Author: admin

This morning I learned from my cousin about backronyms. I had never heard the word “backronym” before today, but I realize that I’ve been making them for years.

Backronyms are cleverly knitted redefinitions, often noteworthy yet manufactured.

When a word that wasn’t an acronym becomes an acronym, it’s because somebody turned it into a backronym. And now that I know what they are called, I am definitely going to keep making them.

The great things about parades is that they are interactive.
Movies just can’t compete.

i am blogging for you in mid-flight
which fills me with total delight
      in fact i’m all smiles
      that i’ve flown twenty miles
since the moment i started to write

I’ve been organizing a group project at NYU. The project is really fun, but nothing ends up being as simple as it should be.

The problem, I think, is that every project involves people. And whenever people are involved, things that should be simple become complicated. I believe this is because the dynamics between human beings is always odd and non-linear in ways that you never see coming.

I once came up with a riddle to explain this phenomenon to myself. It goes like this:

      Q: What’s the definition of politics?
      A: Two people in a room.

This evening I attended a one woman show. And it was really good.

The writer / performer took us all on a personal journey. It was based on her life, but that life was then shaped into good theater. The driving structure was the mutual fascination between her adult and teenage selves — two characters who are very different, and yet literally the same.

The experience led me to pondering the nature of one-person theater. It’s not like traditional theater, in which so much happens in the empty space between two or more actors appearing before us on stage.

In a one person show, that empty space — the place where all of the important questions are dangled — needs to be implied, rather than shown outright. Which makes it an extremely different art form.

I have seen one person shows that failed terribly. And I suspect that was because we were presented with only a single persona onstage. So there was no meaningful conflict to be worked through.

Even if only a single person is standing before you, there needs to be a dialog between two or more points of view. A clash of viewpoints is the food by which drama is nourished.

Tonight’s performance was clever in that the two characters (the teenage and adult versions of the playwright) had an inherently interesting and complex relationship. And we in the audience wanted to know about that relationship.

Even in a one-person show, the fundamental principle of good theater holds true: It all comes down to two characters on a stage.

Tomorrow is the first day of Black History Month, an event that is celebrated in many countries around the world. Everywhere, it seems, but in Florida.

In Florida I believe that it is illegal to say the phrase “black history”, unless you whisper it under your pillow and make sure that nobody is listening. Even then, you need to check to make sure that Ron DeSantis isn’t hiding under your bed.

Let’s face it, the entire month of February is shamelessly breaking the law in Florida. So I wonder what the legal eagles in Tallahassee are going to do about the next twenty eight days.

Maybe they will just avoid the entire mess and jump straight into March. I am sure the Florida Legislature has enough votes to outlaw February.

But then I would feel bad for the people of Florida. They will all miss Valentine’s Day.

In a comment on my recent post about Chatbots, Adrian asserted that people will eventually start to see such things as human and intelligent, even though they are not human and are not intelligent. There is much to unpack in that comment, so today’s post is going to be my response.

When a technology is new and people haven’t seen it before, there is always a tendency to ascribe to it human properties. But at the end of the day, a tool has no consciousness, and cannot / should not be put in jail for breaking the law.

In an earlier time the ML tool that lays out circuit boards might have been thought of as intelligent. But now that we are used to it, we no longer make that mistake.

Similarly, someone not familiar with an airplane might think it is a kind of bird, and someone not familiar with an automobile might think of it as a fabulous kind of horse, or a camera as an astonishingly good realist painter, or a gramophone as a machine that sings and plays instruments.

The fact that people think such things does not make them stupid. They are just trying to make sense of the existence of something that they had always assumed to be impossible.

If you’ve never seen such things before, your sheer astonishment that such a thing is possible might catch you off guard. But eventually you get used to it, and you stop being astonished at what a new kind of tool is capable of producing.

Chatbots do not create original material — they are just a kind of mirror reflecting our human creativity. In particular, they rearrange material that was already created by humans. Without the collective intelligence of the humans who are providing the actual data — original and intelligent human thought — a chatbot would have nothing to work with.

Chatbots are already being used by copywriters in various industries. In those industries, the chatbot doesn’t replace the professional — it is a tool that is used by the professional. The professional copywriter continues to provide their uniquely human insight and humor, but is relieved of much of the manual labor of generating copy.

All automation ends up displacing drudge work, and therefore some kinds of labor-intensive work ends up being done by machines, and those kinds of jobs go away. But automation also provides new and powerful tools for people who know how to use it, thereby creating new jobs that require human thought and judgement, rather than drudgery.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” An important corollary is that technologies do not stay magical for very long.

Today I made up a new word, ephiphemera. I use it to describe something very specific. I will explain.

In every era there are large events that focus everyone’s attention. It might be a war, a rocket ship to the moon, a contentious election, or a pandemic. The one thing you can be sure about is that the same thing is on everyone’s mind.

In the moment, the phenomenon can loom so large that an entire new vocabulary is built around it. Many new words and phrases are coined, each creating its own little epiphenomenon.

Most of those words and phrases will fall by the wayside soon after the phenomenon itself has passed, part of the forgotten detritus of history. Eventually, only people of a certain age will know the meaning behind such epiphemeral phrases as white bronco or the COVID 15.

You’ve been working for years on something. By now you are pretty sure you have it all figured out.

And then one day you have a random conversation with somebody. Suddenly you realize that all this time you’ve had it wrong.

It’s not that there was anything wrong with what you were doing.
Rather, you come to see that what people need is different from what you thought they needed.

The person you’re talking with doesn’t have the faintest idea how to make what you’ve been working on. They just know what they need, and they know how to articulate that need.

And you are reminded all over again that invention does not thrive in a vacuum. Invention needs customers.

There was a time and place in history when the piano was seen as the enemy of music. Unlike other musical instruments, which require serious time and effort to learn to play, the piano lets you begin playing with little or no training.

Some argued that this was harmful. If just anyone could walk in off the street and start playing an instrument, that would promote laziness and sloth, and would devalue the efforts of real musicians working to master the violin or oboe.

But of course that is not what happened. The piano made instrumental music accessible to an entirely new population of students. As an added bonus, it turned out to be the ideal instrument to use when composing original work.

I think something analogous is going on right now. Rather than complaining that Stable Diffusion and Large Learning Models are making it easy for students to cheat, we should start teaching our students how to use these powerful instruments.

Of course that is easier said than done. Most teachers don’t know how to use these newfangled instruments, and good practices have not yet been developed for using them to teach history, math, literature and other subjects.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. In fact, we can’t afford not to try. Much is at stake.

Think of it this way. A lot of the music that you cherish was composed on a piano. Our world would be a much poorer place if those songs and compositions had never been written.