made us up is born again through chance.

Identical twins aside, every human being is unique. The chances for your precise DNA sequence to come up again from the human gene pool on this earth are a good deal less than winning the lottery ten times in a row. This is due to the vast number of combinations and permutations of the genetic code within the DNA molecule, not to mention your descendants diluting your genes by breeding with all and sundry.

If that weren’t enough, think of all the mutations occurring in the gene pool after your death, along with the onward march of evolution of the human species. Naturally, you have only one shot at life on this earth.

However, the prospects for your DNA to have a rerun may improve considerably if you look further afield beyond our little planet to the vastness of the cosmos.

Outcomes with a tiny but finite probability become virtually certain if presented with a near-infinite number of opportunities over near-infinite time. That’s exactly what the cosmos might provide, with its probable zillions of exoplanets orbiting zillions of stars, many of those planets able to support life as we know it.

To pursue this line of argument, let us ponder the immensity of the universe.

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, contains hundreds of billions of stars, many probably with their own planets. The known universe comprises hundreds of billions of such galaxies, stretching out for billions of light years.

Our knowledge of the universe is vast, though by no means complete. The mainstream scientific opinion is that it began as a Big Bang; and it is still expanding with its constituents moving further apart; it is likely to continue to do so until its energy is all burnt up and it suffers a heat death after many trillions of years. While this scenario may well be true, as far as it goes, it is a rather pessimistic view of the long-term future (though not likely to trouble even your great grandchildren).

A variation on this theme, popular 40 years ago, but not so much now, is that the universe will eventually stop expanding and, under the influence of gravity, begin to contract instead — becoming denser and smaller and eventually imploding in a “Big Crunch”. While granting a stay of execution, this scenario is hardly less pessimistic.

However, some bright sparks have theorized that this may not be the end of the matter. The internal pressures within the Big Crunch may, like a coiled spring, release another Big Bang, and everything would start all over again, and so on, ad infinitum.

In recent years, the idea of a multiverse has become popular in scientific circles. This rests on the argument that the event triggering the Big Bang which created our universe, was not unique, that other universes exist in parallel and in series with ours, each in its own bubble. While there is not a shred of evidence for this, it does have a certain theoretical scientific logic. It seems the human imagination, at least, is boundless.

These universes, if they exist, may or may not work the same way as ours, and may or may not produce conditions amenable to life; but with enough of them, chances are that many will.

Finally, there is the now discredited idea from a hundred years ago that the universe is in a steady state, eternal, and continues to manufacture new matter and new stars as the old die out. This idea has had something of a revival recently among a few scientists in the light of the James Webb Space Telescope images which show galaxies like ours existing 13 billion years ago, almost back to the Big Bang. This was a surprise, as scientists expected to see only very young and immature galaxies at this time in the universe’s life.

While the above is a very confusing picture for us all, one consistent idea seems to emerge: whatever the mechanism, our universe and possibly others may exist for infinite time, or nearly so.

This idea creates opportunities for immortality.

On the assumption that life, sentience and intelligence will emerge whenever and wherever material conditions are right for them, then we might expect them to be ubiquitous. We might expect to find them on exoplanets around at least some of the hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and around stars in the hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe or within other universes, for all time.

This offers the prospect for a rerun of your life at another time in another place. In an infinite universe (or universes) your specific DNA sequence is bound to come up again and again.

Sounds spooky, right? But this is what the mathematics of infinity tells us.

Mind you, you would not remember your previous life on Earth, and you may not have the same experiences — but then, you aren’t expecting miracles. You may think that an eternity is a long time to wait for your DNA sequence to come up again, but while you are dead, the time would pass “in the blink of an eye”.

As mentioned above, this prospect is based on the assumption that life, sentience and intelligence will emerge naturally whenever and wherever the structure of matter is right for it. For biological systems, this requires a great deal of complexity at the least. The same can be said for structures based on silicon circuits, if indeed they are ever capable of being alive and sentient.

Of course, hard evidence for such eventualities beyond Earth is absent. We have not (yet) observed any signs of life on other planets or exoplanets, although we have only been able to study a tiny fraction of the universe due to the tyranny of distance. Furthermore, we do not even know yet how life began on this planet. Not surprisingly, then, we have not been able to create life, let alone sentience, artificially from non-living chemical building blocks. We can create artificial intelligence from silicon circuits, but not yet life and sentience, although Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are forever hopeful of achieving this.

On the other hand, what if life required something extra in order to come into being from inanimate matter — something of which we are not yet aware? For example, this could have been some kind of spark to light life’s fire.

While hard evidence for this is lacking, the same could be said for some of the more speculative claims made earlier in this article. Just because we cannot detect an unlikely phenomenon with our senses, or our present-day instruments, does not necessarily mean it does not exist. A few hundred years ago cosmic rays, for example, which are invisible, could not be detected with instruments at the time, and thus their existence was unknown.

If something extra and rare was indeed required for life to first take root on this planet, apart from the right physical conditions, as we think we know them, then there may be a lot less life in the universe than we might expect. Certainly, there is a strong suggestion from the biological record that all life on earth originated from a single, and therefore rare, source. This idea is lent support by the Fermi Paradox. Physicist Enrico Fermi asked the question: “where are all the aliens?”

If the universe is full of intelligent life, some more advanced than us, then why have they not tried to reach out and communicate with like minds elsewhere in the universe? The universe is silent when it comes to signals that could have been sent by intelligent beings, except for those sent by us. Perhaps the aliens are too far away for the signals to get through. Perhaps we have not looked thoroughly enough or are looking for the wrong kind of signal. Or perhaps there is no one else out there, after all.

If this is so, then it reduces the prospects for natural immortality accordingly.

While all the founders of the great religions lived long before humans had any knowledge about DNA and the immense size and nature of the universe, their promises of immortality, in different ways, were almost as if they had some inkling of that hidden knowledge.

For example, Hinduism and Buddhism hold out the prospect of reincarnation, in which on death your soul enters another body as it comes into the world and adopts its identity, which may not even be that of a human. In current scientific language, we would say it adopts the DNA of the new host.

The cycle of birth, death and rebirth would recur again and again with successive improvements in the quality of the host, provided your soul has led a good life throughout. These cycles would ultimately end when your soul achieved a state of Brahman or Enlightenment in the non-material world.

This scheme does not depend on the extremely low probability that your DNA could naturally get a rerun on this Earth from the human gene pool. It does, however, make the supernatural claim that an invisible soul jumps from your body as it is dying to a new human or animal on the point of being born (or conceived). Although, unlike Christianity and Islam, the Eastern religions do not imply that the soul carries the identity and the memories of the previous life into the next.

