The focus today for me was the brush. The Brother-In-Law got a very nice horsehair shop brush — he does really exceptional woodworking as a hobby — and I thought I’d use my own horsehair brush after an email from him saying well his shop brush works. My Vie-Long horsehair shaving brush also works quite well.

I wet the knot and let it soak while I showered, something unnecessary for badger or synthetics. The lather from Tallow + Steel’s Dark shaving soap was excellent, and I do like this fragrance, whose notes are listed (as you see) on the lid. The hidden notes are benzoin + peppermint. Don’t you just love the smell of benzoin in the morning? (movie reference). I don’t even know what it smells like, but I bet Google does. Let’s see…

Benzoin is a vanilla-like note that is frequently used in amber, vanilla, and oriental fragrances. Highly versatile, benzoin also complements citrus, woods and florals. An excellent fixative, it’s often used to increase the longevity of a fragrance.

Well, o-kay then. (Another movie reference.) Vanilla: no wonder I like this fragrance. BTW, Google knows a little too much about me (and you, no doubt): “vanilla” was already in boldface in the search result. I didn’t do that, Google did (apparently knowing how I favor vanilla in fragrances).

I’ve discussed before the rapidity of the evolution of memes (units of cultural inheritance — see chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene). Because memes reproduce (reproduction is through a person learning the meme) very quickly and because mutation (new memes) arise often and because natural selection (the use of meme by others) does occur, evolution is millions of time more rapid than the evolution of lifeforms. Examples are easy to find: Google knows more and more about us; AlphaGo Zero, starting with only the rules of Go and learning by trial and error through playing games against itself, learned enough Go in four days to defeat the program that defeated the human world Go champion. Memes are (in a sense) now directing their own evolution.

On a less dramatic level, we see the speed of meme evolution in how rapidly synthetic shaving brushes improved. Starting from a terrible state (synthetic brush knots made from nylon bristles better suited to whisk brooms — thick and stiff — for which they indeed were used), much finer and better nylon bristles emerged just over 5 years ago — see this post from December 2014. That brush was quickly superseded by Mühle with its synthetic-badger knots and the Plisson, which introduced a knot called “Plissoft” or “angel-hair,” and now simply “synthetic,” since it’s pretty much the standard, though this species has variety in coloring. There are also excellent synthetic knots with a different bristle texture (being slightly thicker), as in the Phoenix Artisan Green Ray (a synthetic horsehair, at least in coloring, but finer in texture) and Solar Flare.

The point is that in five years synthetic knots have gone from unacceptable through acceptable to (as of a couple of years ago) preferred by many. That‘s rapid evolution.

Another example: this morning I was watching a streaming movie on my computer and listening through my bluetooth headphones. Tom Cruise was talking (the movie is Oblivion, a good example of how science-fiction, once very niche, has gone mainstream), and suddenly a woman’s voice said, “The batteries are low. Please recharge them.”

Because I had been listening to Tom Cruise talking (i the movie), this unexpected voice, very like a person’s voice, seemed creepy — for an instant I had a “How did a person get inside the headphone?” moment, and it made me wonder: when did appliances and machines start talking to us and sounding like humans?

For quite a while airplanes have spoken to their pilots in a woman’s voice to warn of danger (“Pull up! Pull up!” when flying toward an obstacle), presumably because pilots were predominantly male and a female voice immediately attracted their attention. Canned evacuation announcements (in subway cars, for example) use male voices because experiments showed that male voices sounded more authoritative so people were more likely to heed the instructions.

Of course, these are canned announcements, not speech generated on the fly (as in a navigation system). Even so, getting natural-sounding speech in something like my headphones had to await microprocessors and enough compact RAM to store digital audio. So that would only have begun in the 1990s.

Constructed natural-sounding speech (text to voice) is getting better but still not fluent enough to sound totally human (though much better than the lurching, drunken-Swedish-accent sing-song speech computers once used. That mode of speech was the theme of an early Bob Newhart stand-up routine. At a time when layoffs due to automation were starting to occur, Newhart’s routine portrayed a machine being laid off by another machine, using the lurching machine-accented speech to deliver the usual layoff talk. (Clearly this was humor based on a prevailing anxiety.)

Now speech recognition has become excellent (cf. Alexa, Siri, and Dragon Speech Recognition (Windows only)). Indeed, I normally dictate text messages on my phone — much more convenient than using the phone’s tiny keyboard. (I use an iPhone 5S, not one of the larger models.) I do wish Apple would use — or at least offer as an app — the Fitaly keyboard on the iPhone. I used the Fitaly layout on a Palm Pilot for a few years, and it was excellent.)

With speech recognition already pretty good and speech production improving, I would expect conversational speech (the Turing test, in effect) to be common within this decade, particularly in specific contexts: for example, legal work (there go paralegals, replaced by automation).

Automation continues to gobble up jobs, thanks again to the rapidity of meme evolution. As I noted in an earlier post Tesla plans to roll out robotaxis this year in a big way. The pace of change in some areas is moving faster, even as we lose ground in others. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

That’s the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859, referring to the French Revolution a century before that — to a time that now is more than 250 years ago. Memes evolve quickly; the human situation apparently does not.

The Yaqi razor did a very fine job. The handle is quite good, the head is an Edwin Jagger clone. And a splash of Dark aftershave finished the job and will provide olfactory pleasure through the day.