A speculative mind

If you have never seen it, you should really try to watch an old TV series from the 1970’s called I Claudius . I Claudius was a BBC miniseries that I believe first made its appearance on American television on Masterpiece Theater. The series is based on the books I Claudius , and Claudius the God by Robert Graves and gives us a look inside the Roman Empire from the middle of the reign of Augustus through the reign of Claudius. The emperor Claudius was called Claudius the Stammerer, or Claudius the Idiot. A stammerer he was, but if we are to believe Graves, Claudius was no idiot. We follow the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula (yes, that Caligula) and Claudius. Most histories about the early Roman Empire use Tacitus as their source. Tacitus was a man of facts, names and dates (though he was not above throwing in a cutting remark now and then. When Graves wrote I Claudius he based his novelization of this period on the writings of Suetonius. In contrast to Tacitus, Suetoni...

The series Fringe ran on Fox television from 2008 to 2013. It was a science fiction show about FBI agents investigating other worldly technology and events. When I tried explaining that to a friend he said, “so you mean like The X-Files ?” And I am like No, it’s not like X-Files . . .   Okay I guess it does kind of sound like it. But it really was not like The X-Files . First of all it was different in tone. X-Files had a darker, atmospheric tone to it. To me it felt like Fringe was a bit more grounded in the real world. (If I can say that with a straight face about a show with parallel dimensions, teleportation, creatures who could stop or alter time, and a mad scientist who insisted a live cow reside in their Harvard laboratory . . .   but it felt more grounded to me.) Also Fringe felt like it was going somewhere. The mystery was slowly revealed and eventually resolved. With The X-Files (much as I loved the show) it always felt like we were falling down the rabbi...

There is a big push to build self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles. This push is technology driven, but it is not the technology of the cars or the artificial intelligence or the sensors that make it work. No. What is driving this is the technology of hand-held electronic devices: Cell phones, I-pods, tablets, and the like. It is the inability of people to put these devices down when logic dictates that you should not be looking at them. Like for example, when you are driving, or walking across the street, or operating heavy equipment. Common sense would seem to indicate that these are potentially hazardous activities and perhaps it might be better to hold off on answering that text message instead of responding to it this very minute. But people are stupid. I say this with some authority. Just read the paper every day. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if the stupid people just killed or maimed themselves , but how many innocent people have died because of the action...