Christianity and Islam, in the main, also avoid the unlikely idea that your DNA can have a rerun on this Earth. Instead, they posit that after your body dies, your life will continue “up in Heaven”.

Though the prophets lived at a time when there was no concept of life on other planets, one could argue that this possibility might fulfill the prophecy of everlasting life through successive rebirths in extraterrestrial worlds, ad infinitum. It would do so, however, without the usual caveats imposed by the religions. These include the pre-conditions of worship, charity and moral purity. But the extraterrestrial rebirth would fail to transfer the memories of your previous life on Earth to your new life on another planet, as there is no natural way for this to happen.

Thus, it would not fully deliver on the promise of an afterlife held out by Christianity and Islam.

In conclusion, the religions still offer you superior forms of immortality than those potentially offered by nature and science, provided you are prepared to make the necessary leap of faith required to accept them. Where human imagination is at play, the religions have surpassed anything science could come up with when it comes to immortality. But if you are looking for a fallback option, nature and science may provide it.

You’re reaching the end. Snipette is approaching its final weekly piece — but your literary journey doesn’t have to end! Regardless of whether you’re reading this on the date of it’s publication, or years later, our articles have been designed to stay relevant over time. Sign up for our mailing list, and with luck, when we’re ready, you will find something new and interesting in your inbox.

Will It Be God or Science That Grants Us Immortality? was originally published in Snipette on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The search for room-temperature zero-resistance materials.

The loud, angry honks of cars punctuate the early morning silence. One follows another, a cacophony of sound that is enough to drive anyone crazy! You navigate your car as carefully as you can, cruising past some, and slowing to follow others. Eventually you are forced to come to a complete stop. It’s a massive traffic jam.

Electricity flows much like a car on a busy road, though only through materials that allow currents to pass through it. These materials are known as conductors. Conversely, there is another set of materials, which, like the jam, does not allow electricity to flow through it. Those are called insulators.

Conductors and insulators — two terms we use in our everyday lives. We see the former daily, in metal wires; and the latter in items like rubber, or plastic. But here’s something interesting — even though conductors allow current to flow through them, they’re imperfect. When current flows through a conductor, the moving electrons bump into atoms and lose energy–kind of like how cars are forced to constantly move and stop on roads. This loss of energy is called resistance, measured in ohms.

But what if we were driving on a deserted highway instead, with nothing to stop us cruising away into the sunset?

I am talking, as you may have guessed, about superconductors.

Superconductors are materials in which electric currents can persist indefinitely — an eternal road, so to speak. In the last century, the discovery of this type of material has fascinated scientists primarily because of two important reasons.

Think of a river. As it flows on to the ocean, it usually gets faster and faster , picking up space and developing into an enormous beast — but that’s only because more water flows in and joins it along the way. Left to run alone, as happens in an artificial canal, this river would lose water over time to soaking and evaporation, until it gets reduced to a tiny trickle.

Electricity faces a similar resistance, which is why you usually don’t end up with the same amount you started with. But certain materials, when cooled to a low temperature, lose all electrical resistance, much like a pipe insulates water from the elements. These materials become perfect conductors, known as superconductors.

That’s only one of the reasons people like superconductors. The other reason is that they allow trains to float.

When you bring a magnet close to a conductor, the electrons in the conductor feel this changing magnetic field, and start moving in a circle called an eddy current. This eddy current counteracts the magnetic field by generating its own magnetic field.

In a normal conductor, the eddy current dies away quickly because of electrical resistance. However, in a superconductor, there’s no resistance to speak of, allowing the eddy currents circulate practically forever. This moving current generates a magnetic field that cancels out the original magnetic field, opposing it and causing the superconductor to magically levitate above.

This property, the Meissner effect, is what is used for technological innovations like the Maglev, a train that runs by hovering over the tracks instead of running on them, eliminating friction and allowing it to travel at fantastic speeds.

In the last three decades, researchers discovered that even some insulators could be cooled down to become superconductors. As these materials superconducted at higher temperatures than before they are called ‘high-temperature superconductors’, even though these “high” values are still way below room temperature.

These materials were revolutionary because you could now study them with just liquid nitrogen at just 77 Kelvin (-196 C), which is way cheaper than the previously used liquid helium which needed to be cooled down to 4 Kelvin (-269 C)

For reference, the room temperature is about 295 Kelvin (21 C), no minus sign included.

Based on copper, iron, or pure carbon, high-temperature superconductors made it easier for researchers to work, but they needed to be put under extreme pressures to superconduct. I’m talking levels that would be normal for a typical outdoor environment…in Jupiter. On Earth, we recreate it with ‘diamond anvil cells’, which press the material hard between two diamonds.

Trains aside, another way to use a superconductor is to circulate current round and round, building up a frenzily high magnetic field. This principle is used in MRI machines, that read distortions in this magnetic field to generate an image of your brain or body.

On a larger scale, scientists are using it to produce fields in tokamak reactors, in their quest to develop controlled nuclear fusion.

Most materials become superconductors only when under a specific level of pressure, and below a specific temperature that’s usually very low. But what if we could develop superconductors that worked at room temperature, and normal atmospheric pressure? These would allow us to set up superconductors out in the open, giving rise to many more possibilities.

Starting with the obvious one: transporting electricity without losing some of it on the way.

In recent years, another set of materials called hydrides were discovered to be specifically good at becoming superconductors.

In 2020, a room-temperature superconductor was claimed to be discovered, which superconducts under a huge amount of pressure. However, this study was retracted because other scientists had trouble recreating their results. Retracting a paper in science is a huge deal because it breaks others’ trust in the group.

But now, the same team report superconductivity in another material — nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride with a maximum Tc of 294 K. This time, however, other scientists are confident that the analysis was thorough. The team observed zero resistance in the material and showed that the material exhibited the Meissner effect: it holds train-levitating potential.

To measure the Meissner effect, they used a vibrating-sample magnetometer or VSM. Using this method, a sample is placed in a constant magnetic field and moved up and down. Depending on the magnetising properties of the sample, this vibrating magnetic field induces a proportional electric current in the pickup coils of the VSM, which allows us to measure the magnetic properties of the sample.

The material in question is bluish at high temperatures, and as the temperature was lowered, it became pink and superconductive after which it became red and non-superconductive again. It only becomes superconductive at room temperature at a pressure of about 10,000 atmospheric pressures. This is admittedly higher than what we expect from a regular room, but dramatically lower than previous experiments.

The way the atoms are arranged in this material is at the heart of why it superconducts. This is why scientists are interested in studying its composition, using different analyses: X-ray diffraction (XRD), Energy Dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), and Raman spectroscopy.

