Minnie at bedtime. She wants details about our planetary defenses.

I enjoyed the first episode of “Lucky Hank,” a dark comedy starring Bob Odenkirk as the chair of the English Department of a mediocre and minuscule northeastern college. He is going through a midlife crisis. It’s based on a novel I thoroughly enjoyed by one of my favorite writers, “Straight Man,” by Richard Russo.

Julie hated the episode. We are negotiating whether she is required by our marriage bylaws to give the show one episode more or two before she nopes out.

We saw a bobcat on the paved trail while I was out walking the dog at Lake Murray this afternoon.

It was about 50 feet away and moving perpendicular across the trail at a fast trot, so I only saw it for a second or two. It wanted very little to do with us. The feeling was mutual.

It was at the end of our walk. Minnie was very alert until we got to the car a few minutes later. So was I.

“Toilet meal” is the Japanese practice of eating meals in “toilet rooms”—public bathrooms—to get a little valuable alone time, or because they don’t have anybody to eat with and they don’t want to be seen eating alone. wikipedia.org

“The Mariko Aoki phenomenon (青木まりこ現象, Aoki Mariko genshō) is a Japanese expression referring to a sudden urge to defecate that is felt upon entering bookstores.” wikipedia.org

If I was a Mandalorian, I would wait until the other Mandalorians were eating, and then I would say “this is the way” to them, so they would have to say “this is the way” back with a mouth full of food.

If I was a Mandalorian, I would wait until the other Mandalorians had their helmets off, and then fill their helmets with cottage cheese.

I would be an unpopular Mandalorian.

Now, guys with zero game can try their luck with CupidBots. For $15 a month, an AI algorithm will pick out women for them on their dating app of choice, based on their previous swipes…. The AI then masquerades as the man behind the dating profile, and continues to talk and flirt with its unsuspecting target, until the woman agrees to a date or to share their number. At that point, the app sends a notification to the user telling them about the date it just secured for them. And no, at no point does the bot disclose its nonhuman nature.

futurism.com

Margaret Atwood: What I Read

I like to feel that I can tell an apple from a pear, and I don’t expect from the pear what I might expect from the apple. In other words, if I’m reading Conan the Conqueror I’m not demanding that it be Middlemarch.

We had our bathrooms remodeled in 2017, and I have finally figured out how to work the light switches in my bathroom.

I was a gifted child.

I saw these two tiny girls while walking Minnie yesterday. We literally died from the cute.

The turmoil at Sarasota Memorial, one of Florida’s largest public hospitals, began last year after three candidates running on a platform of “health freedom” won seats on the nine-member board that oversees the hospital. Board meetings, once sleepy, started drawing hundreds of angry people who, like the new members, denounced the hospital’s treatment protocols for Covid-19.

An internal review last month found that Sarasota Memorial did far better than some of its competitors in saving Covid patients’ lives. But that did little to quell detractors, whose campaign against the hospital has not relented. By then, the hospital had become the latest public institution under siege by an increasingly large and vocal right-wing contingent in one of Florida’s most affluent counties, where a backlash to pandemic policies has started reshaping local government.

— Patricia Mazzei, nytimes.com

Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland.

In September, my family and I move from our home in Dublin to a fancy East Coast college town, where I’ll be teaching for the semester. I grew up in Dublin, which means I have a wide circle of friends to draw on whenever I’m let out of the house. The street where I live is friendly: If I want to borrow a spatula or I need someone to look after my cat, I have only to ask.

Life is different for us in the U.S. We have, for the first time, a basement. But we have no friends. It seems as if none of the permanent faculty can afford to live in the suburb where the university has placed us. We technically have neighbors, but we never see them; they manifest only in the form of their gardeners, who are at work every day with their leaf blowers.

It’s in this strange scenario — alone on a continent, cut off from everyone I know — that I decide to try the metaverse for the first time. A whole galaxy of pals brought right to your living room? I think. Why not?

Funny, insightful, and moving.

By Paul Murray. nymag.com

Margaret Atwood: “The bathroom is a place where you can go in and pretend to be doing one thing while actually you’re reading. Nobody can interrupt you. Compendiums of this and that are very useful for bathroom reading: small reading packages within a larger book. You wouldn’t want to read War and Peace in there. You’d never come out. They’d probably call the police and get the door broken down.” wikipedia.org

“Horny bro conservatism:” Republicans are trying to win over a new generation of sexually libertine young men. “What if some conservatives aren’t longing for Ronald Reagan’s heyday but for the time when women were hotter, you could put up a topless calendar in your cubicle at the office without fear of reprisal from some mean H.R. lady, and nobody told you what to do?”

