Author: admin

There is a moment in Visconte’s The Leopard when the Prince, played by Burt Lancaster, is throwing a grand ball. A young noblewoman believes that she has a chance to win the heart of the Prince’s nephew, played by Alain Delon.

Yet in one moment this all changes. Another woman walks into the room, played by the astonishingly beautiful Claudia Cardinale. Delon and Cardinale lock eyes. In that one moment, the young noblewoman knows that it is all over.

For me, that is the most powerful moment in a very powerful movie. Not just Delon and Cardinale, but the look on the other young woman’s face, as Visconte cuts to her reaction.

It is a look that says “For me there will be no justice, there will be no hope. There can be no argument in the face of such impossible beauty.”

I thought of this moment when I read this morning of the sad passing of the great Alain Delon. There can be no argument in the face of such impossible beauty.

They say that one year is seven dog years. Alas, having known a number of wonderful dogs, I have learned to accept the fact that you rarely get to spend more than about fourteen years in their delightful company.

At the moment I am dealing with a rapidly aging computer. It seemed like only yesterday that it was shiny and new and super fast. But age is now quickly catching up with it.

And I am reminded once again of a truth that I learned a long time ago: One dog year is seven computer years.

“No matter where you go, there you are.” — Buckaroo Bonzai

Yet another opportunity to celebrate the great Jimmy Webb, who turns 78 today. And appending my favorite song lyrics here, just because I can.

See her how she flies
Golden sails across the sky
Close enough to touch
But careful if you try
Though she looks as warm as gold
The moon’s a harsh mistress
The moon can be so cold

Once the sun did shine
Lord, it felt so fine
The moon a phantom rose
Through the mountains and the pines
And then the darkness fell
And the moon’s a harsh mistress
It’s so hard to love her well

I fell out of her eyes
I fell out of her heart
I fell down on my face
Yes, I did, and I, I tripped and I missed my star
God, I fell and I fell alone, I fell alone
And the moon’s a harsh mistress
And the sky is made of stone

— Copyright Jimmy Webb, 1974

When we meet somebody, or read about something they’ve accomplished, we are getting only a thin slice of a much larger picture. That person began somewhere, and then went through a unique set of struggles and obstacles.

Or perhaps they benefitted from some unique advantages. In any case, we are seeing only the fully formed result. What led to that result may be far more complex and interesting.

A presidential candidate may have gotten where they are by working through the stigma of being labeled a member of a minority, only to end up becoming a tough, seasoned prosecutor. Or perhaps a presidential candidate was born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and got where they are largely by realizing the power of using and disposing of people like tissue paper.

For every Marcel Proust, who turned their life into an open book, there is someone who is more like a Jay Gatsby, not at all what they seem. Yet you cannot really separate the person from their origin story.

Alas, those stories are not always easily knowable. I wonder how much it is possible to infer an origin story by sizing up the person that we see before us.

I have been thinking about origin stories. How to do we become who we are? What strange energies fuel our life’s trajectory?

There is much to discuss on this topic. I will approach it in stages.

More tomorrow.

i flew half way round
the globe, and then I looked up
the moon was the same

its perfect crescent
was smiling to remind me
there is just one world

If we take our collective use of AI to some logical extremes, some interesting outcomes might result. For example, children might grow up being used to getting prompts by chatbots in their everyday conversation.

In such a future, rather than needing to think of the next thing to day, kids will just be able to choose from a menu. The idea of conversing without computer assistance will be seen as something archaic, a thing from the past.

We may come to look at unassisted conversation the way modern people look at life before shoes. Yes, we know that primitive peoples managed to get around in bare feet, but that knowledge does not seem relevant to modern life.

After all, our outdoor environment is no longer forests and meadows, but rather hard concrete sidewalks. The technology in our world and the technology on our feet have co-evolved to the point where we can no longer go back.

And so society may evolve to the point where unassisted improvisational conversations will no longer really be possible. If everybody else is using their chatbot assistant to hold a conversation, your atavistic attempt to speak without one would stick out like a sore thumb.

A weird thing about this is that if it comes to pass, it will all seem perfectly normal. People won’t even suspect that anything is missing, or that there could be another way.

At first using ChatGPT and MidJourney feels like having a superpower. Words and images magically appear, seemingly out of nowhere.

But eventually you realize that it’s precisely the opposite. Those words and images are actually appearing out of everywhere.

We are just being fed our own collective words and images, all of the things we’ve put out there into the public sphere. Our keywords are simply prompting a giant search through all of that data.

And that’s when you realize that it’s not that different from what happens when you do a Google search. You are simply sifting through vasts amounts of information, and finding the part that interests you.

The only difference is that the information is coming in the form of imitation. Instead of simply pointing you to a set of webpages, the computer is answering your query by building for you a simulcrum of those pages.

And that’s when you realize that it’s really no more magical than Google search. Marvelous, powerful, yes, but not magical. You are not actually getting anything original. Like a Google search, you are just getting a remix of what we humans have already created.

Every time I get ready to fly to somewhere on the other side of the world, I think of the people in the Flat Earth Society. I realize that some people join such societies out of a sense of irony.

But apparently there are people who really believe the Earth is flat, just as there are people who believe that the Beatles are a vast conspiracy, or that the brain of our Republican candidate for president is not crumbling into red dust before our eyes.

I wonder what those people think when they get on a plane and fly half way around the world. Or maybe you could never get them on that plane in the first place, for fear that they might fly over the edge and be lost forever.