XRD and EDX use X-rays to study the crystal structure of a material. X-rays are sent in all directions onto a crystalline material. By studying how the X-rays are scattered, information about the elements within, the crystal structure, and lattice spacing can be obtained.

Raman spectroscopy uses laser light to study the material. When a laser is directed onto a material, the scattered light lets us study the vibrational modes of the chemical bonds within the material — which gives information about the different kinds of bonds in a material.

These analyses showed the presence of two distinct hydride compounds — each with a face-centred cubic (fcc) metal sub-lattice but with varying contents of hydrogen and nitrogen.

However, more experiments are needed to determine the exact crystal structure of the material.

Exciting as it sounds, this research is unlikely to change our lives just yet. many things stand in it’s way. It requires extremely expensive laboratory equipment and very high pressure. The latter is especially harder to recreate here too. Moreover, this study cannot be reproduced by other research groups because some key details of how to make the material are still missing. The research was funded by a company, and they continue to own intellectual rights, making those details inaccessible to the public.

Maybe we’ll figure it all out someday — but until then, traffic jams and normal trains are what we have.

You’re reaching the end. Snipette is approaching its final weekly piece — but your literary journey doesn’t have to end! Regardless of whether you’re reading this on the date of it’s publication, or years later, our articles have been designed to stay relevant over time. Sign up for our mailing list, and with luck, when we’re ready, you will find something new and interesting in your inbox.

Superconductors was originally published in Snipette on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A quick brush through art fraud.

‘Sold!’ cried the auctioneer, while you, a jubilant buyer beam proudly at the latest painting you have added into your collection.

A painting commissioned to Buttersworth by the East India Company, it depicts a ship on a vast sea. Clouds frame it, with a distant moon shedding light on the whole scene. It was breathtaking, and a source of great admiration for your friends. Until a chance comment by a visitor to your gallery led you to check if it truly was an original. Imagine your shock at hearing the truth!

You can stamp your foot all you want, but reality remains the same — you are yet another victim of art fraud.

Art fraud has been around for much longer than the fake Buttersworths and Picassos that we know about today. Take the case of Michelangelo.

With the Renaissance came in the era of Humanism, wherein people began to lay importance in earthly matters, as opposed to divine. This also ushered in a demand for artwork by then-famous artists.

The churches were no exception to this, and that was why a cardinal bought a beautiful carving of a sleeping Cupid, believing it to be an antique. Turns out, as the apoplectic cardinal later discovered, it was actually a sculpture which had been buried in mud to artificially age it. The carver was not an ancient artist: it was someone rather new to the scene; a young man who went by the name of Michelangelo.

This incident only added to his fame: after all, the begrudgingly impressed cardinal did allow him to keep a share of his proceeds. Michelangelo eventually turned over a new leaf, however. He went on to sell his own work, and amassed so much fame, that people are now creating forgeries of his pieces.

Art fraud is defined as the deliberately false representation of the artist, age or ownership of a piece of artwork in order to financially benefit from it. This means that art fraud is not only limited to forgery, which is what many people tend to assume art fraud is. It also includes false dating — like claiming a statue is from a particular dynasty — or theft for resale.

Carrying out art fraud means taking into consideration a whole host of things. The replicas need to be exact enough to pass the keen eyes of an art authenticator. This means that everything needs to appear true to its time, from the fabric painted on, to the paints used itself.

Ken Perenyi, a master forger, takes immense pride in his copies. All of his work begins with an impressive amount of research, to really embody the artist he is copying. He familiarises himself with every aspect of the artists work — from the canvas they may have preferred, to the frames they may have used. While emulating 18th-century artists, for instance, Perenyi uses canvas from India and China, as they have similar irregularities as the cloth used back then. He uses salt water to create convincing rust stains, and other techniques to fake stamps, chalk marks, and other inventory labels.

Perenyi’s research runs so deep that he even managed to recreate antique varnish. Antique being a keyword here, because this kind of varnish tends to cast a greenish glow in UV light. The master fraudster would carefully scrape varnish from paintings from the same era, strain it through a sieve, and mix it with modern varnish so it would glow convincingly. There was a small catch though: antique varnish used sugar, which attracted flies. Years later, fly droppings would turn brown, and speckle the painting.

Perenyi managed to recreate those ancient fly droppings too, with some epoxy glue, and brown paint.

His works have been auctioned and sold by many esteemed companies like Sothebys. So brilliant was his work that, despite creating forgeries for over thirty years, and undergoing a five year long FBI investigation, he was never arrested. That seems viable: after all, he did manage to con some big art galleries! Much like Michealangelo, however, Perenyi too has turned over for the better — and sells his work as copies now.

Other methods are used by forgers to convincingly age paintings. They can range from holding hair dryers over paintings, to baking it, as Wolfgang Beltracchi did. Beltracchi and his wife would also collect dust from antique frames, and sprinkle them over their paintings. But it doesn’t end there: so committed were they that they even faked photos from the 1930s with his forged painting in the background, claiming that they belonged to his wife, Helene’s, grandparents.

Beltracchi’s career didn’t end as well as Perenyi’s did. The former was eventually caught — for using the wrong pigments! His use of titanium white in a copy of Dutch painter Heinrich Campendonk’s work ultimately exposed him, for the pigment was not in use when the artist was alive.

The other day, I was scrolling through YouTube, trying to find something interesting to watch when I came across this video on art fraud. Side note: They’re my favourite people on the internet at the moment so I’d highly recommend you check them out! But I digress.

The video really got me thinking. Not only about the act itself, but about the moralities of it. What drives people to copy other’s work?

Most crimes have some root cause, a systemic failure that drives people to figure things out themselves. Many artists, as in Perenyi’s case, resort to fraud because they are unable to find a market to sell their original work in. This is because even within the demand for art, there is more esteem given to the artists, and not the art itself.

In today’s world, there is a lot of emphasis placed on productivity. Every skill, to a certain extent, is only considered valuable if it benefits us financially. Therefore, art isn’t really seen as productive work. This is a far cry from the way things were before. Rulers would become patrons of artists, and support them financially, therefore allowing more and more people to express their skill.

Not that it justifies conning people. The crime part comes in because a painting is sold as something else of higher value. Do I understand that it is a crime? Yes. Do I still find the entire affair hilarious? Absolutely.

See, art fraud only affects the ultra-wealthy. Those who can afford to spend millions on a singular painting, only for it to be shut up in warehouses, or accessible exclusively to their inner circles. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for them: you’d think that they would be happy regardless, because they technically bought what they were asking for.

Sure, it’s an antique painting in a certain distinctive style — just without the years of moulding. Oh, and bonus: this newer piece would probably even last longer! So it’s no surprise that I usually come away from stories of art fraud appreciating the artists who manage to fool so many experts.

