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When Does AI Fakery Become AI Reality?

We are living in the precise historical moment when the question “Is this real?” has become unanswerable in real time, and the fact that nobody seems particularly alarmed by this should alarm us all. The case study arrived this month with the force of a wartime broadcast, which is exactly what it was: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose physical whereabouts and physical condition have been the subject of intense speculation since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, appeared in a video address on March 12. Social media users immediately claimed he had six fingers on his right hand. The rumor spread to millions of viewers within hours. Fact-checkers at Snopes, PolitiFact, and Newsweek scrambled to verify that the extra digit was, in fact, the hypothenar eminence, the fleshy pad at the base of the little finger, rendered ambiguous by video compression. Netanyahu’s office declared, flatly, that the Prime Minister was “fine.”

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On Unraveling the World and Letting the Queue Clear

We spend our lives creating, and waiting in, queues.  We do our best to manage the dead time in line and when we are responsible for the movement of any queue, we oftentimes become impatient with a process that more slowly unravels than the speed in which it tightened.

Sometimes there’s nothing to be done except to stand back and let the queue take on a life of its own and allow it to expire when the momentum of the movement is exhausted.

There are three kinds of basic queues that capture our daily lives: Physical, Virtual and Ethereal. Let’s examine them in kind.

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Education as an Abstraction: Teaching with Real Things

When teaching becomes an abstraction and not something real, the learning doesn’t stick in the student very well.  Imagination must first be grounded in a hard reality.

As we move closer into living in a 24/7 virtual world, it is important for all of us to keep in mind that learning is best fostered using real things, in real-time, in the same, real, room with each other getting real.  That is important in all human interactions, not just the classroom.  We’re always trying to learn from each other and doing it with real objects is a powerful experience that binds.

When you’re teaching about a flower — is it better to show a computer image of a flower, or hand out a flower printed on a piece of paper, or is it best to share a real flower plucked from a garden in your alive hand?

A real flower authentically engages every bodily sense and creates a sensation in the mind.

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Finding Reality at Easy Street Records

A thin man — maybe it was a woman (honestly was hard to tell in my tired state) was looking through one of the several bins of used records in front of Easy Street Records in West Seattle. I was walking to a friend’s apartment to take a short nap and my wife and I thought we saw our friend walk into the store.

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Justin Sandercoe Teaches The Blues

Justin Sandercoe will teach you how to play The Blues on your guitar for free online.

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Death on the Tethered Vine: Breaking the Virtual Bond

In yesterday’s article, we discussed how the internet can bind old friendships.  Today, we’ll examine why meeting virtual friends in person often leads to disaster and misconception.

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The Two Decade Virtual Touch

When we consider the depth of the internet, we often foment shallow thoughts of the world compressing time and space as we become more distant from each other.  We reach for tethers and tendrils and often come up with an empty grasp.

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The Newspaper is Dead: Long Live the News!

The newsprint newspaper is DEAD!  Let it die!  Bury it.  Let the bugs and worms eat the decaying pulp and let’s move on with our lives and getting the news quick, fast, and deadly on the internet.  As an online author and itinerant publisher, it is delicious to watch the traditional media bandwagon crumble under the weight of their new irrelevancy.  They have their worry beads in hand and their self-flagellation in process and they aren’t waiting to sound their own public death knell on your front stoop and in your mailbox:

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Stalking as the National Pastime

It’s official.  Stalking is the new, national, pastime in America.

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Containing Content

As the world of publishing changes, so too, does the way we create containers for content.  It used to be enough to have paper and ink.  Now we have a virtual world where mere replication is the business recipe of the day, but the real, inherent, power of original content is that it cannot really be contained because it is always transmogrifying into multiple, redistributable forms depending upon end user need and desire.  Content isn’t king.  How the end user changes the content container is king.

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