A speculative mind

The newly discovered comet Neowise has been in the sky recently. Our state has been blessed with good weather, so everyone who wants to can see it. Well, everyone except for those of us who live on the coast. We get clouds every night. But Friday night it looked like we might get a break. There were high, wispy clouds but we thought it might be possible. My wife and I went outside just after sunset and walked around the block. Too much light. We walked around it again. Too much light. We walked around again. I got my binoculars out and scanned the northwest sky. All total, we were out there about 45 minutes, but we found nothing. My wife went to bed and about 15 minutes later I tried again. Now it was certainly  dark enough. I could see the Big Dipper (one of the landmarks for finding the comet) but only faintly. This close to the ocean, there is always a haze that rises up from the west. The dipper was barely peaking out through the haze and that did not bode well for the ...

Why is it that some artistic endeavors survive the test of time better than others? If you have been on this Earth for more than thirty years, this is probably something that you have experienced first-hand. Music, movies, or TV shows that seemed great when you were a kid, make you cringe now. You can’t blame it all on the fact that the show or music was aimed at a young audience and you are an adult now. No, some of it just didn’t age well. Sometimes it can be blamed on changing cultural sensibilities. James Bond’s quasi-raping of Pussy Galore doesn’t go over as well today as it did in 1965. In fact, the early James Bond films had a lot of moments like that. I truly do cringe when I see that now, and I know I didn’t the first time I saw it. The later James Bond films still objectified women, but at least the rapeyness was gone. Similarly, minority stereotypes are a tough sell to today’s audience, like dumbed down black servants that were played for comic relief in 1940’s m...

Inevitably, whenever I tell anyone I write a blog they always ask me what the focus of my blog is. I scrunch my eyes and mumble that my blog doesn’t really have a focus. It is eclectic. Yes, it is. One week I may write about science fiction. The next week it may be Biology. The next week it may be about writing. Another week may be about art, and on and on. I haven’t exhausted the variety of topics yet. It truly is a mixed bag. I write about whatever I feel like writing about for that week. There is a down side to that. It is not the best way to build a following for my blog. Many bloggers write to a single focus. There are food bloggers, travel bloggers, style bloggers, book bloggers etc. These bloggers often have a dedicated following of people who are interested in that topic and subscribe to one or more of the blogs that speak to that topic. Why order a combination pizza if you are only interested in the pepperoni? That being said, I am not planning on changing. I have ...

I was recently watching a Q & A session on You Tube with the author John Scalzi. One of the questioners was asking about Scalzi's book Lock In . Lock in is an interesting book set in the near future in the aftermath of a pandemic that has left 1% of the population totally paralyzed (locked in), unable to move or communicate verbally. This is a huge health crisis (see any parallels today? But it was written in 2014) To overcome this, the technology has been developed to allow the consciousness of a Locked in patient to control an android body that allows him or her to interact with the outside world. The protagonist and narrator, Chris, is a lock in patient that through the use of a robot avatar is able to work as a FBI agent. What follows is a futuristic police procedural. The person talking to John Scalzi at this Q & A session said they had listened to the audiobook of lock In and noticed that there were two versions of the audiobook: One narrated by Wil Whea...

I have just finished The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings. Cummings was many things:   playwright, artist and novelist, but is most famous for being a poet in the first half of the Twentieth Century. The Enormous Room is a memoir of the time he spent in a French prison during World War I. With America not yet in the war, he and a friend volunteered for ambulance duty. Letters home intercepted by censors caused the French to think these two Americans were undesirables, possibly even German spies because they dared to state that they did not hate Germans. They were sent to a holding prison until their fates could be determined. All the men in the prison were housed in one ‘enormous room’ with minimal comforts and sanitation. Meals were sparse (when his friend was finally released, he was found to have scurvy). Some of the fellow prisoners probably (like Cummings and his friend) were no threat to France or anybody. But some of the prisoners were bad seeds. The good and th...

Confirmation bias is a phrase I have been hearing a lot lately. It is simply the tendency in humans to give more weight to evidence that supports their beliefs: to “confirm” them. I have been hearing about it and seeing evidence of it especially in the political realm of late. Oh, no party has a monopoly on this; everyone does it to a certain extent. Every time you see a meme on Facebook that makes you go “Yeah!” and immediately repost it, without checking to see if it is actually true, you are not only guilty of it, but are encouraging it in others. Let’s say, you take a firm stand on trade for example. You could be someone who believes in free trade, or alternately, you could believe in protectionism.   Whichever it is, you believe in it, and you want others to believe in it too, so you go about looking for evidence that supports your view. See, you are already in trouble. Instead of gathering evidence to see which model is actually better, you have already decided befo...

IOT stands for the Internet Of Things. This is an expanded view of the internet that doesn’t just connect computers or even phones. Never mind smart phones, now you can have smart houses, smart cars, and smart traffic lights. And it includes things like artificial intelligence and remote sensing. On the one hand it is kind of cool. It’s the stuff of science fiction. It is the world of George Jetson. Vending machine companies can get automated alerts that machines need restocking or their drinks aren’t being kept cold enough. Implanted medical devices can report the patient’s or the device’s condition. Industrial systems, factories and power plants can be monitored and controlled remotely. You can tell your house to turn the lights on and preheat the oven before you get home. Farmers can monitor temperature humidity, and soil moisture. With the advent of more cameras hooked into the system, police, fire, and ambulance people can see what is going on before they arrive on scene. ...