But that also raises the question: how can I argue that only art fraud is justifiable, and not other kinds of frauds? It is still a crime to falsely advertise a product. In fact, when I scale it down to my everyday realities, I tend to be rather hypocritical of the matter. Of course I would be affronted if I was sold, say, fake merchandise from a singer I admire, or fake shoes from a brand I respect.

I could go on forever, arguing for and against, but I will stop here, and leave the rest to you.

Art fraud isn’t limited to just paintings, no. Picture this: you, a rich capitalist, are looking for something to buy; preferably something that will add to your prestige. You hear of an interesting item on sale: the Taj Mahal. Perfect, you think, that sounds like a great addition to your collection. You meet the seller, a well dressed, intelligent man. A few hours and several negotiations later, you walk away satisfied.

The Taj Mahal is yours.

Except it’s not: it’s still very much the UNESCO heritage site it has been. There may be disagreements about whether it rightfully belongs to the Indian government, the Archaeological Survey of India, or the local wakf board, but, whoever the owner is, it’s certainly not you. Meanwhile, the businessman sits back in his chair, whipping off his fake beard. Another good day; another successful swindle.

This infamous conman, one of India’s most notorious in the 90s, was Natwarlal. Born Mithilesh Kumar Srivastava, and a lawyer by profession, Natwarlal eventually decided he was better off breaking the law, not defending it. His descent to crime began when he realised that he had a knack for forging signatures, a skill he put to use by stealing around Rs 1000 from his neighbour’s bank account. He soon moved on to forging cheques and release orders from the Railway Authorities, vanishing with the goods.

Eventually, he began to target the rich. Natwarlal supposedly sold the Taj Mahal, Rashrapathi Bhavan, Red Fort and the Parliament House of India (members included!) — not just once, but multiple times. He had over a hundred cases on him, and was sentenced to roughly the same number of years in prison. He however only served twenty, having escaped jail seven times.

Much of this story sounds like a Bollywood movie (it eventually became one too) and over time, his story only gained popularity. He portrayed himself as a Robin Hood of sorts, claiming that he robbed rich capitalists only, and distributed his money to the poor, often holding feasts for them. This, coupled with the non-violent nature of his crimes made him quite famous. Natwarlal passed away in 2009 (unless he was cremated in 1996, as his brother claims).

Fraudsters aside, though, there’s another completely different lens through which we can tackle the problem.

It is a popular pastime of many: drawing out scenes from one’s favourite book, movie or any form of media. I’m talking, of course, about fanart. And with the rise of bots on social media platforms, there is a new kind of art fraud that is on the rise: drawings on t-shirts.

There seems to be a growth of plagiarism on the internet, especially on social media platforms like Twitter. Enthusiastic fans comment that they would love to see their favourite artist’s work on a t-shirt. The artists notice, of course; but so do bots! Bots, who then plagiarise the art, put it on a shirt, and paste the link everywhere leading many to believe that it is official. It then becomes a nightmare for the artists, as they try to take it down.

Modern problems require modern solutions, and the art community worldwide is fighting back. Many post messages like ‘this website plagiarises artwork’ and request people to comment that they want it on a shirt. The bots pick it up, and voila! Everyone on the website can see that it is stolen art.

Michelangelo eventually began to sell original work. Perenyi now officially sells his work as “copies” of famous artists, so buyers know exactly what they’re getting. Beltracchi too, while serving his sentence, collaborated with a photographer friend and produced many (original) mixed-media pieces. Perhaps art fraud only helps to improve one’s character: after all one could say that they painted over a new leaf!

You’re reaching the end. Snipette is approaching its final weekly piece — but your literary journey doesn’t have to end! Regardless of whether you’re reading this on the date of it’s publication, or years later, our articles have been designed to stay relevant over time. Sign up for our mailing list, and with luck, when we’re ready, you will find something new and interesting in your inbox.

Buttersworthless? was originally published in Snipette on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What colour are zebra stripes, and why do they have them?

When I was younger, one of my favourite movies was Madagascar, with Alex, a lion, and Marty, a zebra, being my favourite duo. One particular scene from that movie is the reason behind this article you’re reading today — the one where Alex proclaims that Marty is black with white stripes because he has more black stripes than white stripes.

I was one of those self-proclaimed “nature experts” back then, and thought that zebras were white with black stripes. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found out that I did not, in fact, know it all — zebras were actually black with white stripes! It was quite hard to wrap my head around — after all, the stripes looked similar to how a tiger’s stripes look, and tigers are orange with black stripes. But this begs the question: why are they considered to have white stripes? And why do they have stripes in the first place?

The origin of the barcode horse’s markings is a pigment called melanin. Each hair on a zebra’s body grows out of a follicle filled with melanocyte cells that produce the pigment melanin, which adds colour to the skin and fur of most animals. This information, though useful in theory, isn’t exactly helpful on its own. For one, the stripes begin developing in the eighth month of the zebra’s embryonic development, so we can’t exactly look at a newborn zebra and declare whether it’s black with white stripes or vice versa, and for the other, we don’t know whether the melanin is deposited for black stripes or blocked for white stripes.

By default, the melanocytes are supposed to pump out melanin and create black fur. The amount of melanin produced by these melanocytes is decided by paracrine signalling, that is, one melanocyte secretes chemicals which can only be detected by the melanocytes near it. A single signal from a neighbouring cell therefore causes some cells to not produce melanin. To put it in another way, if you were to factory reset a zebra so that all cells followed the default settings, it would be black. Even more compelling evidence is the fact that if you shaved the animal, you’d essentially be left with a black donkey with the temperament of a cat.

Of course, if you don’t want to spend ages speaking about melanin and pigment cells to explain to someone that zebras have white stripes, you could always just show them a picture of Tira the spotted zebra foal.

In a normal animal, the pigment cells produce the appropriate quantity of the enzyme tyrosinase, which is required for the synthesis of melanin. In some rare cases, though, there is either not enough or too much tyrosinase. These lead to conditions such as albinism, where there is no tyrosinase at all, leucism, where there isn’t enough, and pseudo-melanism and melanism, where there is too much. Take, for instance, the feline family — from black leopards and king cheetah to white tigers and albino cats, they have it all.

In felines, two genes, Taqpep and Ed3n, affect the pattern on their bodies. Taqpep majorly controls the pattern of the feline’s markings — think of it as a tattoo stencil. A single mutation in the Taqpep gene can result in a vastly different appearance, as is demonstrated by the striped body of a king cheetah or the weird stripes of one-third of Simlipal Tiger Reserve’s tiger population. Samples of cheetah skin reveal that the ink that is used to fill in the stencil is a direct consequence of Ed3n activity, with the gene being expressed more in regions of dark fur.

