It’s very difficult, recently, to escape the flood of news stories about artificial intelligence, many of them created by the latest version of artificial intelligence. “AI” is an initialism now recognized by far too many people. When I say “latest version” of AI, artificial intelligence has been around by that name since the mid-1950s, and… Continue reading

Autumn has just begun in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s the most interesting season, for me at least, and it has its own feeling. It’s hard to put words to that feeling. Hart Crane, about a century ago, wrote Fear: The host, he says that all is wellAnd the fire-wood glow is bright;The food has a… Continue reading

I’ve noticed something over the past few years about the software I use at work. I’m referring to commercial stuff like Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, and the lot, “collaboration tools” like SharePoint, as well as more niche things that are more unique to the company I work for (which is a large enterprise). What I’ve… Continue reading

The American dream scape. A strange topology beneath the moon that our oddly faceless icons walked on, then abandoned, an issue suddenly as dead as the dust under their nasa boots. We Americans inhabit stories and myths, not reality. We’re fictional characters who believe ourselves to be real, but disbelieve the real world. We’re wraiths… Continue reading

When I was about three years old we lived in a little ranch house on a cul-de-sac. We were right at the end, and our driveway opened onto the round paved end of the street. There was no through or cross traffic, and I was allowed to ride my tricycle there. But it was down… Continue reading

April 2022 In an article in The Atlantic, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” Jonathan Haidt mentions James Madison’s recognition that democratic societies can suffer from “the turbulence and weakness of unruly passions.” Haidt points out that to create a “sustainable republic” is to “build in mechanisms to slow things down”… Continue reading

April 2022 The title is a quote from the Cate Le Bon song Pompeii. It’s from the album of the same name. Le Bon’s music is spare, simple, and yet far more evocative than it at first appears. It can be pretty difficult, for me, at least, to figure out what some of her work is really… Continue reading

May, 2022 Sometimes there’s a technology that captures our minds so much that it becomes a metaphor for practically everything. The universe — and the mind — seemed like an infinitely complex clockwork back in the days when the mechanisms inside clocks were new and fascinating. The “clockwork universe” showed up around the 1400s, and… Continue reading