CapitalistImperialistPig

 I was surprised and a bit taken aback by DJT's indictment today. I hadn't even had time to put the champaign on ice. So what to do if he fuels up Trump Force One and makes a run for Moscow or Riyad?  Let him go or escort him back.  I lean toward letting him go.  Let him be caught in the ruination of Mordor when Putin goes down.

  I first encountered Anaximander in a course I took in Ancient Greek philosophy, and I didn’t have the sense to be impressed.  Only four brief lines of his work survive, and to me they were utterly mysterious: All things originate from one another, and vanish into one another according to necessity; they give to each other justice and recompense for injustice in conformity with the order of Time. Rovelli, Carlo. Anaximander (p. 79). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Neither my textbook nor my professor pointed out that these rather mysterious lines contain a profound idea – the notion of natural law, the idea that the phenomena of nature are due not to the whims of this god or that, but the operation in time of natural laws, or necessity. This was a profound innovation.   All previous explanations of rain, storms, thunder, lightning and other phenomena seem to have attributed them to the actions of gods and spirits.   Anaximander’s idea thus began a ...

If you haven't  sampled ChatGPT yet, I recommend it.  Deep neural networks and the new technology of transformers are producing a technological revolution that is likely the biggest one yet.  ChatGPT and its relatives can write you a sonnet, a coherent summary of the role of sheaves in algebraic geometry, or a computer program in Python or other languages.  A related technology can produce plausible images of persons, monsters, or imaginary landscapes based on a few words of prompting text.  Yet another can take a minute or so of anyone's speech to produce hard to distinguish speech in the speaker's voice. Would you like to hear the Silmarillion as if read by J. R. R. Tolkien?  It can probably be done.  

  A former English major decides to take some trips down Interstate 80 in the company of geologists.  I 80 runs from Teaneck, New Jersey, to San Francisco, a journey of 2901 miles.  Annals is a title borrowed from one of the founding documents of geology, by James Hutton: “ To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders undistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret.” McPhee, John. Annals of the Former World (p. 77). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. Science is always a detective story, but in geology it finds its purest form. McPhee’s book is about the stories those rocks reveal and the geologists who read and tell them.   The interst...