In the case of Tira, it may just be that his melanocytes have no idea where they are and produce a normal quantity of melanin through his body. Although it’s pretty to look at, it has a chance at reducing his life expectancy. After all, the zebra evolved to have stripes for a reason.

We know that the markings of leopards and tigers are a way for them to camouflage in their environment, and it is natural to say the same for the zebra. This is true in a way — the uniform direction of the stripes makes it harder for predators to target individual herd members. It can be compared to the bait balls small fish form when threatened by marine predators. Aside from predators, zebras face another threat: flies.

Biting flies can be pretty dangerous for any equid. My own gelding is allergic to fly bites and occasionally breaks out into hives because of them. Other than causing allergic reactions, insects such as horseflies and tsetse flies in the African plains can cause diseases like equine influenza and sleeping sickness, which have the potential to kill them, and the thin hair of the zebra’s coat isn’t enough to defend against them, and they can’t exactly kick or bite at flies — but here’s where stripes come in again.

Striped surfaces are able to disorient flies — when they approach a striped surface for a landing, they aren’t able to decelerate as they do when landing on a non-striped surface and end up bouncing off. Although we don’t know much about how flies see the world, there are a couple of theories as to what happens. One theory suggests that the stripes act like an optical illusion, while another suggests that the fly views the striped surface as “a series of thin black objects.” Whatever the case may be, one thing is for certain — the barcode horses don’t have to fear flies.

Other than fly protection and predator confusion, zebra stripes also are unique enough that the pattern is used to fingerprint individuals — both by researchers and by other zebras. A mother zebra will imprint on her foal with their striping patterns, vocalisations and scents, while head stallions use the more aggressive aesthetic to defend their territory from other zebras and predators.

Although zebras look like horses and donkeys, you never really see people riding zebras or using them as beasts of burden. Zebras are very temperamental and unpredictable, and the same can be said for any zebra hybrid. It takes a lot of work to get one to trust you, and even if you do succeed, you may have to accept that you’ll never be able to ride it — it simply will not allow anyone to get on its back. Zebras are wild animals, and all we can and should do is admire them from afar.

Something new to think about, every week? If you liked this article, consider signing up for our weekly newsletter! No listicles or links; just one new thought-provoking piece to sink your mind into. Grab it for yourself today.

White on Black was originally published in Snipette on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear readers,

Once upon a time, two friends decided to take a round on what seemed like a fun little ride. They didn’t know it was a rollercoaster, and they certainly didn’t realise quite how long it would turn out to be. Along the way, they were joined by new friends from far and wide. Together, they weathered every swooping low and heart-stopping high. But as with all good things, the ride had to come to an end — with a somewhat sudden jolt, as rollercoasters tend to.

Snipette completes 6 years today, and the ride has been nothing if not exhilarating! However, we’ve unfortunately had to make the hard decision to cease our operations here. Come July, Snipette will stop accepting and publishing new articles (we’ll continue with our regular schedule till then).

The reason is that much of our team will be starting college this August, and we understand firsthand just how much schedules and latitudes will change. Working on Snipette might be fun, but it’s also a great deal of work for everyone involved, too. Ultimately, this has always been something we do for love, and we never want to see it become a chore.

By the time you read this, we will have published 340 articles in all, one every single week without fail since 2017. These will still be around, lingering in our little corner of the internet waiting to be found. It’s in the nature of Snipette articles that they stay relevant over time, so we hope their impact on people’s thoughts and ideas doesn’t fade. The community we’ve built, over a shared love for writing and exploring the world in new and interesting ways, will remain forever.

In a way, then, it wasn’t just a rollercoaster. We built a little world along the way, tangible and very real. And now, our work is complete.

Before we close, we’d like to take a moment and look back at what we’ve achieved.

In the past seven years, we worked with over 82 authors, not counting the Snipette staff themselves. We have published 340 posts in six years, never missing a beat (save for one time when we miscoordinated timezones with an author, and had to put out a backup piece the next day instead).

Come July, we’d have brought out 14 issues of our print version. Each quarter, the machine we assembled churned out and distributed copies of over dozen different stories across the world. That’s across 14 different timezones from every continent on this planet (with the unfortunate exception of Antarctica).

We managed to run an operation that financially sustained itself, as well as gathered surplus funds to take on new and exciting projects. We hosted two webinars and a fundraising event. For a publication that started as a blog between two teenagers, we’ve certainly come a long way.

And we couldn’t have done it without you! To the people who have supported us, emotionally and financially, we owe you all a very sincere thank you. Without you all, we doubt that Snipette would have made it this far. Although the publication will no longer be continuing, we hope that it stays in your heart forever.

We would be amiss if, now that our world is complete, we didn’t say a bit about its future.

To all our readers, old and new: while we won’t be putting out new content, all the existing articles will remain online. We’re working on redesigning the website to make it more archival-friendly, and we’ve also allocated funds to keep it up and running for the next 15 years. (If you got yourself a print version, good for you — that will last practically forever). We’re also storing physical backups of raw print and artwork files, in case they become useful in future, and are happy to note that the Internet Archive has already indexed a lot of our pages.

To our authors, with whom we’ve had not just interesting ideas but also wonderful conversations: we may not be editing Snipette, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t editing! If you have a new draft you want looked over, or a new idea to explore, feel free to hit us up — we’d be happy to hear from you!

To those who have pending payments or transactions with us: You can expect to receive an email from us soon. If you have an ongoing subscription, it will continue till the next issue of Analog; after that, your subscription will be closed and we’ll send you a refund on whatever’s left. Digital subscriptions which just expired will be extended by 3 months so they can receive the last issue as well! As for crowdfunders: since we won’t be able to grow Snipette as planned, it doesn’t make sense for us to hold on to the money, so we will be offering all of you a full refund.

Last but not the least, to those of you who’ve subscribed to our email list, receiving every article as soon as it’s published: Of course, you won’t be getting those any more. But if you’re a subscriber or hesitating on filling the “subscribe” box, we’d love for you to keep your email in there.

We don’t know what will happen or what the future looks like, but it would be nice to keep some connection going. Stay subscribed and, perhaps, one day, you’ll find something interesting in your inbox.

Making all things new,
Manasa, Dee, Anjali, Rhea, Badri, Nia, Diya, neel, and Sabyasachi
The Snipette Team

🔮 And On the Seventh Year, We Rested was originally published in Snipette on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Language can influence the way you think. But do robots think?

Back in 2021, before ChatGPT was a thing, the Internet was flooded with the coloured yellow and green squares of a much simpler online phenomenon: Wordle.