— Jane Coaston: The Debate Hugh Hefner Won and William Buckley Lost nytimes.com

Jamelle Bouie: “The people who blame wokeness for the collapse of a bank do not want you to understand or even think about the political economy of banking in the United States. They want to deflect your attention from the real questions toward a manufactured cultural conflict. And the reason they want to do this is to obscure the extent to which they and their allies are complicit in — or responsible for — creating an environment in which banks collapse for lack of appropriate regulation.” nytimes.com

Democrats contribute to this environment as well. They rush to make SVB’s depositors whole, but when the poor and middle class are struggling, Democrats sigh and say they wish they could do more.

A court will decide whether antifa is a political movement or criminal conspiracy. usatoday.com

I’m skeptical whether antifa even exists. It’s a right-wing fantasy, like wokism and LGBTQ groomers.

MSNBC viewers seem mostly interested in which books his supporters want removed from elementary school libraries, how he’s treating The Walt Disney Company, and which Miami venues might lose their liquor licenses from having drag performances in spaces open to children. And certainly, DeSantis has put a lot of energy into stirring up those and other culture wars. But he’s also raised teacher pay, cut tolls on highways, and spent money on Everglades restoration. He has demonstrated a broad awareness that voters care about the basic operations of government and how those affect their daily lives, and he’s focused on getting them to feel satisfied with the way he’s overseeing the actual government.

— Is Ron DeSantis Savvy Or Not? www.joshbarro.com

Every time I play with FeedLand I come away thinking it’s a basic web-based RSS reader, of which there are already quite a few. Other than all of your subscriptions being public, how is Feedland different from Feedly, Feedbin, Inoreader, NewsBlur, etc.?

It does far less than those other guys, which means it’s simpler. And sometimes simplicity is itself a feature. Is that the appeal?

45 minutes to try to create a COBRA account and it turned out the problem was my password needed a special character.

Isn’t that special?

That, and reviewing COBRA paperwork has been my morning so far.

Title for a proposed spinoff series starring Captain Shaw and the Titan: “Star Trek: Just a Dipshit From Chicago.”

What is “wuthering”? As in, “Wuthering Heights”? What are the heights doing?

This season of Picard is some of the most enjoyable Star Trek ever.

We need a spinoff series featuring Captain Shaw and the Titan. I love him. His motto: “To boldly go where no one has gone before … kvetching the whole time.”

Todd Stashwick, who plays Shaw, is a terrific character actor; I’ve had my eye on him since he played the villain on a series called “The Riches,” that aired briefly 2007-8, starring Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver. (They played Americans and the series was set in the US, oddly.)

Michelle Forbes is another great character actor. More of Commander Ro Laren, please.

I love the chemistry between Raffi and Worf.

Michael Dorn has appeared on more Trek episodes than any other actor. More than William Shatner, more than Patrick Stewart, more than anyone. Worf is the Detective Munch of the 24th Century.

This morning I learned what the name is for the genre of music that the cantina band plays in “Star Wars,” and now I want to go back to bed and start the day over.

My process for getting ready to walk in the rain, and getting myself and the dog dry when we get back, has become so elaborate that I think I can now refer to it as a “workflow,” and describe all my rain gear as a “tech stack.”

I saw a big fat squirrel sitting on the steel fence just outside my office window, licking rainwater off the top of the railing. It stayed there a good long time.

I keep a Nikon with a moderately long lens on my desk next to me for just such wildlife encounters as these. Critters like our backyard. But I had put stuff in front of the camera since the last time I used it, and couldn’t get the camera free before the squirrel scampered off.

Lately when I see something striking, it’s a struggle for me: Take the photo? Or just be in the moment and appreciate the thing I’m looking at?

That’s a false distinction though. Whatever you do, you’re in the moment. Knowing that can make the choice more clear. What do you want to be doing? Looking at the thing? Maybe the thing is an activity you could be participating in–do you want to do that? Or do you want to take the photo?

Whoah, I didn’t realize this was going to get philosophical. Bringing it back to the main point: I saw a squirrel up close.

I’ve heard great things about “Children of Time,” by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and I’ve started reading it, but I’m finding it tough to get into.

The book is science fiction, set on a planet that was terraformed by ancient humans and is now dominated by intelligent spiders.

So far, the book focuses on a bunch of uninspiring humans doing uninteresting things.

