Recently, the New York Times Magazine had a long article on artificial intelligence: “A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?” by Steven Johnson. The focus of much of the article was on how A.I. has evolved to the point where it can produce human-sounding prose. Give GPT-3 some text and it will…
I was five years old when I saw Star Wars sometime in the spring/summer of 1977. My parents took my brother and I to a local drive-in theater to see it. I have only the vaguest memories of that time: I recall being in the back seat of the car. I have a memory of…
I can remember days in the late 1980s and through most of the 1990s when a single monitor (and not a particularly large one) was suitable for all of my work. When I started at my job in late 1994, for instance, Windows 3.1 was still the main operating system. A single application open at…
Just a heads-up that there will be no Practically Paperless post this week. I have revised the schedule for the final two episodes of the series. Episode 29: Filling Out Forms will appear on Tuesday, May 10. Episode 30: Project Management in Obsidian will appear on May 24. Final two episodes? I can hear you…
A few nights ago, I had a strange dream. I was swinging on a vine over a lake or pond. As I drifted to one side, I noticed a snake in the tree I approached. Momentum carried me to the other side of the pond and I noticed a snake in that tree as well.…
Now and then I lament that there will never be enough time to read all of the books I want to read. I could spend lifetimes reading books that have already been written, without even scratching the surface. And that wouldn’t count all of the new books that are constantly being released. I touched on…
Here is what I read this week. Some of the articles/posts may require a subscription to read them. Books Finished George Marshall: Defender of the Republic by David L. Roll. An interesting biography of Marshall’s life. Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom by Carl Bernstein. This was a fantastic look at the making of a…
Tomorrow we are heading down to Florida for the kids’ spring break. Of course, given the backlog of these essays I’ve built up, by the time you read this we’ll already be back. We drive down to Florida several times a year and each time, in the week leading up to the trip, the same…
One of my favorite works of nonfiction is Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization, an 11-volume series of history published by Simon & Schuster between 1935 and 1975. The reading is fascinating, but I also enjoy Will Durant’s writing style. It is a blend of old-world and modern, sardonic, but not malicious. These are…
I have written about the various times that I met Harlan Ellison. I wrote about the time I met him with my Mom at Dangerous Visions bookshop, for instance, which I was certain was the second time I met him. The first time, I was certain, was a lecture he gave at the Learning Tree…