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The AIs Are No Longer Science Fiction
The Sorcerer’s Apprentices If you are old enough, you may recall the 1940 Disney movie Fantasia, especially the cartoon of Dukas’ symphonic poem, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” starring Mickey Mouse and a host of magic brooms. The grizzled old wizard goes to bed for the night, and Mickey works a spell to animate some brooms, which quickly multiply and wreak havoc, until the sorcerer returns and sets things right. When it comes to the sorcery of […]
Words, Words, Words
Plain Text Authors can learn a lot about writing from computer programmers. Substack and Medium overflow with articles praising alternatives to Microsoft Word: Ulysses, Scrivener, whatever’s hot this week. Everyone craves a “distraction-free” writing environment, but I submit that “distraction-free” has less to do with the interface than with the benefits of using a text editor instead of a word processor. Writers would do well to get comfortable with what programmers call “the terminal,” […]
The Other Side Of Unsustainable
During the last U.S. presidential election, American voters insisted that the economy was issue number one, but neither candidate campaigned on managing the national debt, or even mentioned it. Now the experts all agree that the government’s $37 trillion debt is unsustainable, a scary thought, given that, since 2001, and for each of the last 24 years, the government has spent more than it took in and borrowed trillions to cover the difference. It’s […]
Ten Thousand Repetitions
Skills When I was a boy in the 1960s, long before the Internet and 24-hour news cycles, people didn’t get their news by scrolling through feeds on phones and tablets. No, they got their news from me. I was a paper boy. A professional! As were my brothers and most of my friends. The Catholic grade school we attended in Omaha, Nebraska was a short walk from Paper Station H at 40th and Cuming, where […]