Posted on

What the Lemmings Could Not Do: On Suicide, Cognition, and the Mortal Imagination

Of all the acts a human being can perform, suicide is the strangest. It requires the actor to picture a world without itself, judge that world preferable, and execute a plan whose author will not survive to see the result. No other behavior in the human repertoire so cleanly inverts the survival logic that built every body and every brain. The question of whether other animals do the same thing is a question about cognition. The behavior is downstream of cognition, and beneath cognition runs the question of meaning. To kill oneself one must first have the kind of self that can be killed by its owner.

Continue reading → What the Lemmings Could Not Do: On Suicide, Cognition, and the Mortal Imagination

Posted on

The Lack of the Ack, Sixteen Years On

In February of 2010, I wrote about a small but symptomatic failure in our digital manners. Young people, then aged eighteen to twenty, would send you a message, receive your reply, and disappear. No acknowledgement, no “Ok,” no “Got it,” just the digital equivalent of someone slamming the door after asking you a question through the mail slot. The piece was called “How to Ack Back,” and the argument was that the etiquette of the early internet, the discipline of acknowledging every transmission, had been lost on a generation that grew up assuming delivery was guaranteed and silence was a defensible reply.

Continue reading → The Lack of the Ack, Sixteen Years On

Posted on

ChatGPT Invents a New Language

As a Boles.ai experiment, I asked three AI Bots — Claude.ai and Gemini and ChatGPT — to create a language and then I asked them if the language was actually created by them or not. Because of the length of the responses, I created three separate articles demonstrating the language invention capabilities of each Bot. You can decide which language Bot was most effective and inventive. I used the same prompts for all three attempts.

Continue reading → ChatGPT Invents a New Language

Posted on

Gemini Invents a New Language

As a Boles.ai experiment, I asked three AI Bots — Claude.ai and Gemini and ChatGPT — to create a language and then I asked them if the language was actually created by them or not. Because of the length of the responses, I created three separate articles demonstrating the language invention capabilities of each Bot. You can decide which language Bot was most effective and inventive. I used the same prompts for all three attempts.

Continue reading → Gemini Invents a New Language

Posted on

Student Teach Thyself: My Dubbed Podcast in Italian

Navigating the difficult task of teaching oneself Italian through the marvels of AI voice dubbing is a 21st-century twist on the ancient wisdom of “Physician, heal thyself.” That age-old saying, ripped from the heart of biblical narratives, pushes us towards self-reflection and repair before we set out to fix or guide others. When we apply this idea to the adventure of self-learning Italian — or any foreign language! — by using our own voices echoed back to us in Italian through AI wizardry, welp, it’s like we’re living in a high-tech remix of that proverb.

Continue reading → Student Teach Thyself: My Dubbed Podcast in Italian

Posted on

The Shape of Water: Guillermo del Toro and the Failure to Consecrate

Guillermo del Toro’s new movie — The Shape of Water — is a high-minded movie that looks great, sounds good, but ultimately fails to consecrate the point of the story: Communication Creates Love.

There are all sorts of movie tropes packed into the The Shape of Water — but the center of the swirling is a “mute” janitor, played by Sally Hawkins, who falls in love with a sea monster because they are able to communicate using American Sign Language; and that major flaw in discovery, reason, and accessibility, will serve as the remainder of my argument why The Shape of Water, in the end, fails as a facilitation for a grander, romantic, connection of human/serpent longing.

Continue reading → The Shape of Water: Guillermo del Toro and the Failure to Consecrate

Posted on

A Romanov in a Pau Garden: A Glorious Last Moment in Living History

One sunny morning in Pau, one of the neighbors came to take some plants for his garden.  The elderly gentleman in the photograph on the right is Monsieur Romanov — a  descendant of the Romanov family, rulers of Russia from 1613 until the Russian Revolution in 1917.

Continue reading → A Romanov in a Pau Garden: A Glorious Last Moment in Living History

Posted on

Michelangelo’s 16th Century Cipher Image Communication

One internet meme that is taking flight on social media is the handcrafted glory of a grocery list Michelangelo created in the 16th century for his illiterate servant to use while shopping.

“Because the servant he was sending to market was illiterate,” writes the Oregonian‘s Steve Duin in a review of a Seattle Art Museum show, “Michelangelo illustrated the shopping lists — a herring, tortelli, two fennel soups, four anchovies and ‘a small quarter of a rough wine’ — with rushed (and all the more exquisite for it) caricatures in pen and ink.” As we can see, the true Renaissance Man didn’t just pursue a variety of interests, but applied his mastery equally to tasks exceptional and mundane. Which, of course, renders the mundane exceptional.

Continue reading → Michelangelo’s 16th Century Cipher Image Communication

Posted on

On Being AWOL: The Great 80 Day Internet Disconnect

You may have noticed that I have been absent a while — there are two reasons for this. The first was losing my internet lifeline — the first storm of the season rendered our already stressed internet connection null and void. 13 kilometers of line had to be replaced along with some of the electricity lines.

There is no rush here in Portugal to undertake such work — SAPO who own all the lines and infrastructure are next on the privatization list and do not want to invest in capital at present — the internet providers who have to use the infrastructure, and pay to do so, quite understandably have no desire to fix a problem that is not theirs.

Continue reading → On Being AWOL: The Great 80 Day Internet Disconnect

Posted on

Three Days of a Hundred Years of Darkness: Hurricane Sandy and 12 Months of Nothingness

One year ago today, 8.5 million people in the New York City area were without heat or power as Hurricane Sandy blasted the soft middle of our lives — thrusting us backward a hundred years behind a wall of water into at least three days of cold and darkness:

Monday night, at 11:00 pm sharp in Jersey City, New Jersey, the lights went out and stayed off until last night at 7:43pm.  That’s three days without power or heat.  Hurricane Sandy was a massively nasty beast, and we’re just now starting the recovery process.  We are hungry and scavenging for food.  Supermarkets are closed.  Few places have power.

For many of those directly touched by the floodwater a year ago, life has yet to return to normal, and many will never recover the good lives they once had before the storm; and that is a clear failure of the government safety net and the lack of any sort of real social fabric that meshes us together.  The King has no clothes, and we don’t, either!

When it is better, and more profitable, to cut and run and abandon than it is to stay and rebuild and recover — we all have a problem.

Continue reading → Three Days of a Hundred Years of Darkness: Hurricane Sandy and 12 Months of Nothingness