Category: personal
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Facetious blueprint
An AI researcher (Kai-Fu Lee) has written an article (“A Blueprint for Coexistence with Artificial Intelligence“) that fails at its own goal, spectacularly. He assures us we need not end up in the dystopias so common in movies and literature. And I wanted to his assurances to be convincing, because I happen to feel the…
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Lunacon 2014 (2): Saturday
Even though Lunacon is over, I’m going to keep writing up my notes and impressions, if only to keep writing in general. Saturday was the busiest day of the con, and it certainly showed in my personal programming grid. I faced the typical con paradox: Too many good panels all at the same time. I…
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Marc Cohn @ The City Winery, 2012 Jan 26
{This has apparently been sitting in my Drafts folder for four years. Oops. I never finished it, so it ends abruptly. -=-BLG} It’s been a while (a real long while) since I’ve gotten to a Marc Cohn show, but this one was worth it. He played the City Winery, which is an odd hybrid of…
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On riots, protests, and the legitimacy of violence (short)
For everyone who has counseled the citizens of Baltimore (and Ferguson and…) that “violence is not the answer” and that it would be better if everyone just protested peacefully: 1) As has now been documented extensively, the protests were by and large peaceful — and even more by and large, ignored by the national media.…
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What explains the waning influence of research blaming black poverty on black culture
Vox has an article purporting to explore “The real reason research blaming black poverty on black culture has fallen out of favor”. And it’s fine so far as it goes, but it still dances around the reality. Why has “blaming black poverty on black culture has fallen out of favor”? Because the same dire straits and…
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Review: Doctor Who Season 8 Episode 8: Mummy on the Orient Express
Meh. Haven’t we been here before?
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Review: Doctor Who Season 8 Episode 1 “Deep Breath”
I finally got around to watching Season 8 Episode 1 (“Deep Breath”) of the revived Doctor Who. It’s the first one with Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. (What do we call him, anyway? Is he the 12th Doctor, even though we know that Matt Smith‘s 11 was really the twelfth?) So it’s probably worth a…
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What is a library?
I am far from the first to ask this question in an increasingly-electronic age, and I am sure that my answer will be far from unique. But my wife and I have batted the question around a couple of times and I wanted to get my thoughts down. The proximate cause of our discussion was…
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The persistence of “factory”-style schools
Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute asks “Why Do ‘Anti-Corporatists’ Defend Factory-Style Leadership?” There’s a lot in there I’d like to respond to; here’s my first swing at it. It’s easy to blame hidebound educators for educational malaise, and some of the blame lands justly. But you cannot begin to understand the problem until…
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All good things may come to an end, but you can sometimes revisit them
Today (2014 May 23) is the 20th anniversary of the airing of “All Good Things…”, the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It cannot be denied that this series is directly responsible for the resurgence of American sci-fi on television – without the Enterprise-D, there would have been no Babylon 5, no Stargate,…