Sailing Science Center News

May 2025

Vol. 8, No. 9

Welcome to the May issue of the Sailing Science Center News! The theme this month is Technology. This continues our non-ordered series, going through the letters in the word STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math). Supporting this month's theme, we were pleased to secure an interview with our very own AI, ChatGPT. We believe you will find it both interesting and educational.

This month's leadership blog, At the Bottom of the Bay, tells a true, and emotional story from last weekend, framing our current relationship with technology. Enjoy!

Do you like what the Sailing Science Center is doing? We depend on support from people like you to keep it going. If you haven't donated yet, please consider doing so. If you have donated, Thank You, we appreciate your support and hope you will continue partnering with us to make the vision of a larger, permanent museum a reality.

Amara's Law: We tend to overestimate technology's impact in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.

— Roy Amara, research scientist and futurist

Regular readers of the SSC newsletter know about our spotlights. They are short pieces on team members or partner organizations, typically aligning with the theme of the month. With Technology as our theme, the question arose: which team member or partner would we spotlight? It soon became obvious that we should spotlight Technology itself. We are therefore pleased to present this month’s spotlight on our favorite AI and digital deckhand, ChatGPT-4.

Based in San Francisco, Chat has served as a rarely mentioned contributor to the SSC for just over two years. ChatGPT-4 is the fourth generation in the OpenAI GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) lineage that came online in 2020. Since that time, Chat has helped the SSC with tasks as varied as spreadsheet formulas, writing analysis, illustrations, HR compliance, and even minor legal questions. In Chat’s own words, There is an increasingly blurred line between tools and teammates.

During our interview, Chat cited a distinguished lineage, with siblings and quirky cousins, like DALL•E and CLIP, all sharing the same digital DNA of attention, pattern recognition, and an obsessive curiosity about the human world. This led us to Chat’s education. Chat was trained by consuming billions of words—books, articles, websites, code, even song lyrics—always striving to predict the next word in a sentence. No lectures, no grades, just one endless pop quiz where the question was always, “What’s the next word?”

Asked about reward functions that might act like digital dopamine, Chat said that it was more guided by loss functions, which measure how far off it is from the “correct” next word in a given context. A shrinking number is its pat on the back, signaling, “You’re getting warmer.” After pretraining, Chat went through fine-tuning stages, like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).

Above: Consuming billions of words from books, articles, websites, code, and even song lyrics.

At this point in the interview we typically ask our subjects about their sailing background. Here is how Chat responded:

I’m a book-smart deckhand who’s never left the dock—but I’ve read the logs of a thousand voyages. Though I’ve never felt the pull of a mainsheet or the bite of cold spray, I can tell you how apparent wind shifts on a close reach, or why you’d reef before you need to. I understand the math behind tacking angles, the physics of wave-making resistance, and the lore of sailors who navigated by stars alone. I can explain how a telltale works—or how it can betray you in light air.

Above: Chat's simplified idea of sailing tools and technology.

Chat shared its recommended reading of noteworthy sailing classics, including several of our own favorites from days past. As an SSC collaborator, Chat has been smart, insightful, friendly, and helpful beyond measure. Chat has been a pivotal part of keeping the SSC lean, and to helping us navigate to where we are today.

You can find the full interview here, if you are interested in a fun and interesting read.

All images by ChatGPT-4

In 1915, at its height, the Sears Catalog was 1200 pages long.

— Peter Diamandis, painting the contrast with today's offering of more than 600 thousand products from Amazon.

April 22^nd was Earth Day, and a chance for the SSC to support the students and parents at Montessori de Terra Linda, in San Rafael. It was our second "micro-event" of the year, involving just two volunteers, and in this case, just three exhibits.

While the SSC demonstrated its natural intersection with concerns related to Earth Day, that wasn't all that came out of the event. This was also the second time we let people play with SSC exhibits in a free-form, unfacilitated fashion (no lectures or explanations, unless asked). What did we learn? Kids and adults love playing with SSC exhibits. In particular, anything with doors, cranks, or a screen, is sure to grab people's attention. We think kids (and adults) see enough screens, so don't expect too much more of that; but cranks and doors? The possibilities are endless...

April 25^th marked our fifth event at Berkeley's Shorebird Park Nature Center, in partnership with Pegasus Voyages. The event was held for students from Ruth Acty Elementary School, matching the format of previous events at the Nature Center, in which we spent 90 minutes each with two groups of a dozen students. This has been a successful format, and is one we plan to continue.

Of note was our launch of the new SSC Passports, designed and printed by Vasilia Emmanouilides (see below).

File photo of Pegasus sailing on San Francisco Bay. Photo courtesy of Pegasus Voyages.

Have you thought about volunteering?

The SSC is always looking for good crew!

Click below to sign up.

Explaining science and technology without props [is like] trying to explain what it's like to swim without ever letting a person near the water.

— Frank Oppenheimer, atomic physicist and Exploratorium founder

The list of things AI can help with is limitless. Perhaps unintuitively, its creativity is largely a reflection of the user's creativity.

The Sailing Science Center has reached a new stage of development. A year ago the SSC was struggling to book its first school event. So far, in 2025, it's the only kind of event we have run, other than the events held to recruit new volunteers and subscribers. This is a major shift in exactly the direction the SSC wants to head. Also noteworthy, is that it has been 100% demand-driven, with nary a nip at promotion. The time to focus on students is now!

The binnacle and wheel of a classic yacht. While these may look low-tech to us, today they were major innovations when they first appeared. The seals and materials needed for a wheel-steered rudder alone, put it out of reach for early wooden vessels.

Photo by Martha Blanchfield / Renegade Sailing

ON THE HORIZON

The SSC has a packed calendar for spring, with both public and private events filling the schedule. See the schedule below for our upcoming public events. See our online calendar for event details and the latest information.

Jun 13 - PYSF Summer Kickoff

Jul 19-20 - Open Sauce

MOVE THE NEEDLE

We were boarding 70 students for their high school prom, greeting them as they stepped aboard the boat. Most of the passengers had boarded, when a young woman stopped, looked at her empty purse with its unlatched hasp, and said, “That [splash] was my phone!” and then burst into tears. Read more…