Author: admin

Today is the 75th anniversary of two simultaneous events: The birth of the transistor and the birth of the modern horror story. On the same day, June 26, 1948, William Shockley gave the world the bipolar junction transistor and Shirley Jackson gave the world “The Lottery”.

The world is now dealing with the latest manifestation of the power of the transistor — artificial intelligence which eerily mimics human communication. Soon we may find it easier to talk with bots that reinforce our prejudices, than with other people who may challenge them.

We are a stone’s throw from tribal echo-chambers and reflexive group-think becoming so normalized that we forget there was ever any other way of seeing the world. And then “The Lottery” will read like a documentary.

i already knew from the start
that limericks aren’t true art
    which leads some, I suppose,
    to look down through their nose
but I try not to take it to heart

As I write this, a ruthless warlord is marching toward Moscow, aiming to topple Putin’s Russia. Meanwhile, Putin’s Russia has been attacking Ukraine for more than a year, in a brutal and tragic war of aggression.

Here in the U.S., we conduct our domestic wars in a more subtle way. Today, June 24, is the first anniversary of a declaration of war by our own Supreme Court against half of our own citizens.

It amazes me how much it bothers some people that other people simply want to live their lives in peace.

Many early collaborations between talented and now celebrated artists have been forgotten in the mists of time. It would be interesting to do a kind of cultural archaeology to rediscover such events.

For example, the Academy Award winning animator John Canemaker and the Academy Award winning actor Joel Grey collaborated more than half a century ago. I’m guessing that very few people remember that.

If you can figure out what they collaborated on, you get extra points. 🙂

There is an old joke about science fiction, in the form of a riddle:

Q: What was the golden age of science fiction?
A: Twelve

The joke is not only funny — it is also profound. When you are twelve years old you are uniquely positioned between two worlds. There is a part of you that still thinks very much like a child, but for the first time there is also a part of you that thinks like an adult.

Which is really the sweet spot for science fiction. The child in you marvels in wonder at the fantastical worlds opening up to you. Yet the adult in you is starting to think critically about the real subject of science fiction — the human condition, with all of its attendant complexities and moral failings.

When you are twelve you are uniquely able to comfortably inhabit both the child’s view and the adult’s view. And if you are lucky, you continue to retain some of that beautiful mix as you grow older.

Today, the first day of summer, is a good day to talk about seasons. The concept of dividing time into seasons is a little weird.

After all, there is no appreciable difference between the weather on June 20 and June 21. Yet we go ahead and draw a big fat line on the calendar and say “this day is Spring” and “the next day is Summer”.

We also tend to divide entire lives into seasons. We label people as being youngsters, or middle age, or old folks, as though they are undergoing some sort of sudden molting or morphogenesis.

I am not sure that this is healthy. Every time we put someone in a box like that, we take a way a little of their individual humanity.

But if we must “seasonalize” people, the least we can do is let them choose their own preferred season. As for where I am in the seasons of my life, I’ve decided that today is the first day of my summer.

Last night I was invited to a dinner party where I got to mingle with some old friends who had started out in computer graphics back when I was starting out In computer graphics. Some had actually started out a decade or so earlier.

We reminisced over old times, old colleagues, and old algorithms. At one point one of my friends remarked about how easy it was back when we were starting out. Nobody had invented anything yet, so we got to be there first. Now, she said, it’s all already been invented.

I found myself strongly disagreeing. The really interesting problems have yet to be solved, I said. We still aren’t at the point where a great artist or designer, a primary creator, can comfortably use digital tools to create the worlds they want to create. Yhey still need to have a team of people who know how to wrangle computers.

When Steven Spielberg feels as comfortable designing on a computer as he now feels when he moves a chair on a miniature set, then I will know that we’ve gotten somewhere. Until then, these are still early days.

Juneteenth is interesting for many reasons. One of those reasons is in the way it differs from a celebration of emancipation.

It is not a celebration of emancipation, or in fact a celebration of any act by an oppressor culture. Instead, it commemorates the fact that if you are an oppressed group, you cannot rely on your oppressor to give you a square deal.

In that sense, it is very particularly a celebration of, for and by this particular historically oppressed group. The attempts by everybody else to join in, however well meaning, maybe misguided.

If you are not part of an historically oppressed group, this distinction might not make sense to you. But if you are, it will seem obvious.

If I’d been out since 4³
Would you lock the door
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m 3⁴

When I read online opinion pieces, I am very tolerant of wildly different points of view. I figure I can always learn from the way someone else thinks, even if I disagree with their conclusions.

But I’ve noticed that as soon as I encounter bad grammar, I immediately stop reading. My thinking, more or less, is this: If you don’t know how to put together an English sentence properly, you should at least have the good sense to ask someone to check your work.

And if you really don’t care about proper communication, then don’t expect me to care about what you have to say. People, let’s at least use the language properly. Without language, where would we be?