Month: May 2025

There are particular combinations of names that for the true fan will instantly invoke the name of a particular songwriter. To others these name combinations will mean nothing at all.

The true fan will instantly recognize “Terry and Julie”. The fan of a different songwriter will recognize “Brenda and Eddie”.

There are many such examples. But I think my favorite songwriter mentions a lot more name combinations than anyone else.

There’s “Rose and Valerie”, and “Vera, Chuck and Dave”. Not to mention “Desmond and Molly” or “Phil and Don”. The list goes on, and I just love it.

I find A.I. to be useful as a starter kit. For example, I can ask it a question about a particular software package, and it will give me a working example of how to use that package.

For me this is useful because it is essentially a starter kit. I never end up using any of the code that the A.I. generates, but I find it extremely helpful to have a working example as a reference when I write my own code.

This parallels what people report in their use of ChatGPT. Good writers don’t actually use any of the actual prose that ChatGPT spits out, but they often find it helpful as a reference.

I wonder whether this will be the way that people who generally know that they are doing employ A.I. You would never allow it to substitute for your own work, but it’s nice to have a working example to refer to, just as it’s nice to have a dictionary or encyclopedia at your fingertips.

What is it about Monday songs? It seems that most of the sad songs that are about a day of the week are about Monday.

There are too many to list here, but you know what I’m talking about. After reading this, one of those songs is probably playing in your head right now.

Regardless of the genre or the era, songwriters seem to really hate Mondays. Or is it that songwriters just really love weekends, and hate to see them end?

I’ve been watching the war of words between the Boss and the aging six year old who once pretended to be a boss on TV. A number of commentators have been criticizing Bruce’s recent statements, accusing him of diving into politics.

But isn’t this an important part of why millions of people have loved him for all of these decades? The poetry of the man’s lyrics is inherently political. His songs speak truth to injustice, standing up for the dignity of individuals and urging respect for the working class.

I found his recent words decrying our nation’s recent political slide into intolerance and authoritarianism to be thoughtful, articulate, and well reasoned.

In contrast, that petulant six year old sounded, well, like a petulant six year old.

Somebody asked me recently what I would say in celebration of Alan Kay’s birthday, which happens to be today. This was my reply:

Somebody once said that if you are the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

One great thing about hanging out with Alan Kay is that I can always be sure I am in the right room.

There is a theory that our entire reality is actually a simulation. In that view of things, nothing we experience is actually real — it is all software running on a big computer somewhere, and so are we.

But of course that begs the question — who is running the simulation, and for what purpose? Actually it begs many questions.

When you really think this theory through, isn’t it just a way to put a technological sounding gloss on religion?

I’ve noticed a very specific narrative pattern that continues to recur. It shows up not only in fiction, but in real life as well.

In the movie Braveheart, there is a shocking moment when the king murders the lover of his son the prince by hurling him out of a window. Up until this scene, the film makes it very clear that the prince’s lover is strong, intelligent, highly competent, and has excellent judgement.

It is therefore understood that with his lover by his side, the prince would have been able to rule as a wise and effective king. By removing his partner, the king has rendered his own son ineffective.

The prince’s lover was killed precisely because he was the smartest person in the room. In the king’s mind, by definition, a natural leader who is homosexual cannot be allowed to exist.

Quite similarly, there is a shocking moment in Schindler’s List when Jews in a concentration camp are being put to work on a construction project. One of the Jews, a young woman, informs their Nazi overseers that they are planning the project all wrong.

Before being sent to the concentration camp, she explains, she had been a civil engineer. She tells them how they would need to proceed to do the project effectively.

The Nazi commandant immediately takes out his gun and shoots her dead. Then he informs his underlings to do the project the way she had instructed.

The young engineer was killed precisely because she was the smartest person in the room. In the commandant’s mind, by definition, a natural leader who is Jewish cannot be allowed to exist.

We have recently seen this pattern repeated, with remarkable fidelity, in real life. General Brown was fired as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff precisely because he was the smartest person in the room. In the mind of the person who fired him, by definition, a natural leader who is black cannot be allowed to exist.

In all three of these cases, the discerning observer understands that things will end very badly for the fool who has removed the smartest person from the room.

I’ve been doing the NY Times Spelling Bee pretty much every day for the last several years. For the most part it has been a faithful companion — challenging to my brain, while soothing to my nerves.

But today there was a surprise. To get a perfect score, I believed that I needed to find 41 words (and 207 points), as you can see in the screen capture below left.

Yet after I had entered 40 words (and accumulated only 193 points), the app declared that I had found all possible words, as you can see in the screen capture below right, which is showing the first 24 words out of 40.

The missing 14 points would have come from two things: 7 points for finding a seven letter word, plus an extra 7 points for that word being a pangram (a word that uses all seven letters).

As you can see in the image to the left, there are supposed to be three pangrams. But the app told me that I had achieved a “Queen Bee” — a perfect score — even though I had found only two pangrams.

Somehow there is a discrepancy today between the instructions and the game itself — something I had never encountered before. I had often wondered whether something like this could ever occur in Spelling Bee, and now I know.

Frankly, I feel cheated. It’s like going bowling and being told that you’ve just bowled a perfect strike. But you know, in your heart of hearts, that you only knocked down nine pins, because the headpin was missing.

A lot of people are worried about A.I. resulting in everybody becoming unemployed. Here are two examples from history (among many) to show why such fears are unfounded.

When sound recording first became available, many musicians were worried that they would soon be out of work. If their singing or playing could be recorded, then nobody would ever need to hire them again to perform.

In fact, the opposite happened. Those musicians who were willing to be recorded became much better known, because many more people could hear their music. Those musicians started to get a lot more gigs, because they had become well known and had developed a much larger fan base.

When movies came out a lot of people worried about unemployment in the theater. If you can film a play just once and then show it as often as you want, what’s the point of continuing to hire actors?

As we now know, theater is doing just fine, because movies turned out to be a very different medium, once it was properly understood. In addition, movies created entirely new categories of gainful employment, such as film crew, film editor, camera operator, location manager and cinematographer (among many others), which have no parallel in theater.

Yes, some jobs will become redundant as A.I. continues to evolve, just as we no longer have those telephone operators that you see in movies from the 1940s. But if history is any guide, many more new categories of jobs will be created.

If Edward Lear today were here,
He would be very old I fear
It’s very hard to make the scene
At age two hundred and thirteen
I’d like to think he’d fill the time
By penning some new nonsense rhyme
Containing words most runcible
And nearly unpronuncible