Confessions of a Conservative Atheist
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The Bard wasn’t a scientist, unless you consider him an explorer of the human mind as some critics have asserted, and yet if we can divine one overarching theme he pursued, we might say it is uncertainty itself. Sonnet 94 is perhaps his greatest achievement in this regard, as the meaning changes based on the… Continue reading Shakespeare’s quantum mechanics in verse form
In one sense, Hamlet spins out the statement in a play of words, not intended to have any logical meaning, but to confuse his audience, hiding his real thoughts beneath the mask of insanity. In another, it contains the meaning of the entire play and Macbeth besides. O God, I could be bounded in a… Continue reading I could be bounded in a nutshell, Shakespeare’s genius in three cryptic phrases
The Boss released Human Touch and Lucky Town on the same day in 1992 to some of the worst reviews of his career. This doesn’t mean there aren’t stellar songs on both including the most poignant take on jealousy in his canon. By Springsteen standards, the early to mid 1990s was the nadir of his… Continue reading “I Wish I Were Blind,” revisiting Springsteen’s oft forgotten classic from Human Touch
I cannot be the only one increasingly tired with critics hailing recycled ideas packaged in slick ways as modern masterpieces, nor do I think anyone should be impressed that a movie made by a small army at a cost of at least a hundred million dollars looks good. Unless you are a recent arrival from… Continue reading “Barbenheimer,” Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and the dearth of original ideas
The former President enters the book banning debate not by highlighting the troubling trend of retroactively editing classics for progressive political reasons, the presence of borderline pornography in schools, his party’s censorship crusade, or even defending a single book that was unfairly targeted by conservatives in his opinion. Last week, former President Barack Obama wrote… Continue reading Former President Barack Obama is profoundly political and completely wrong
The same as Logan’s children seek to inherit his creation without having done the hard work of building it, hard work which included shady deals, sacrificing morals when convenient, cutting corners when necessary, and screwing over competitors, we inherit a world built by giants from Thomas Edison to Teddy Roosevelt and have no idea what… Continue reading For better or worse, Succession is the ideal show for our times
The Titanic claims another five victims in a story that might be even more illustrative of humanity’s boundless pride than the original tragedy. If the sinking of the world’s largest ocean liner was Shakespeare, the implosion of the Titan is Vonnegut in a sad sign of the decline of our times. For generations, the Titanic… Continue reading The Titanic, the Titan, and humanity’s endless hubris
There are always going to people who have things you don’t, whether by birth or achievement. There is value instead in being grounded – knowing who you are, what you are capable of, your strengths and weaknesses and the like. The Bulimia Project recently asked three Artificial Intelligence Image Generators to create their vision of… Continue reading Unpopular opinion: Beauty standards are supposed to be unrealistic, that’s the point
From coding to chess, computers keep outperforming humans at cognitive tasks, revealing a huge gap in our understanding and definition of intelligence. We need to consider what lies between the capabilities of computers today and a hypothetical Artificial General Intelligence. For decades, scientists and philosophers have debated, sometimes rather vigorously, if a computer could ever… Continue reading ChatGPT: We need a new definition of intelligence
My writing process can best be described as vomiting on the screen and sifting through it in search of an editable morsel. The morsel is then preserved as I throw up again and repeat the process. Many morsels do not make it, some do as the process repeats itself into something resembling a final product. … Continue reading Celebrating 500 posts: Why and how I write
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 