Author: admin

I use Google’s Gemini all the time. I ask it questions about computer programming, politics, movies, geography, coffee makers, or pretty much anything I’m curious about.

The answers are nearly always very helpful and to the point. Its response to my questions are usually excellent summaries of what I would have achieved if I had spent a lot longer doing a Google search.

But unlike much of the hype I have been hearing and reading, I never get a sense that there is a human-like intelligence at work. Rather, it feels just like what it is — an algorithmic gathering and summation of information from various sources.

I remember when I started using Google search about twenty six years ago. It was extremely useful, but I never felt that there was “a person in the computer”. Rather, it felt like I was interacting with an algorithm, albeit one that had been tuned by humans.

Similarly, the advent of desktop publishing four decades ago felt useful, but not magical, even though it was a radical advance for the time. It was clear that my document was being typeset by an algorithm — an algorithm that was performing calculations based on information that had been fed to it by human beings.

I suspect that people will soon come to see AI bots like Gemini and its cousins in the same way. There is no magical “person in the computer”. Like Google search and desktop publishing before it, a chatbot is just another useful tool in our ever expanding human arsenal of useful tools.

As you probably know, the building housing the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts was recently defaced. What you may not know is that Public Law 88-260, enacted by the U.S. Congress and signed into law on January 23, 1964, quite explicitly makes it illegal to modify the name of the Kennedy Center.

If artists perform in that building before the legal name has been restored, they might therefore be guilty of implicitly endorsing an illegal act of vandalism of a public monument, and of being in contempt of the U.S. Congress. So legally, Chuck Redd had no recourse but to cancel the 2025 Christmas show. To do otherwise could have placed all of the show’s participants in legal peril.

So looking at the situation from a legal perspective, the recent threatening letter to Redd by Richard Grenell was a clear admission of guilt on Grenell’s part. By sending that letter, Grenell was explicitly confessing to having committed a federal crime.

The U.S. Government now has an obligation to bring federal charges against Grenell, for his self-confessed violation of Public Law 88-260. If he is convicted, I wonder how much jail time he will serve.

Then again, he might end up getting a presidential pardon. I hear those are going cheaply these days.

Three episodes in a row of Stranger Things.

It doesn’t get any better than that.

Today is a day when millions of people are united by a common narrative. And it’s no ordinary narrative. In particular, it is one that promises to let you overcome the finality of death.

That’s a pretty darned powerful promise. If somebody has spent their entire life believing in that promise, you aren’t going to change their mind by talking to them about it.

Which leads me to today’s topic: What is most real to people?

We clearly live in a physical world, where we regularly encounter physical objects like chairs and apples. We all have bodily functions, we all feel the tug of gravity, we all experience the tangible world around us.

But you can’t tell a story about those things. People know that those things exist, but those things are not what is most real to us.

What is fascinating to me about us humans is that what is most real to us are things that cannot be seen in our physical world. The reality that we care about exists in an entirely different space.

There are words to describe the reality that truly matters to us. Words like “love”, “jealousy”, “kindness”, “hate”, “compassion” and “trust”.

You cannot see those things out there in the physical world — they exist only within our collective 8 billion minds. And yet they are far more real to us than mere physical objects like chairs or apples.

That might help to explain why so many people are united by a common narrative today.

I like days this, that are one day before a big day of the year. It’s the calm before the storm, the eye in the hurricane, that singular moment of stillness.

Everything sort of winds down, and we all get a day to catch our collective breath. We all definitely need more days like this.

The U.S. Supreme Court has just affirmed that the U.S. president cannot federalize the Illinois state national guard in Chicago to protect pink people in their work of rounding up thousands of brown people.

The fact that many of the people being rounded up are American citizens doesn’t seem to factor into the decision. Those people are brown, so under current federal policy pink people apparently have the right to round them up and detain them.

Many people, both pink and brown, have been exercising their first amendment rights to protest this activity, and the administration argued that those protests amount to insurrection. The Supreme Court disagreed, in a six to three ruling.

A small but helpful win for democracy and the U.S. Constitution.

I am thinking of a TV show from the late 1990s. The main character is a strong and independent young woman, with a mission to take on the world, and a great fashion sense.

As she takes on the world, our heroine has by her side a small but trusty band of loyal friends. Each of those friends represents a different aspect of her own personality.

In the very first episode, we meet the man of her dreams. He is a devilishly handsome yet strangely aloof and mysterious figure. The two of them spend entire seasons of the show in and out of a powerfully alluring yet possibly doomed relationship.

The show was critically acclaimed for its clever and witty dialog.

I am speaking, of course, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I am speaking, of course, of Sex and the City.

How many other pairs of TV shows can you think of which could both be accurately described by the same summary?

On winter solstice, so they say,
You only get the shortest day
But if you look at it just right
You also get the longest night

My wife and I went pie shopping for the holidays this morning. We bought two pies, a cherry rhubarb for us, and a peach pie to give away.

After we purchased them, I turned to my wife and said “In math circles, do you know how many pies are enough?”

“No,” she asked, “how many?”

“2πr,” I replied. It’s a good thing she loves me.

As I try to make sense of the current U.S. administration, the analogy that keeps coming to mind is cancer. Cancer starts out as a small anomaly, but then can quickly grow within the body, often with fatal consequences.

The divisiveness, toxic racism and astonishing economic destructiveness of this administration parallels the effects of cancer. A once reasonably healthy body politic has been taken over by a particularly virulent and dangerous mutation.

I was particularly struck by the ugly attack on the late Rob Reiner, who was not only a brilliant and beloved filmmaker, but also, in his non-professional life, a kind, generous, and deeply engaged American citizen. This fits the pattern.

After all, one of the ways that a cancer destroys the body is to attack healthy cells.