Author: admin

If we could see clouds only once every ten years, we would regard them as a great miracle.

But because we see clouds every day, we take them for granted.

Wouldn’t it be better if we understood that every day we get to witness a great miracle?

These are still early days for head-worn mixed reality. For now, if you want to manipulate objects in MR, you pretty much have two choices: either bare hands or VR controllers.

But this goes against many centuries of human wisdom. In our everyday life, we have pens, brushes, hammers and chisels, screwdrivers and pliers. Humans have developed many specialized tools that amplify both the power and the precision of our hands.

I suspect that sometime soon, the act of picking up an ordinary pen to make a magic animated scribble while wearing your mixed reality glasses will become commonplace. We are not there yet, but with any luck we will be soon.

Today is the birthday of four people who created fictional worlds that continue to live on in my head, and that I suspect always will.

On this day in 1866, H.G. Wells was born. On this day in 1912, Chuck Jones was born. On this day in 1934, Leonard Cohen was born. On this day in 1947, Stephen King was born.

Imagine if those four individuals were able to collaborate. Whatever they came up with together, I for one would definitely go see it.

It has been exactly 50 years, to the day, since Billie Jean King beat Bobbie Riggs in tennis at the Houston Astrodome, in straight sets. It was the most watched tennis match of all time.

It may be hard for young people today to imagine a time when it was simply taken for granted by millions of people that a woman could never successfully compete with a man in athletic competition. The historic match between King and Riggs helped to lay that particular idiocy to rest once and for all.

As we have learned from recent Supreme Court rulings, the struggle for equality within a rigged system is never complete. Sometimes it’s good to remember historic battles that were well fought and well won.

Today I was looking at some natural marble and I thought about how its amazingly beautiful pattern was formed by extreme and violent forces.

I was reminded of Wordsworth’s description of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility.”

I said this to the person next to me, and he replied “Yes, it’s the poetry of the earth.”

Which then reminded me of what Keats said in one of his poems: “The poetry of Earth is never dead.”

Suppose we actually had flying cars. Who would drive them?

Given that it is now 2023, and AI is rapidly taking over, I suspect that nobody would drive them.

Given the choice between what able to do in a few years, and what we already know about human drivers, I suspect that flying cars will all be driven by computers.

If somebody has a good counter argument, I am willing to hear it.

Suppose the studios won, and they were to get the right to replace human actors and writers with AI bots. Anyone who has been following ChatGPT already knows what would happen.

We would end up with homogenized pap. Stories would become prosaic and predictable. Movie acting would become generic and flsvorless, making the most mediocre of today’s movies seem like a masterpiece by comparison.

Maybe we could then just go all the way and replace moviegoers with bots. I am sure they would appreciate AI movies a lot more than us pesky humans would.

I love dates that are mathematically interesting. Today is either 9/16/2023 or 16/9/2023, depending on where you live in the world. Which means that the following are all true:

The month is the square of three (the last digit of the year).

The day of the month is the square of four (the sum of the first three digits of the year).

If you add the month and the day together, you get the square of five (the sum of the last three digits of the year).

If you add up the month and the digits of the year, you get 9 + 2 + 0 + 2 + 3 = 16, which is the day of the month.

after all this time
time can still bewilder me
guess i need more time

Today it happens to be a beautiful day in New York City. I know that theoretically the weather should have little or no bearing on how much work I get done.

But in fact it turns out to have an enormous influence on my productivity. When it’s a beautiful day outside, even though, ironically, I am spending most of my time indoors, I end up getting lots more work done.

Maybe it has something to do with feeling happy. 🙂