IT’S TIME FOR A SEASONAL MESSAGE AND GIFT …

… and here it comes:

What a year it has been.  Even so, reading this message will reassure you that, in one sense at least, everything is as usual: the donation has been made to charity instead of sending cards, and I am attaching your annual gift to this post.  Here it is, right in the middle, between the dividers: – << >> –

(Newcomers may see a complete set of Seasonal Messages by filtering “gift” on the News/Blog page. However, this year’s gift is, as you will have discovered, rather more difficult to see, though it is there.)

Over several years I have endeavoured to choose eco-friendly and welcome gifts, unusual yet everyday items which would come in handy at just the right moment.  Recently I started my annual task of thinking this through for 2024.

I did consider gifting you a typo, but such things are generally not very useful unless they happen by chance to be apposite or amusing.  In any case, to offer you something which various machines already tend to offer us regularly seemed a trifle unfiendly.

After further thought, I devised an experiment.  Up until now my opinion of A.I. has been somewhat negative.  While recognising the wonderful potential of the tool, I am concerned primarily in two areas.  Firstly, given all that A.I. can do is scour the fruits of past human creativity and predict statistically what may be derived from it, I wonder how it helps us move forward?  (This is, of course, open to the challenge that all human creativity works in the same way, but an email message is not the place for me to refute this.)  And, secondly, I worry that, given the absence of any sense of honesty, benevolence or integrity in the engine itself, what is to stop the spread of highly credible misinformation?

Anyway, enough of speculation and forward with empirical methodology.  I typed into CHAT GPT the following request: “Add a relevant item to this list please.”  I followed this with a list of all the gifts I have sent over the past dozen or so years:

2013 HIGGS BOSON; 2014 DOT FOR MICRO-ZOO; 2015 SPACE; 2016 DOT FOR A SPECIFIC POINT OF VIEW; 2017 DOT FOR A FULL STOP; 2018 SILENCE; 2019 THE PRESENT; 2020 ELLIPSIS; 2021 APOSTROPHE; 2022 2x; 2023 &.

To be honest my expectations regarding the machine’s response, though interested, were not high.  But this is what the programme came up with:

“Here’s a relevant addition to your intriguing list: ZERO POINT ENERGY.  It aligns with the abstract, scientific, and conceptual nature of the items you’ve included, blending ideas of physics, absence, and potential.”

I have to admit liking the terminology very much, but the physics was beyond me.  So I googled ZPE (the acronym is, in fact, used) and found that:

Zero-Point Energy is the lowest possible energy a quantum mechanical system may have.

I now needed, of course, to check that such a gift would fulfil the requirements I have set from the beginning.  Ten years ago I summed those up as an object “which can be delivered electronically as a self-contained gift, and which nonetheless (would be) welcomed as both luxurious and necessary – the proper defining qualities of a good present.”

Were these criteria being properly applied here?  The authorities I consulted assured me that Zero-Point Energy has to be higher than zero for anything even to exist.  Extracted, they say, ZPE indeed offers a potentially limitless and ubiquitous source of energy.  A welcome gift indeed.  However, they did add: if one can only find the means to harness it.

It seems that this energy, though higher than zero, is so small that to pull it out of a system can only be done by looking for it elsewhere in the universe.  (This is ‘entanglement’, which Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”.)  You will not, in fact, be able to access the energy gifted you from this post.  And this means that the gift fails the requirements.

However, all is not lost.  In order to receive your gift, you will only need to apply to another person who visits this site; they will happily let you have their unit of ZPE in exchange for yours.  Human Intelligence to the fore.

As ever, I send you all the very best of wishes and much love.  May 2025 be a year after which we can say “what a year this has been” in a rather happier tone of voice.