The whole “Columbus discovered The Americas” meme is stupid; rather obviously the people who settled down there 13,000 years before Columbus came, did. After all, they were there to greet him when he arrived, and promptly murdered a few of them. There were literally millions of people who discovered and inhabited the americas before Columbus was even born. What a strange conceit that it takes a white european to “discover” a place.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a special effects wrangler. In fact, the short story Armaments Race by Arthur Clarke [wik] really appealed to me – I thought that making swords and guns and armor and tanks for movies would be a fine way to spend my life.
This posting will be a bit image-heavy.
You can’t fool me!
One of the challenges in AI is creativity: how do you make an AI that makes new things? For a long time, many humans privileged the human experience (as we do) saying that computer creativity was a hard limit.
It seems to me that the US government’s (and its politicians’) stance on China is contradictory. That should be no surprise, right?
This is a delightful little book, and I won’t post much from it because it’s so delightful that posting the illustrations would constitute a “spoiler.”
When I bought my farm, it included 20 acres of old coal mine.
Every time I am using a gasoline can to fill a mower, chainsaw, molotov cocktail, etc., I am annoyed by the safety mechanisms on the pouring spout.
I’ve been a huge fan of Indian food since I first tasted it.