Hieronymous Bosch, the Temptation of St. Anthony. Via Wikimedia Commons. When I was a student studying literature, I kept seeing Christ allegories everywhere. I remember being assigned The Old Man and the Sea, one of many Hemingways I read that semester, and I remember my teacher asking what we thought the book was about. Answers […]
Month: August 2023
Even at a thousand words, this picture would be way undervalued. But there it was, waiting to be taken (the picture, that is, not the object). So I took, during a visit to Florence, and I wrote, in 2014, and I redux, here, because some images you just can’t get out of your head. The […]
I had never seen or heard of cypress knees before last year, when I visited Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. It’s a beautiful place to walk around. The landscape is idyllic. Grass, grass, trees, trees, pond, swans, mausoleum, leaves, tombstone, tre—what the hell are those?
This post ran in 2017 and the last time I looked, the Four Corners is still a Roadrunner cartoon landscape. Here, I explain, at least in part, why. Flying through Monument Valley on the Arizona/Utah border recently, I was crammed into an old and slow Cessna 147 taildragger. Light filtered through the smoke of distant […]
It’s an interesting time to go back and look at the old artificial intelligence work. This summer I’ve been reading Marvin Minsky’s The Society of Mind (1985), the kind of systematic monograph people don’t seem to publish anymore. The computer-like schemas Minsky draws out for how the mind must work belong to cognitive psychology, a […]
