One of the early stories, written while I was still in college, about a year after I began submitting stories, was titled “The Guardian Angel Project.” It was a fantasy about a grown up (me?) going back to middle school and helping out the younger version of myself during those tough times. I never sold…
I do some of my best thinking in the shower. In last night’s shower, I was thinking about artificial intelligence. A.I. systems have a come a long way since folks like Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, and others first begin thinking about them. Many systems today seem to provide at least the illusion of passing the…
Over the years, I’ve seen a new kind of style develop in online writing. Especially in abbreviated writing like what you find in tweets, Facebook posts, and text messages, I am seeing more and more random capital letters. Sentences will contain randomly capitalized words right in the Middle of the sentence. For a long time,…
On Saturday, I obtained my 1,000th audio book from Audible. It was Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe. On the one hand, for someone who once wrote here that audio books were not his thing, this is pretty remarkable. On the other hand, as a bibliophile, this is just an example of catching up. I picked…
As we passed the year-mark for the pandemic, I went back to my journals from early 2020 to see if I could find when I first mentioned the coronavirus. As best as I can tell, it was on February 24, 2020 when I mentioned, at the very end of that day’s entry: “Stock market down…
Why is it that we get so excited when we see wildlife? Our house backs up to a local park and the park is full of wildlife. Every now and then, some of that wildlife makes its way into our yard. A few months ago I noted that the security light in front of the…
Much of the TV I watch these days is through osmosis. While I am reading, Kelly will be watching something and some of what she watches seeps through. Here are some things that annoy me about TV shows today: When the stars of a medical drama become patients in the hospital they work in. When…
Entropy increases, despite everything. I can attest to that and I don’t need basic physics or the laws of quantum mechanics to illustrate the problem. Consider: On two occasions in the last 6 weeks, the our newer car would not start in the morning. A quick jump solved the problem both times. But when I…
In my capacity as a person working in a technology field, I am occasionally the recipient of email messages from companies that want to sell their products and services. Reading these email messages often reminds me of a great passage in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, indeed in the original “Foundation” story published in Astounding in…
I’ve had a number of people reach out recently to inquire about my Obsidian automation scripts. I will get them posted to Github in the relatively nearly future. In their current state, they are not ready for public consumption. There are lots of hard-coded paths, to say nothing of the code is fairly ugly. I’ve…