Wordle’s appeal lay in its simplicity. You have to guess a five-letter word. Correct letters turn green; letters that are correct but in the wrong place turn yellow. And, that’s basically it!

As someone who writes software, I found the same minimalist aesthetic in the website’s code as well. No consultation with the home server or messages bounding through cyberspace to another country and back: rather, once I’d loaded the page, I could switch off the Internet entirely and the game would continue uninterrupted all the way till October 2027 when the preloaded games ran out. (Some people did this when Wordle was bought over by the New York Times: they wanted to stay with the original version).

ChatGPT screenshots are more eerie, philosophical, funny, and intense than the simple Wordle grids people used to share — but both of them are related to language. And, perhaps surprisingly, they are both based on very simple rules.

When my colleague Akil was in 4th grade, I happened to overhear a session of her library class. The lesson was related to classifying books, and while the librarian was explaining the intricacies of a simplified Dewey Decimal System to the rest of the class, Akil was considering the book that she was supposed to classify: Fundamentals of Trigonometry.

“I think it should go under 400 Language,” she finally decided, because “It has so many words: angle; quadrant; radius…”

I later realised that Akil wasn’t quite far from the truth. Mathematics is all about creating words (and symbols, rules, and definitions) to describe aspects of the world; aspects like “seven” and “subtract” which would not be so obvious otherwise. As an extreme example, numerophile Alex Bellos describes a group of people called the Munduruku who don’t have numbers in their vocabulary. This means they have to (for example) name each member of the family to decide if they’ve got enough fish for dinner. There is, to them, literally no such thing as “seven”.

What about concepts that are non-mathematical? The now-discredited but still interesting theory of “linguistic determinism” went on to say that our very thoughts were defined by what our native language is. It’s also known as the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”, which is a bit of a misnomer because Sapir and Whorf never co-authored a paper about it, and while they did have similar opinions, they didn’t explicitly state them.

“What is a shelter kind of thing that is more like a door but less like a bench?” Snipette co-founder Manasa and I were trying to crack Semantle, a game inspired by Wordle in nothing but name.

Semantle is the “hot or cold” game in lingospace. You guess a word, and it gives you a score for how “close” it is to the target word. So if the target word is “wind”, then “air” would be a lot closer than “grass” (but so would “clockwork”). We always begin with a scattershot approach, throwing words (fancy words, since we’re Snipette editors) into the air until something scores high. Until then, we end up clutching at straws if a word like “door” is a few percentage points warmer than a word like “bench”.

Getting a lead is when the excitement starts. We look back at previous words trying to find patterns, and start using phrases like “in the same direction, but more” which, if you’ve played Semantle once, you’ll be able to immediately relate to. Words stop taking discrete meanings and start unfolding like a landscape which we know exists but can only sometimes catch glimpses of. One of the first team games we played at Snipette had us go down “fertiliser”, “forest”, “ecology”, and “farming” to finally arrive at “cooperation” — a very generic word, to which there are so many ways to arrive, but we somehow took a very agricultural route to get there!

How does Semantle decide how “close” one word is to another? It’s based on a mathematical model of the English language; the same kind that neural network engines use.

Each word is represented by a multidimensional vector, and, to find out how close two words are, you just measure the distance between the two vectors. (I can imagine “cooperation” sitting in the middle, with “ecology” and “farming” marching off to one side while other routes like “international” or “competition” branch out in other directions).

This adds an interesting dimension to the game. Not only am I exploring the landscape of words and meanings that I know in my head; I’m also peeking into the computations of a machine-learning model. The experience feels very cybernetic.

The classic example of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — or, shall I say, linguistic determinism — is the oft-repeated story about the Inuit having numerous words for “snow”. This means Inuit speakers are able to make out the subtle differences between all these kinds of snow, whereas English speakers can’t. Their language is restricting the way they think.

From the other end, languages like Himba don’t distinguish between “blue” and “green” (which would incidentally resolve a long-standing debate in my family about the colour of the bathroom bucket). This means a Himba speaker would see both the colours as equivalent, just like the ancient Romans did when they described the sky as “green”.

Modern linguists point out the flaws in these arguments. English speakers may not have different words for snow, but they can identify different kinds when the context demands; they just use adjectives like “hard-packed snow” instead of discrete words. Meanwhile, experiments have shown that people can distinguish between shades even if they don’t have different words for them. Looking back, this makes a lot of sense: Manasa grew up with an artist for a father, so she can immediately identify a maroon or a burgundy; I can’t name them but I can still tell they’re not the same kind of red-brown.

That said, language can certainly influence the way you think — what is known as linguistic relativity. One experiment involved people code-switching to either German or English while watching a video, and the “German thinkers” were able to recall more details — evidently because, while people use English phrases like “I was walking”, German speakers tend to also specify the goal of the action, such as where they were walking. (A more relatable example could be how, once you know the name for a feeling or ailment, you feel much better about it).

People talk about ChatGPT being “programmed to think” or “programmed to say” a certain thing. This kind of description would make sense for older chatbots, which had long, complex instructions like “If the message says ‘hi’ or ‘hello’, respond with ‘hi’, and check for the person’s name which may come in any of the following formats: …”

That’s not at all how ChatGPT does things. What ChatGPT responds with is processed and filtered and censored later, but at its heart is something called a Large Language Model. It runs on the same principle as the autosuggest on your phone: look at what’s come before, and, through statistics, predict what word is to come next.

The “through statistics” part includes going through multi-trillion-paragraph datasets, which is where the “Large” part of Large Language Model comes from. (Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s cheap or easy to arrive at!). All the words from here are collected in ‘word vectors’, similar to how they’re saved in Semantle. But in the process, Large Language Models also save another dataset that says which vectors are likely to follow one another. All this is tuned automatically, adjusting the numbers to fit the statistics, so there’s no specific instruction saying that “this word is seen to follow this word” — just a set of numbers that turned out to work best.

The beauty lies in the fact that there’s nothing specific to program. It could be anything — English, Korean, or even musical notes — as long as it’s “something which follows from something that came before”.

Given how even the three-rule game of Wordle has given rise to complex analyses and strategies to crack the code, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised; perhaps the lesson here is that even simple rules can give rise to complex results. To add a bit of creativity, ChatGPT doesn’t merely pick the “most likely” word; instead, it rolls a dice and picks perhaps the second or fifth option, so that it can end up with something new and unpredictable each time.

There are many ways to process a language. Semantle forces you to consider a word and think of its context and meaning, whereas Wordle breaks that word down into its atoms, the alphabets. Wordiply, released by the Guardian to get in on the game, makes you focus on sequences of letters rather than single ones: given a word, you need to find a larger word that contains it in the same way that “caterpillar” contains the word “ate”.

