I've seen a few attempts to illustrate the size of the Dali container ship that hit the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore, and I thought I'd get in on the fun. At least that was the plan a few days ago when I got an idea for this timely post and finished 90% of it. Then I got distracted by real life. I was going to abandon this, but...the images are kind of fun, so here it … [Read more...] about Just How Big is the Dali Container Ship?
In Which I Consider Applying for the Trump Administration
I've been seeing some chatter about Project 2025, which is a right-wing plan for carrying out a politically conservative agenda if Donald Trump wins the presidential election this year.One of the goals of Project 2025 is to build a personnel database of potential government employees who can be brought in to implement the conservative agenda. And they have a link to an … [Read more...] about In Which I Consider Applying for the Trump Administration
Why Margo Robbie Wasn’t Nominated
I finally got around to seeing the Barbie movie, and as everybody is saying, it's pretty good. So when I heard that Margot Robbie did not receive an Oscar nomination for her performance as Barbie, despite the movie's Best Picture nomination, my first reaction was that it was a typical case of the Academy's tendency to ignore women.After giving it a little more thought, … [Read more...] about Why Margo Robbie Wasn’t Nominated
Backpage and The Iron Law of Prohibition
By now, most of my readers have already heard that Backpage founder Michael Lacey, was found guilty of a single count of money laundering for a $16.5 million transfer to a bank in Hungary, which was supposedly done to conceal the illegal source of the money.That seems weird, since the jury did not find him guilty of any crime in which he supposedly earned that illegal money … [Read more...] about Backpage and The Iron Law of Prohibition
What is ChatGPT doing wrong?
In my previous post on this subject, I gave a brief outline of how ChatGPT is based on a neural network that has been trained on a huge sample of digital documents to recognize human-written text, and how it generates responses to user prompts and questions by using that recognition capability to decode which token to add to the end of the conversation, thus building a response … [Read more...] about What is ChatGPT doing wrong?