Monthly Archives: December 2024

Happy Belated Blogversary to Me.

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As of this past November 29, have been blogging here for 23 years. I take breaks because I often these days I have nothing to say. I’ve been looking over some of my old posts, when I did have something to say. Here is one of my favorites, posted in 2006, before I moved to Massachusetts:

One For The Girls

I look out my rear window and all I can see is the monstrous cab of a bright and shiny red eighteen wheeler. He’s practically crawling up my spoiler. I’m in the left lane on a two-lane stretch of the Mass Pike. I’m driving back from a couple of nights helping out my daughter and the day is gloriously just spring.

I’m on cruise control, two car lengths behind the car in front of me — in front of which are a couple of big delivery trucks. To the right of us are an empty car-carrier and another truck. I can’t move into the right lane. I pump my brakes, but the monster cab is so close to my rear that he probably can’t see them. We all drive along that way for a while, the trucks setting the speed, the red monster cab threatening to gobble me up.

There’s finally an opening in the right lane, and we two cars take it. The trucks take off in front of us, passing each other in some kind of bizzare tag game as they disappear into the distance.

It’s so warm that I open my sun roof, loving the freedom of the road, radio station surfing to find some music that suits my mood. I settle on Country. It reminds me of my carefree adolescence hanging out with a bunch of guys who had a country western band. They taught me the only three guitar chords I know, the ones that suit just about every Everly Brothers tune — at least the ones that were popular during the 50s. As I continue my controlled cruising, I tap my foot to the simple rhythms of songs about old cars and lost loves and I sip at my bottle of cold Starbuck’s Mocha. Life is good.

And then it gets better. I zoom by (just a bit over the speed limit) the big bad bright red monster eighteen wheeler, along with three of the other trucks, pulled over to the side of the road by a blue light blinking police car. I’m tempted to beep or wave out my open sunroof; I opt for discretion. Then Martina McBride comes on with This One’s for the Girls, and by the time she gets around to singing the chorus for the second time, I’m singing it with her:

This one’s for the girls
Who’ve ever had a broken heart
Who’ve wished upon a shooting star
You’re beautiful the way you are
This one’s for the girls
Who love without holdin’ back
Who dream with everything they have
All around the world

Now both feet are tappin’. I’m dancin’ in my seat.
It’s a good day.

Abyss Walkers

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There is a fraternity of us, the abyss walkers….
from “Outer Banks” by Anne Rivers Siddons

There is a fraternity of us, the abyss walkers. In our eyes, the world is divided by it, made up of those who walk frail, careening rope bridges over the abysses and those who do not. We know each other. I do not think it is a concsious thing with us, this knowing, at least not most of the time, or we would flee from each other as from montsers. It is an animal thing. It is only on that wild old neck-prickling level that we meet. It is only in our eyes that we acknowledge that our twin exhalations have touched and mingled. Sometimes, though not often, one of the others, the non-abyss people, will know us too. You may even know the feeling yourself; you may have met someone about whom otherness clings like miasma; you can feel it on your skin though you can’t name it. When that happens, you have me one of us. You may even be one of us, down deep and in secret. The other half of the world, the solid, golden half, the non-abyssers…they feel nothing under their feet but solidity. They inherit the earth. We inherit the wind.

Have a chat with MIT’s debunking bot.

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A team of MIT researchers has made public a link to an AI bot designed to debunk conspiracy theories.

This study is investigating how humans and artificial intelligence algorithms interact. In the study, you will answer questions and have a back and forth discussion with an artificial intelligence algorithm. If you give us permission by saying yes below, we plan to discuss/publish the results in an academic forum. In any publication, information will be provided in such a way that you cannot be identified.

You don’t necessarily have to ask it about a conspiracy theory; it will answer every question with super-intelligent logic and a thorough explanation. For example, I asked it if aliens from space visited our planet eons ago and had an effect on our evolution. I also asked if there was an “afterlife.” It scientifically explained both issues in detail.

Go debunkbot.com to try it out.

And if you do, please leave a comment here about how it worked for you.

After We Crash and Burn

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After the next four years of the crashing and burning of our democratic government, hopefully, we will be able to rebuild into a better America. But the challenges we will be facing will be unprecedented, and I can’t begin to imagine how we will rise from those ashes.

One of the challenges was predicted in a book I read back in the late 90s, The End of Work. I am re-reading it now and will share some of the ideas put forth in the book.

In the meanwhile, this is from the back of the book:

Rifkin argues that we are entering a new phase in history — one characterized by the steadily and inevitable decline of jobs. Sophisticated computers, robotics telecommunications, and other Information Age technologies are fast replacing human beings in virtually every sector and industry. Near-workerless factories and virtual companies loom on the horizon.

While the emerging “knowledge sector” and new markets abroad will create some new jobs, they will be too few to absorb the vast numbers of workers displaced by the new technologies

Rethinking the nature of work is likely to be the single most pressing concern facing society in the decades to come.

Rifkin warns that the end of work could mean the demise of civilization as we have come to know it, or signal the beginning of a great social transformation and a rebirth of the human spirit.

The book does not even mention the threats of Artificial Intelligence, which makes his argument even more relevant.

His projections and suggestions offer hope to all of those future unemployable citizens and are especially important to those elderly, disabled and/or homeless individuals who, even today, suffer without a safety net.