Author: admin

Yesterday somebody pointed out to me that for people under 30, the phrase “by accident” has largely been replaced by “on accident”. Someone in the conversation who is under 30 nodded and said “yes, it’s ‘on accident'”.

I found this startling because I had literally never, until that moment, heard the phrase “on accident”. I always use “by accident”. I think this is a clear example of the English language evolving before our eyes.

I must admit that “on accident” is more logical than “by accident”. After all, it parallels the complementary phrase “on purpose”.

But a related question is why such a mutation occurs. Surely it can’t be completely by accident.

Or on accident, if you prefer.

We celebrate the birthdays of highly accomplished people, whether they be saints, artists, athletes or political leaders. We do not celebrate the day that they died.

Yet on the day that any individual was born, they have not yet accomplished anything. They are, at that point, all potential, no accomplishment.

But on the day an accomplished person passes away, they have accumulated a lifetime of achievement, sometimes towering achievement. Given that we are celebrating what they managed to accomplish while they were here on this Earth, might it not make more sense to celebrate them on the day that they left?

I realize that this may be a controversial idea. 🙂

There are few things more fun than great dinner conversation about movies. But you need to be with the right dinner companions.

I was visiting a museum today. One of the exhibits featured a circular projection against the wall.

To be clear the projector they used was a perfectly ordinary projector which protects a rectangular image. But a mask was installed near the lens, blocking out all light outside of a soft-edged disk shaped region.

The result is surprising effective. The region within registered not so much as a projection, but as a magical round window into another world.

I am delighted that a technique which is so simple can produce something that is so effective. Somehow this makes me very happy.

Yesterday somebody pointed out that the opposite of “woke” is “fascist”. After watching what is going on in Florida, I can see exactly what they mean.

Hopefully people will wake up before this goes too far.

You sit there with nothing to do
And the hours crawl by, it is true
    But when it gets boring
    You end up exploring
Ideas that keep coming to you

I admit that I used to be wary
But I no longer find these flights scary
    I get lots of work done
    And it’s really quite fun
A disclaimer: your mileage may vary

Often, just for fun, I do old NY Times Saturday crossword puzzles from their archives, usually on my phone. Sometimes I can finish them very quickly — my best times are around 10 minutes or so. But other times it can take a lot longer.

The other day I was wrestling with a particularly difficult one. I was really struggling, and it looked like it was going to take at least half an hour.

When I finally filled in the last square, I looked at my time, and it read 29:59. In that moment I felt an enormous sense of elation.

Never mind that it had taken me about three times longer than my best times. I felt enormously happy that I had gotten in just under the wire, beating the half hour mark by a single second.

If I had finished the puzzle in 11:37, I would not have felt the same pleasurable rush as I felt at 29:59. Logically it made no sense. And yet there it was.

What is this emotion, this irrational response to beating an arbitrary — and arguably meaningless — marker? Why do we get so excited at such “achievements”?

Why did I feel such a heady sense of accomplishment? All I had really done was manage to finish a crossword puzzle in half an hour.

Well, actually, less than half an hour. 🙂

“There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it’s all dark.”
— Gerry O’Driscoll

Today I received an announcement in my email inbox. It was from our University, discussing the issue of students using ChatGPT, and offering to give seminars on how to navigate this difficult topic.

My very first thought was, how do I know this was written by a person?

I was curious to see whether ChatGPT could write yesterday’s intersection program for me. So I told it:

“Write a Javascript program to intersect two convex polygons by checking whether any vertex or the center of either polygon is inside the other polygon.”

It responded with a perfectly correct Javascript program. I then asked the question again, and it responded with a different Javascript program, also perfectly correct.

When I compared the code it produced those two different times, it appeared as though it was stealing pieces from different programmers who had very different styles of coding. I could recognize the thinking of the programmers who wrote the original code that it was using.

The final programs it produced tended to be kind of clumsy and inelegant — although definitely functional and correct. I am guessing that this was because it was stitching together parts of programs that it had found in different places. The result was a kind of Frankencode.

This is pretty much the impression I get when I read prose generated by ChatGPT. Just beyond the text, I can perceive the half-digested bits and pieces of the creative thoughts of unnamed humans.