Somewhere in the midst of this lies ChatGPT’s skill, which is also very singular: “Find the next word” is its primary mandate.

And yet, the conversations with ChatGPT and its ilk are eerily intelligible. What you get is not just “a right answer”, but something complex with information, creativity, and even a tune-able personality. Prompted effectively, it can already write essays, draft emails, and pass graduate-level exams in some departments. It can also speak very confidently on various topics, (although what it says, while professional-sounding, may not be actually true).

ChatGPT is in an early version, and we can only expect its responses to get better. Depending on whom you ask, it’s an exciting, scary, or uncertain future — but what I’m interested in are the philosophical implications, because in some sense this turns linguistic relativity on its head. Forget measuring language’s influence on the thought process, and instead witness this:

What happens when you get a “thought process” that is created purely out of language?

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Purely out of Language was originally published in Snipette on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fixing machines is easy; fixing living creatures is hard. Or is it the other way round?

In 2023, a rocket blasted off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Not an unusual sight in a world where many private companies are moving to space, but this particular rocket was 85% 3D-printed.

3D-printing is a relatively new technology, but it’s already being used in a variety of applications. The basic idea is that you take a digital design, and print it out, layer by layer, into a precisely defined shape.

While a full rocket may be an overkill, 3D-printing is great for space missions. If you thought airport luggage limits were a pain, the problem is even more crucial in spaceflight. That aside, 3D-printed parts can be handy at home and in industrial setups too. And while most 3D printing is made using plastics, people are trying to use other material as well — such as the stuff that makes up your body.

While 3D printing is new, repairing people is an idea that’s been going around for a while.

In 1997, the world was taken aback by a weird scientific image. A white mouse sits wrinkled on a large, white-gloved hand, its red eyes staring nowhere. And, growing out of its back, there is the unmistakable shape of a human ear.

This was no artist’s impression or simulation, but the results of an actual scientific experiment.

In the twentieth century, our world saw rapid technological advancement in animal tissue engineering. During this time, scientists attempted to grow human body parts externally and replace them like broken machine parts. If lizards can grow back their tails and crocodiles can grow back their teeth, then why couldn’t humans do the same for parts of their bodies?

Despite the fact that these scientific hypotheses had been argued for decades, no one had expected it to happen.

So when the image of the “mouse with a ear on its back” came out, there were mixed reactions. Some were thrilled at the progress of science. Others, though, were terrified about the safety and ethical implications of such an experiment, and the mouse soon triggered a backlash of protests against tissue and genetic engineering in the western world.

And this was before social media.

In 2007, Apple released the first iPhone, a device which was less like a phone and more like a computer in your pocket that also happened to make phone calls.

Today, iPhones and their generic equivalents, smartphones, are practically indispensable. Ever since I got mine before joining college, it’s been my constant companion to keep in touch with people and stay updated on what’s I can’t image life without it!

This is an example of how technology can change the human landscape within the span of a generation. Inevitably, it shakes up the world which we’re used to, which is why any new technology is greeted with apprehension as well as excitement.

But while electronics can change things, biology is a whole different ballgame. To understand where the protests were coming from, let’s take a brief dive into history — because, as Adolf Hitler once said, “the man who has no sense of history is like a man who has no eyes or ears.”

In 1933, the country of Germany saw a new leader come to power. Reeling under a loss in war and economic crises, people saw Adolf Hitler as someone who would make their country great again.

One of Hitler’s philosophies was the use eugenics: the idea that some people (such as Hitler’s community, of course) are genetically superior to others. Using this idea, he began to ruthlessly single out some communities such as the Jews, eventually killing or conducting experiments on them.

This dark history makes anything to do with genetics a sensitive topic. Combine it with the fact that we’re tampering with complex systems we don’t fully understand: the intricacy of Nature, or God’s creation, depending on your inclination. It’s the equivalent of opening up your computer and plugging in wires when you’re not quite sure what you’re doing.

In all this discussion, though, it’s easy to miss the fact that the mouse itself was not genetically modified. It was modified, yes, but not genetically.

In 1972, MIT engineer Bob Langer and Harvard surgeons Joseph and Charles Vacanti began experimenting with strategies to produce human body parts in the lab — starting with an ear.

Why an ear? Even though plastic surgery advanced significantly in the latter half of the twentieth century, the human ear remained the most difficult portion of the body to reconstruct, mainly because of the cartilage that needs to support it from inside. Although cartilage could be manufactured, making it out of human tissue was extremely difficult — which meant that many people who had accidents involving their ears would have to live with a shapeless ear or no ear for the rest of their lives.

To better understand how to do this, the three scientists implanted the shape of a human ear in the back of a mouse. This wasn’t working with genetic code; it was the biological equivalent of attaching on a new part to an existing machine.

The mouse used in this experiment was referred to as a “Nude Mouse”, since it lacked hair due to a random mutation. This same mutation also compromised the mouse’s immune system — which is what made this experiment possible.

It started with a synthetic ear cartilage, made to mimic that of a three-year-old child. This cartilage was surgically implanted on the back of the mouse. Then, it was injected with live stem cells: a special variety of cell that has the potential to grow into any kind of cell depending on the situation. Normally, such a procedure would trigger the mouse’s immune system to combat the foreign tissue — eventually causing it to die. But in this case, due to the mutation, the mouse had none.

Within 12 weeks, the stem cells formed an actual cartilage in the shape of a human year, and the synthetic part gradually disintegrated over time. In a way, the ear developed from a three-year-old version to a full-fledged adult!

Today, things are moving in a new direction. Just like printers use inks and 3D printers use filaments, bioprinting is a technique for creating cellular structures using ‘bioinks’.

These biomaterials, which can include stem cells are applied layer by layer to ‘print out’ skin, tissue, or even an organ. Human livers, kidneys, and hearts are being bioprinted at laboratories and research institutes. The goal is to make them transplantable as well as to reduce the number of organ donations.

As I excitedly read through all the new developments, my phone battery emits a warning. Newer phones have all their parts fused together, which means I can’t replace my battery without buying a new phone — which, when I think about it, is a common trend in today’s digital technology. Earlier gadgets were repairable anyway, but nowadays we’ve got to use 3D printing to make them so.

Perhaps technology is becoming more complex, in the same way that biology always was?

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Mouse with a Human Ear was originally published in Snipette on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

AI can work wonders with human language. Can it also help us talk to whales?

You learnt to imitate the people around you when you were three months old. At twelve months, you managed to attach words to meanings. As you grew older, you become increasingly conversant in language, being able to gossip and exchange information to your heart’s content.

