For a medieval project, I wanted a wood pile, but I didn’t want to have to stack the individual wedges manually. I’m experienced enough with Blender 3D that it only took me a few minutes to get this simulation running — but as this video clip attests, I need to adjust a few parameters. …
My auditory processing disorder makes it hard for me to process speech when I can’t see the speaker’s lips. My wife is being treated for an ear infection. We are asking each other “What?” after somebody coughs, after we ask each other “What did you say?” and after we answer each other “Never mind.” In…
I recall being very moved by the 1980s Gregory Peck / Christopher Plummer made-for-TV movie “The Scarlet and the Black,” which dramatized this story. From the late summer of 1943, O’Flaherty worked with “The Organisation”, a massive partisan network, to save more than 6,000 Allied prisoners of war, anti-Fascists, and Jews from Nazi concentration and…
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I miss the convention in movies and TV shows in which the main characters visit a music hall or club, and we watch them watching an entire number. Maybe they exchange a few lines during a musical bridge, but mostly they’re just in character, sitting through a performance. I have only fragmentary memories of H.R.…
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On my ride into work yesterday, my mother mentioned “That popular singer has a song about a Shakespeare character.” I had seen social media posts about Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia,” but hadn’t investigated yet. I watched the video right before teaching my “Shakespeare in Context” class, and I felt kind of overwhelmed. I…
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Rewatching ST:DS9 Dax, Worf and Kira arrive at an otherwise empty bar. Before Quark can take their order, a mechanical noise drives them away. In a service tunnel (the source of the noise), Nog is expertly assisting O’Brien, but something goes boom, critically flabbergasting all the station’s jimberjams. The only way to unflabbergast them is…
The following comment appeared recently on one of my YouTube lectures, “Historical Context for American Literature.” American???? So where are: CANADA, MEXICO, GUATEMALA, CUBA, COSTA RICA, BRAZIL, CHILE ARGENTINA, PERÚ, COLOMBIA, PANAMÁ, URUGUAY, PARAGUAY, EL SALVADOR, HONDURAS, VENEZUELA… ETC ETC ETC. STOP SAYING THE UNITED STATES IS AMERICA! Here’s how I responded: Geography and names…
The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and…
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Clanker is a derogatory term used to insult AI and its products and services such as delivery robots, therapist chatbots and automated customer service. Why try to hurt the feelings of something that, oh wait, has no feelings? Like most slurs, it has more to do with the speaker using it than the object of…
Artificial intelligence is making steady advances into subtitling but, say its practitioners, it’s a vital service that needs a human to make it work […] AI is unable to decide which sounds are important. “Right now, it’s not even close,” Deryagin says. He also stresses the importance of the broader context of a film, rather…
If you have ever experienced this, you might recall the feeling of confusion after opening such a document, followed by frustration—Wait, what is this exactly?—before you begin to wonder if the sender simply used AI to generate large blocks of text instead of thinking it through. If this sounds familiar, you have been workslopped. —Harvard Business Review
From an essay that includes a reflection on discovering AI-fabricated quotes while peer-reviewing a scholarly essay for potential publication. (Academics don’t get paid for the labor of pre-reading scholarly drafts for potential review. An author who uses AI is squandering the resources of human peer-reviewers.) Humanistic study once promised — and for many, still delivers…
Rewatching ST:DS9 At dinner with the Siskos, Cadet Nog reluctantly reveals that the B-plot will involve his difficulty getting respect from Klingons. Because this is TV, General Martok shows up at that very moment with this week’s plot-starter: an intercepted message for “Michael” about a terrorist missile launch which threatens to trigger a devastating war.…
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Essays like this remind me why I picked my English major. There are other ways to get facts. Newspapers are full of them, as are podcasts and documentaries. Travel shows proliferate, take your pick. But even then, there is nothing like the view of the world via a novel. Novels can go beyond merely being…