Category: personal
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The power of the dark side
[amazon_link asins=’0785192557,0785192565,0785199772,0785199780,0785197893′ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’gilroy0-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’0a4327d5-eb7a-11e7-a142-c169eec473c4′] No, this is not a political post. 🙂 I absolutely tore through the omnibus Kindle editions of the Darth Vader comic (one of several in the rebooted Marvel line). I guess it really paid off for Amazon to make Volume 1 free to Prime members because it hooked me fast. I…
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Happy New Year and Happy 2018
Just a quick maintenance post. In the new year I intend — as anyone who writes does — to write more frequently and more broadly. I don’t expect it, but I intend it. 🙂
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Facetious blueprint
An AI researcher (Kai-Fu Lee) has written an article (“A Blueprint for Coexistence with Artificial Intelligence“) that fails at its own goal, spectacularly. He assures us we need not end up in the dystopias so common in movies and literature. And I wanted to his assurances to be convincing, because I happen to feel the…
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Lunacon 2014 (2): Saturday
Even though Lunacon is over, I’m going to keep writing up my notes and impressions, if only to keep writing in general. Saturday was the busiest day of the con, and it certainly showed in my personal programming grid. I faced the typical con paradox: Too many good panels all at the same time. I…
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Marc Cohn @ The City Winery, 2012 Jan 26
{This has apparently been sitting in my Drafts folder for four years. Oops. I never finished it, so it ends abruptly. -=-BLG} It’s been a while (a real long while) since I’ve gotten to a Marc Cohn show, but this one was worth it. He played the City Winery, which is an odd hybrid of…
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On riots, protests, and the legitimacy of violence (short)
For everyone who has counseled the citizens of Baltimore (and Ferguson and…) that “violence is not the answer” and that it would be better if everyone just protested peacefully: 1) As has now been documented extensively, the protests were by and large peaceful — and even more by and large, ignored by the national media.…
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What explains the waning influence of research blaming black poverty on black culture
Vox has an article purporting to explore “The real reason research blaming black poverty on black culture has fallen out of favor”. And it’s fine so far as it goes, but it still dances around the reality. Why has “blaming black poverty on black culture has fallen out of favor”? Because the same dire straits and…
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Review: Doctor Who Season 8 Episode 8: Mummy on the Orient Express
Meh. Haven’t we been here before?
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Review: Doctor Who Season 8 Episode 1 “Deep Breath”
I finally got around to watching Season 8 Episode 1 (“Deep Breath”) of the revived Doctor Who. It’s the first one with Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. (What do we call him, anyway? Is he the 12th Doctor, even though we know that Matt Smith‘s 11 was really the twelfth?) So it’s probably worth a…
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What is a library?
I am far from the first to ask this question in an increasingly-electronic age, and I am sure that my answer will be far from unique. But my wife and I have batted the question around a couple of times and I wanted to get my thoughts down. The proximate cause of our discussion was…