Where are the spiders, Adrian? I’m here for the spiders!

The Silicon Valley Bank bailout is yet another example of the old adage, attributed to Martin Luther King, that we have socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else.

If you’re rich and you’re at risk of going broke, the US government comes running with its checkbook wide open.

If you’re struggling with medical debt, or you’re homeless because you can’t afford to pay for housing, or you’re a college grad who’s struggling to pay off their student loan: Fuck you.

Cory Doctorow: Learning from Silicon Valley Bank’s apologists

Staunchly anti-LGBTQ+ Tennessee Lt. Gov. Randy McNally is pausing his social media use after he was caught leaving bawdy, flirty comments on the Instagram posts of a gay man who poses nude.

Tennessee has been a leader in passing anti-LGBTQ legislation and laws banning drag shows. (You know who else led the world in that kind of thing? The Nazis.)

McNally told ABC affiliate WKRN in a statement that he has “long been active on social media” and engaged with constituents via posts, comments and messages. He said the comments on these posts “are no different.”

“While I see now that I should have been more careful about how my comments and activity would be perceived, my intent was always engagement and encouragement,” he said in the statement

It’s nothing new for anti-LGBTQ Republican wannabe Nazis to get caught doing gay shit, but it’s new for them to simply flat-out deny that it’s gay, and Tennessee is leading that trend. Gov. Bill Lee has been a leader in passing idiotic and persecutory anti-drag legislation. After Lee’s own teen drag exploits were discovered, he claimed they were absolutely not the same thing, and scolded reporters for drawing equivalents, when in fact they are exactly the same.

I’m trying Orion, a third-party web browser for Macs, iPhones, and iPads.

It’s based on Safari, and very Safari-like.

It runs many Chrome and Firefox extensions, supposedly even on the iPhone and iPad.

Orion supports vertical tree-style tabs, which I tried with Microsoft Edge and like quite a lot, even though they can be a little confusing.

Very nice!

It Took Me Nearly 40 Years To Stop Resenting Ke Huy Quan

A terrific and thoughtful essay by Walter Chaw about internalized racism and why Ke Huy Quan is a great role model. As a Jewish man, I find this very relatable.

Given the choice of playing along or protesting, I played along. I’m great at the Asian accent as minstrelry. When I do it for my white friends even today, it never fails to bring a laugh. Assimilation was the goal, and even though I could never hide my physical difference, I could at least laugh along with their enthusiastic recognition of my perpetual alienness. I think I wouldn’t be a writer at all if I hadn’t dedicated all of my energy into being very good at English, my second language. If I couldn’t pass the sight test, perhaps I could pass the reading one. Humor branded me as not one of those “sensitive” Asians, as a guy who wouldn’t make you feel uncomfortable about asking where I was really from, and where I’m really from is Golden, Colorado. Golden is a mining town, and to this day and despite its profound gentrification, it still has a giant wooden banner spanning its main street that says “Howdy Folks!” I have spent most of my life trying to divorce myself from my parents’ culture. They’re both dead now and they went before I was strong and stable enough to repair any of the damage I did. Honestly, none of us ever had the emotional language to do the work.

Minnie spent Saturday morning to Sunday evening at Camp Bow Wow. She has a lot to process

My brilliant joke about dog Viagra this morning did not get the acclaim I anticipated. I’m disappointed in all of you.

Gold. I’m wasting comedy gold on you people.

We went away Saturday night.

Here’s a view from our hotel window. I question whether this pastrami is, in fact, world famous.

I went to a party and the host had an elderly dog with a heart condition, being treated with Viagra. I took one of the dog’s pills and spent the rest of the night trying to hump people’s legs.

I was preoccupied while shaving this morning, and I realized when I was nearly done that I had shaved using soap instead of shaving cream.

And it was fine. No difference.

I feel I’ve been duped by the shaving cream cartel my whole life.

With Captain Shaw’s attitude, he’s definitely Generation X. Also, Vadic’s hair is awful She needs a spa day.

Shower thought: The 1968 episode of the original Star Trek that guest-starred Teri Garr is a Doctor Who ripoff.

That’s the episode where the Enterprise travels back in time to 1968, and encounters an advanced humanoid alien named Gary Seven, who may or may not be mucking around with Earth history.

And now I want to see an episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” featuring the Doctor, played by Matt Smith, and Jenna Coleman as Clara Oswald.

While the dog and I were walking at the park, a gentleman wearing a Batman helmet and cape sped by on his bicycle.