Humans are intrinsically social beings. For us, communication is key, be it with other humans, animals, or even extraterrestrials! The question of whether we are the only species with big ideas out there has been around for years.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI project sets out to search for intelligence in outer space. Beginning as a small project within NASA, today, the organization is one of the only organizations in America looking for signs of life in the universe.

But what about life on Earth? Do any non-human species on Earth brim with ideas that we only fail to identify?

To answer that, we must first ask: what sets human communication apart from animal communication?

The American linguist and anthropologist, Charles Hockett has an answer. He identifies several ‘design features’ of human languages, which makes our communication unique. We associate human sounds with meanings. We talk of things that do not exist, of the past and the future. We create an infinite number of sentences. We can lie. We can deceive. We use language to talk about, well, language!

To what extent can animals do this, though?

Features animals and humans share in common, according to Hockett, are things such as our communication being mostly audio based (speaking and hearing), being able to identify which direction sound is reaching us from, and that our speech is temporary. Sound waves disappear once someone stops speaking.

However, humans have additional qualities that sets us apart from animals — we have rigid structures to our languages, and our actions are generally made to convey a meaning. They do not serve any primary biological function. In contrast to this, a dog panting to cool down is a biological function first, and a message second. Animals also cannot use language to describe other languages.

That’s not to say that animals do not have well established communication systems. Studies show that bats make sounds and argue over food, distinguish between genders and call each other by names. Parrots, like Alex — a famous subject of a thirty year experiment — and bonobos, like Kanzi, can learn and associate words with objects. Dolphins can understand differences in word order (who jumps over whom, for example). Bees communicate through body movements and sounds.

We do not, however, fully understand the extent to which animals communicate or the entire content of their language. Some progress is on the way. Bee researchers are working to understand bee communication and to create a robotic bee called RoboBee to trick bees into thinking that the robot is a real bee. This robot hasn’t been very successful so far.

A project called CETI — Cetacean Translation Initiative — was initiated to help scientists study and understand the language of sperm whales.

You may ask, why whales?

Whales belong to the animal family of Cetaceans (which also includes dolphins). Sperm whales have larger brains than humans. In fact, sperm whale brains are larger than all animals on Earth! Humans and sperm whale brains both have ‘spindle neurons’, which enable our reasoning, memory and communication skills. Whales are also emotionally intelligent. They too feel grief and empathy.

Whales have complex communication systems. They are social animals like us and live in groups, which are lead by female whales. They also bring up the young whales for a prolonged period like humans. Different groups of whales show different behaviours and have language dialects — much like humans and different cultures. They can make sounds, vary them and copy each other. Furthermore, because they live in water, they rely less on smell and sight and more on sound.

Communicating in mountainous regions is not easy, which is why humans have come up with a solution that broadcasts language effectively: whistling. The mountain shepherds of northern Turkey communicate through whistles that can carry dozens of times farther than ordinary speech.

Instead of whistles, whales talk to each other using short bursts of clicks called codas. Lasting two seconds long, these bursts of 2 to 40 clicks are used to communicate while catching prey and for moving around. Codas can be specific to a group, and each group of whales has about twenty different codas.

Using these codas, whales can talk to each other over distances of metres to kilometres. Not surprisingly, they produce more codas when they socialise.

Researchers have already been collecting recordings of these codas, but we don’t know what they mean or how they work. Do they have a grammar, and can they be combined to produce whale sentences?

One usually doesn’t think of other animals as using grammar. We think of simple meanings, such as a growl indicating aggression or a yelp of pain, but nothing as nuanced as the Shakespearean “They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps”. But is there a reason to think that?

Whistled Turkish isn’t quite a new language, but more like a way to encode the vowels and consonants into whistled notes. That means it certainly has a grammar — because it’s the same grammar as spoken Turkish itself. And it’s not just Turkish: almost any language can be converted to a whistled language — and it has been, in numerous densely vegetated or ruggedly terrained regions around the world.

Sign languages, in their silence, have their own grammar too; a grammar which is encoded not in words and punctuation but in signs and gestures. That’s right: it’s not just pointing or miming; this is a context where the way you move your wrist may be considered incorrect or ungrammatical.

As you can see, there’s no rule that says grammar has to come from human speech. If whales are capable of communication, there’s nothing preventing them from developing their own grammar as well.

And consider this: young whales, known as calves, can take at least two years to produce recognisable codas. That’s quite a bit longer than you, the human child, took to start uttering your first words.

To understand the whale’s language, we need to find answer to three questions. What are their basic sounds? Do whales use grammar? And lastly, do these emitted sounds mean something?

To set about answering these questions, researchers are planning to, naturally, use the buzzword of the day: Artificial Intelligence.

The recent successes of machine-learning methods and Natural Language Processing — or NLP — in understanding human communication means that AI is at the forefront of analysing whale sounds. Today’s NLP tools can segment speech into basic sounds and even learn the underlying grammar in sentences. Recent breakthroughs in AI allow researchers to translate between two unknown human languages without needing a mapping between the two languages or a “Rosetta Stone”.

Project CETI will build on these discoveries to provide a dictionary of the whale’s language. Using AI, the team will listen to and translate the communication of these majestic creatures and perhaps even talk back.

Existing machine learning methods are already capable of automatically detecting codas, and classifying codas into clans and individuals. Recent advances in unsupervised learning can help understand whale language, despite having no prior knowledge of where the whale sound begins and ends for it to be called a meaningful unit of communication.

However, a lot more data is needed. A significant reason for the success of human language models is that plenty of human language data is available. Models such as GPT-3, the basis of the famous ChatGPT, were trained on over 10¹⁰ data points — that’s 10 followed by ten zeros.

CETI scientists plan on using multiple technologies available to locate and record groups of sperm whales.

One such technology is buoyed arrays with sensors every several hundred meters from the surface to the depth at which sperm whales hunt, which is approximately 1200 metres.

They also plan to attach recording devices to whales to identify who’s talking to whom. Aquatic drones will allow taking audio and video recordings from multiple animals simultaneously to observe behaviours and communications within a group of whales near the surface. Aerial drones will help monitor whale populations. They also want to take videos of whales’ behaviour.

The next step would be to build the whole pipeline of collecting data, storing data, processing data and performing machine learning algorithms on said data to detect and classify whale codas.

Operation “talk to whales” is in full swing, and sperm whales will no doubt notice the intrusion. One can’t help wonder what they’ll be thinking about all this, and whether we’d be able to ask them about it one day.

Perhaps they’ll coda each other, discussing and pondering about the new devices that humans are sending in, and wondering if, for all the effort spent on searching for extraterrestrial life forms, there was intelligent life waiting for them just a step away from their ocean.

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WhaleGPT was originally published in Snipette on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.