72/5 on my birthday
Ingenuity Mars Helicopter The NASA Ingenuity mars helicopter has taken its last flight, on 18 January. It was designed for 5 flights, and managed 72. It was...
Left the old bar, found a new one
For those who saw my last post on Substack and are now reading this - welcome! The old bar was starting to have an unpleasant odour, one which the...
Turnaround Day
The winter solstice is later today. Getting to this point in the year always feels like a long, darkening slog. External world events haven’t helped....
Taking the fork in the road
'The expression "when you come to a fork in the road, take it" has been attributed to the baseball legend Yogi Berra, who used it as a humorous way of giving...
Mike Pinder was almost right...
My modification is “Training is the best way to travel”. My sweetie and I spent several hours on the VIA train Wednesday and again on Thursday. I hadn’t been...
Oppenheimer and Handler
Now that a few weeks have passed since I watched both movies, perhaps my first impressions have stabilized. We saw “Oppenheimer” (the movie) at a mini-IMAX...
There it was... Gone!
The Mont Blanc I inherited from my uncle is missing. When last I assembled all my implements for a group photograph, there it was – gone! It had always stood...
Time perspective
Today I am listening to music 247 years old. It is stored on vinyl 60 years old. The turntable and speakers are at least 50 years old. I’m reading poetry 168...
Peak Brain
We all have heard of “Peak Oil” and most have used the phrase “peak performance”. The first has probably passed, the second keeps increasing, judging by...
"The Gift" by Lewis Hyde - some thoughts
“A classic… If you want to write, paint, sing, compose, act, or make films, read The Gift.” That headline quote by Margaret Atwood was a significant...
My test of DALL-E produced crap.
The image above was the best result of 16 attempts, each with 4 variations. This one was in the very first set of 4. The prompt for this one was “space...
In a small minority
16% if you include the “Bad but getting better” group. The checkmark indicates for which option I voted. There are several negative factors to consider in...
Rudification
Pogo by Walt Kelly 1950 <rant ON> Corey Doctorow is credited with creating the word and concept of “enshittification” – the life cycle of social media (and...
Learning a Cakewalk
Cakewalk: “something accomplished with ease” Cakewalk: “a jazz composition by Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson”. Cakewalk: “a dance developed… …in the...
Stop calling it "AI"!
That turkey is far more intelligent than ChatGPT and all its ilk. All these so-called “intelligent chatbots” are certainly artificial by definition, and...
Seeing the Unseeable
This past week I’ve been slowly making my way through Ed Yong’s “An Immense World”. The subtitle is “How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us.”...
...it's full of stars!
For the past few days I’ve been looking at the above image as my screen background. It is a very small section of the recently released NOIRLab survey of the...
Starlink can cause our extermination
Starlink is, so far, one of Elon Musk’s success stories. Thanks to the 3,300 and counting (target: 42,000) Starlink satellites now in orbit, people in 45...
The Door Into Summer 2023
This is my birthday view from the shop office's back door. Above the door is a sign inspired by the Heinlein novel of the same name: The Door Into Summer....
Is time really passing faster?
It may be just an aspect of the human condition, particularly among those of “a certain age”. Most people I talk with are almost guarantied at some point in...