I respected his commitment to cosplay, but he was going too fast, on a path used by both bicyclists and pedestrians, human and dog, and all ages and ability levels.

I’m trying Microsoft Edge as my primary browser, after hearing Federico Viticci rave about it on the Macstories podcast. He also loved Arc, but I need a browser that syncs with my iPad and iPhone.

There’s a new version of the Castro podcast player, which is nice, but holy cow the version notes make no sense.

Janice Eberly, a “corporate ghoul who helped Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner steal Americans' houses on behalf of the bankers who destroyed the world economy in 2008,” seems likely to be tapped by Biden an open seat on the Federal Reserve Board.

Cory Doctorow:

Eberly helped throw millions of Americans into the street in order to reward reckless banks, already wildly profitable banks, with even more profit.

…

Personnel are policy. Eberly has explained, in excruciating detail, exactly what policy she favors – policy that rewards reckless speculation by incinerating the life chances of everyday Americans. Appointing her to the Federal Reserve board would be a giant Fuck You from the Biden admin to every person who got their home stolen by a bank.

Pluralistic: Biden set to appoint mass foreclosure cheerleader to the Fed (06 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Science definitely hasn’t figured things out, and that’s what makes it exciting. There are all sorts of blindingly obvious things we still don’t know.

Why do we sleep, anyway? Why does every living thing seem to sleep? Even microscopic organisms demonstrate sleep-like behavior.

Theory says time travel should be possible. In fact, theory says there’s no difference between the past, present, and future. Obviously that’s not the case. What’s up with that?

Our common sense is based on extremely parochial conditions. We are these tiny little creatures living in a micro-instant of time, and the universe contains multitudes that are both vastly bigger and smaller than we are,. A lot of it moves a lot faster than we do. Get down to the subatomic scale, or up to the interstellar scale, and things are very, very different.

Twitter is far too angry and I have to ration it. Same with Mastodon. People are outraged all the time. This is probably due to the people I follow rather than anything built into the platforms. I am not motivated to find other people to follow. I’ve got other things to do.

On the other hand, I find Facebook to be mostly a positive place, and I like it.

This is completely the opposite of the common wisdom among the extremely online millennials who I follow. They’re all convinced that Mastodon, the Fediverse, and Discord are islands of sunshine and Facebook is a iniquitous pit of Boomers doing nothing but swapping Qanon theories and minion memes.

I’m amused to see that New Balance sneakers are now the cutting edge of fashion. I’ve been buying New Balance shoes for decades. I wear them when I walk, which I do for a bit more than 3 miles daily.

A few years ago I read that New Balance shoes were hopelessly dorky and middle aged, and I have to admit I felt self-conscious about that.

But now New Balance shoes are hip and trendy and I can wear them proudly.

I’ve been played by imposter scams a few times. I was only duped for a few minutes—once for a half hour—and I caught on before sending money, so all I lost was time. Maybe next time I won’t be as smart or lucky.

Scammers are using AI to perpetrate “imposter scams.” The voice sounds like a family member or other loved one, and claims to need money to get out of trouble.

If a loved one tells you they need money, put that call on hold and try calling your family member separately… If a suspicious call comes from a family member’s number, understand that too can be spoofed. Never pay people in gift cards, because those are hard to trace…. and be wary of any requests for cash.

Scammers are now using AI to sound like family members. It’s working. By Pranshu Derma at The Washington Post

Fox News is

a purported news organization that knowingly and repeatedly reports lies to its viewers, whose chief executive brazenly works with and assists one party’s candidates by sharing confidential information about the other. What has always been the tell about Fox News is the tagline and motto: fair and balanced. The operation’s very branding is an aggressive bit of trolling. An unabashedly partisan and ideological operation selling itself under the heading of “fair and balanced.” It’s less a lie than a knowing taunt.

… One of the things that is clear from the very start of the conservative movement was a basic failure to quite understand the thing they rallied themselves against, the history that in Bill Buckley’s famous phrase he was standing athwart and yelling “Stop!” None of the organizations that the right took issue with — the think tanks, the news publications, the movie studios, the nonprofits, the book publishers — were ideological, let alone partisan, organizations. When the founders of modern conservatism looked at CBS News they saw the shock troops of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Same with Brookings and the Washington Post and all the rest. And when they went to build their own versions of these institutions they patterned them off their own cartoonish understandings of how these operations functioned. The idea that institutions like CBS News or The New York Times were, whatever their faults and unexamined biases, fundamentally rooted in an ethic of news gathering and reporting was really totally lost on them.

