One year ago today: November 23, 2018, Help! I ate wasabi.
Five years ago today: November 23, 2014, first mention of DATEM here.
Nine years ago today: November 23, 2010, women always think it’s easy.
Random years ago today: November 23, 2008, the Jungle Queen.
You really don’t want to be outside today. I know, because neither do the doggies. Instead, it was a day for light work and lots of research. Here’s a better set of pics on the first box with integral lid. It looks pretty nice compared to a few months ago. There are still errors and one of them is that no matter how carefully I installed the hardware, the lid still springs up slightly on its own. This box has no particular purpose. But the saying goes that you never have enough storage.
Still, the box shows signs that I’m learning and I’m more convinced than ever that learning carpentry by hand is a goof concept. That’s like saying a person has to learn how to build a car before he can drive it. Even with power tools, this is a hobby that requires active moving around. I still like electronics, but I’ve found I at least equally enjoy just reading about projects. True, the field has no ceiling but I’ve been unable to find anything new in the past half-century. I’m more likely to build a lively demo or something than to study the matter in much further detail.
The tale from the trailer court that I’m a bad driver stems from the number of times I failed my driver’s test. So I was smiling to hear a report that most people in Iran also fail their tests for the same reason. It’s how you learn to drive when you are too poor to have access to a car. But as far as I know, I’m the only American who ever had to premeditatedly resort to this. But yeah, I chuckled to hear it was common practice elsewhere. Somehow, in the wealthiest continent in the history of the world, I was raised like an Iranian peasant.
Referring back to what I said last day about greed-based sharing, that was also a factor. Despite there being money everywhere, you could not leave $5 lying around because they could not be trusted not to “share” it. Permanently. Years later it is impossible to say how many important messages and job interviews I missed. Why? Because they would refuse to answer the phone while I was in the shower. Why should they “help” me when I would not “share” my paycheck with them? Zero hours driving instruction while we were the only multi-car family town. Yet I still meet people who say when I remember these things that I am “dwelling on the past”. Don’t you love my habit of using “quotation marks” out of context?
And blog rules say I must report my morning shopping trip. Heading over early to beat the Thanksgiving shoppers, I turned a run for kitty litter into a $50 shop. The shelves were getting bare, something unheard of in this country twenty years ago. And this pretty lady bumps her shopping cart into mine, I mean really, really pretty. And some twenty-five years younger. She starts to engage my in conversation and I’m glancing around for a hidden camera. This gal is drop-dead gorgeous and the items in her cart say she is for real. Guys are starting to hover nearby pretending to examine the artichokes. Her demeanor was like, so what, this happens whenever she tries to talk to a man.
TShe quickly covered that she was going to a Thanksgiving dinner full of “stuffy married types” and she picked up that I was not from around here. I think an invitation was eminent, so I said how I was already going to another function. I’ll leave the report at that because there will always be men around to call me a liar. She was for real, and she looked like Angelina Jolie, except younger, blonder, and with much smoother curves around the, uh, Magna Carta.
I got in my car to drive home. The man on the radio said, “You are listening to WLNA”. I thought, how does he know? How’s that for an old joke? YouTube has been flashing a message about new terms of service. They used that excuse to remove the auto-play button. Remember how they said if you paid $12 per month for premium service, it would eliminate the pop-ups? And wasn’t cable TV supposed to eliminate the commercials? You are dealing with Google. Suckers.
Human allergy test.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Before continuing, feast your eyes on this box. It’s a case for a propane torch that has space for extra goodies like plumbing solder, the torch assembly, flux, with room left over. If you notice, it has also passed turtle inspection. Placement of the hardware is getting better but there is still no consistent method that produces perfect results. The hinges and such, even in this late day and age, are still not self-fitting. Hey, I’m proud of this useful box, look at the rope handles. So humor me and take a good peek at it. Don’t worry, I’m already over-encouraged.
Moments later I found it. But it requires TrustedInstaller, so I’ll leave it alone for now. I forget how to use that executable program. Careful, because it works with weird code modules called property dialogs, which have a ton of unwanted side effects. To cheer things up, here’s a limerick I just recalled from boy scout days.
There once was a girl from St. Paul
Who wore a newspaper dress to a ball.
The dress caught on fire,
And burned up her entire
Front page, sports section, and all.
Then I fall for some click-bait that A.I. has finally unhorsed Shakespeare. I claimed that proof was found somebody else wrote half his works, another useful modern-day application of new technology. The MIT Tech review (no link) was bogus. It showed nothing more than what is already known. That a writer’s style changes over time and that English is such a redundant language that you can find patterns anywhere. I underline to the reader that what is being called A.I. (this blog champions the use of the periods so A.I. doesn’t look like Al) is not intelligence at all.
I programmed A.I. in 1981 on an Apple ][e. What you are seeing today is not real artificial intelligence and it cannot be made to behave like it. The code is goal-based and those goals are the sub-product of people who code, but cannot program. At most, the code I’ve read has a 10% resemblance to the real thing. And even that code shows a severe lack of innovation and imagination. Real A.I. does not have the end results embedded in the algorithms. It goes looking for them.
My instinct on this is finally being shared by some academics. One is Judea Pearl (no link) who notes current A.I. is “stuck on the level of . . . curve fitting”. How right he is. Today’s fake A.I. does not recognize ordinary data variations and picks them out as trends that support the coders pre-determined head space. I believe the term being used is “whip-sawing”. Another unfamiliar phrase is “A.I. winter”. It refers to the lull in research caused by a withdrawal of funding. The first example I’m aware of was the Georgetown experiment of 1954 that translated “hydraulic ram” into “water sheep”.
You know what I think? That the real A.I. winter will be what happens to society when C+ coding does to A.I. what it has done to computers. It creates an overwhelming mass of bad systems, too overwhelming and expensive to realistically replace. Instead, the lazy majority adapt their lifestyles to the errors and the end result is a wasteland where they can’t do anything right even if they try. They get to stew in their own juice just like you see the social media doing today with the privacy they gave away without a fight.
ADDENDUM
Here’s a photo of leaf caught in the morning sunshine. A nice bright color to set off the drab scenery of the past while. That’s my artistic eye for today. It’s the sunlight, the rest of the landscape has become drab, camouflage colors. That’s the tree house in the background that is too high to reach without a big ladder.
That’s the entire thrust of today’s NPR news coverage, where you get to hear music that you would never really get to hear any place else. Sponsored today by a company that sells “ethically produced” Christmas ornaments. I get some of my raunchiest stage humor from their attempts at euphemisms. Other material, too, like I am the club secretary, but not the receptionist, who I learned today is known as the “Vice-Director of First Impressions”.