The Deep Archeology of Fox News - TPM – Talking Points Memo

The Mandolorians are a race of people repeatedly almost decimated by genocide who now live scattered across the galaxy. These rootless cosmopolitans sometimes blend into their new societies. More often, however, they’re forced to support themselves by turning to professions their societies despise.

— Is The Mandalorian a Space Jew?, by Nathan Abrams on JewThink. Abrams is quoting Charlotte Gartenberg in The Tablet.

Harrison Ford is Jewish? If I knew that, I forgot.

Gentleman on Twitter posts his “sleep stack”—12 products and three practices he uses to sleep. Ryan Broderick is befuddled:

The “sleep stack” tweet has really thrown me. The fact the user tagged all the products he’s using. The fact he called it a “stack,” as in a “tech stack”. The fact other people in the replies are sharing their own “sleep stacks” as if this is totally normal. I think there’s a growing subset of people — especially in America — that want to both optimize and also commodify every part of their lives. I think some of these people feel a genuine discomfort when they do something that doesn’t involve spending money or buying products. Anyways, the best “sleep stack” I ever heard was from Steve Harvey back when he used to host a morning radio show and it was “a Benadryl and some silk underwear.”

The tweet..

jwz: Welcome to year four of 14 days to flatten the curve..

The pandemic is still killing 11,000 people per month in the US alone, but supposedly it’s over. I guess that’s what “over” means now.

If you choose to stand around inside a crowded room without wearing a mask — I think you’re a fucking idiot.

Turns out, nearly every person I know is a fucking idiot.

I do not claim to be smarter than anybody else about this. I’m no more careful than anybody else. I stay home more than most people, but that’s my nature.

Just now I was unsuccessful trying to eat lunch and I realized after multiple failed attempts that I was holding the spoon upside down and that’s how thing are going lately.

I saw these ducks in a puddle. Not to be confused with snakes in a plane. 📷

On our walk today, the dog and I got caught in a surprise and intense hailstorm

We were at Lake Murray, about a mile from home. It came on in seconds, and hit hard, a barrage of pellets the size of BBs. Uncomfortable for us both. We took shelter in the lee of the snack bar adjacent to the Kiowa Street parking lot.

The storm passed in 10-15 minutes and we moved on, both pretty wet. I hadn’t worn rain gear, because the forecast called for rain in the morning but not the afternoon.

I’m continually impressed by what a tough little dog Minnie is. She can’t have been happy being hammered by ice BBs—I know I wasn’t—but her attitude was, “All right, we’re doing this now I guess.”

I was taking this photo of the lake at the precise moment the storm hit. When I took my phone out of my pocket, no precipitation. Seconds later: heavy hail.

That white stuff on the ground in the second photo is hail.

Father of cellphone sees dark side but also hope in new tech (AP / Kelvin Chan)

94-year-old Marty Cooper, credited with inventing the mobile phone in 1973, sees dark sides but also hope in new technology

Cooper talks with the Associated Press about the mobile industry’s current and future directions and challenges.

As for his own phone use, Cooper says he checks email and does online searches for information to settle dinner table arguments.
> However, “there are many things that I have not yet learned,” he said. “I still don’t know what TikTok is.”

Cooper received a lifetime achievement award this week at the international Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the industry’s biggest conference.

MWC attracts 120,000+ people. Imagine going to an event like that and knowing all those people are there because of you.

Do you have a Zoom shirt?

When was the last time you laundered it?

Micro.blog does not show follower counts. It doesn’t tell you when somebody follows you. It has no concept of a like or favorite.

There are definite benefits to this system.

But there is one big drawback: Because I get very few replies to my mb posts, it feels like I’m talking to myself. On Facebook and Tumblr, I get a lot of likes. On Mastodon, I get fewer, but I get ‘em. This interaction lets me know that somebody’s listening.

Soon you’ll be able to see a restoration of one of the most infamous movies ever made: Guccione’s 1980 “Caligula.” (Boing Boing / Mark Frauenfelder)

Thomas Negovan, a musician and songwriter, has been working on the project for three years, based on the original camera negatives and location audio. He wants to create a movie that conforms to the original vision and Gore Vidal script.

“Caligula” was filmed in 1976 as a big-budget indy movie, with an impressive cast including Malcomlm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, and Helen Mirren, and budget twice the size of Star Wars.

But then Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione took over, threw out the original script, and added explicit sex scenes without the consent of the other creators. Guccione filmed the sex scenes secretly on the movie sets.

Negovan is using the original camera negatives and location audio, enhanced with AI. He created a five-minute video explaining his work—it looks great and I’m looking forward to seeing this movie, which may be a lost masterpiece.

Here’s the teaser trailer:

The Horror of Realizing Everyone Can See Your Work Calendar Entries Naptime. Call Mom. Some employees are shocked to discover how much they are revealing; is this your first colonoscopy? (WSJ)

An enjoyable and informative article–but an odd one.

When I’ve been employed at companies with shared calendar servers, I have always assumed the details of my corporate calendar were open to my colleagues. If there’s an event I don’t want my colleagues to know the details about, I don’t put it on the calendar.

I keep a personal calendar for personal events. When I have to take time off work in the middle of the day for a personal reason, I just put a calendar event called “BLOCKED” on my corporate calendar, and put the details on my personal calendar.

How ‘The Last of Us’ Cherishes a Bygone World. (By Shirley Li at The Atlantic)

The characters of “The Last of Us” are mourning for the world we live in, and the show helps us appreciate that we’re still living here.

You and I may think of shopping malls as suburban eyesores and monuments to kitsch, but that’s because we take them for granted.

Fans were over the moon for the third episode, featuring Nick Offerman. I thought it was good but not great. But this episode lived up to the hype.

The Case for a Primary Challenge to Joe Biden (By Mark Leibovich at The Atlantic)

Yes. Biden has been an excellent President—but that’s not good enough. The US needs better than excellence. We need a great President, a transformative President, a Roosevelt or Lincoln.

And Biden has failed in several ways as President. He has done a terrible job at Covid.

And has not done enough to break up the domination of big business in our national lives. Ask the people of East Palestine about that. Yeah, sure, Trump set the policy that allowed that disaster to happen—but the Biden administration has had plenty of time to fix that policy, and they didn’t. Indeed, during a showdown between labor and the railroad companies, Biden came down for the railroad companies.

And there’s the matter of his age. I’m staunchly anti-ageist—but Biden will be 82 when he’s sworn in for his next term. That’s old.

So let’s have a good primary competition and see if Biden is up for the rigors of a rough-and-tumble election, and his second term.

I’ll support whichever Democrat gets the nomination.

How old are you in your head?

According to research, most adults feel 20% younger than their actual age.

This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.

She is 76.

— The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are, by Jennifer Senior at The Atlantic.

I’m conflicted about the premise of this article. It makes sense, but it also seems possibly ageist. Like being old is bad so we are in denial about our age and think we’re younger than we really are.

I’m 61. I don’t have a precise number for how old I am in my head, but 80% of 61 is 48, and that feels about right. I feel like I’m somewhere in the 36-52-year-old range. It helps that I’m healthy and fit.1

As a number, 61 seems elderly to me, but I think that’s just my internal conditioning growing up. Internalized ageism. Rather than think of myself as being younger than I am, I try to redefine what my age means. It means whatever I want it to mean, and whatever my mind and body are capable of making it mean.

But that will only work for a while. Twenty-five years ago, I was about the same as I am today, only with a crappier phone. In 25 years, I will be an old man, and no amount of positive thinking will change that.

  1. That’s weird for me to say, because I used to be a fat, sedentary, junk-food-eating chainsmoker. I am not intending here to disparage fat, sedentary, junk-food-eating chainsmokers, except to say they tend not to be healthy when they are 61 years old. ↩︎

I’m trying to avoid having opinions about the Scott Adams news, or even thinking about it. I’m not doing too well with that.

The metaverse hype bubble popped. What now?

I wrote this:

By now, we were all expecting to be wearing Oculus headsets and piloting legless avatars floating in virtual worlds of dragons, robots, and spaceships. Instead, here we are in a new world of tech austerity, with massive layoffs sweeping the industry. So the metaverse is dead, right?

Wrong. The hype bubble has collapsed. But the metaverse is growing.

“Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine,” published in 1958, was one of my favorite books when I was a little kid. I read and reread it many times.

It’s a book about a boy and his friends who teach a computer to do their homework. They read to the machine from their textbooks.

That’s not how computers actually worked …until recently, when voice recognition and machine learning has caught up to 65-year-old kiddie sci-fi.

I’ve been thinking about that book quite a bit recently. And so has David Owen at The New Yorker.

What a Sixty-Five-Year-Old Book Teaches Us About A.I.