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You Can Call Me Bill: William Shatner
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 346
When I was a kid I loved this.
I mean, it was the best, the concept - of "Going Boldly Where No Man Has Gone Before", the imagination, costumes, aliens. All of it. Well ahead of it's time.
Then I got a bit older, and still appreciated it, but also realized the rather simple good-nature quality of it's imaginings, the naivety, William Shatner's over the top performances, his portrayal of the best of our we would like to believe are the best of our qualities, and I slowly cottoned on to the fact that it was more than a little bit of bollocks.
Still...
And then there was the 'trekkies', those nerds that took it for far more than it was worth. And no one wanted to be seen with them...
And Shatner, his honest-to-goodness lack of self consciousness, his ability to sink his teeth into the most 2 dimensional role possible, lightly, lovingly even satirized in "Galaxy Quest", I mean, you get it, it was time for my tastes to move on, and it's even now still a guilty pleasure. Ahead of it's time, but...
Anyways. He's been the perfect everyman, completely himself, un-self-conscious, barreling on forward, turning what for many actors would have been a liability into a career, satirizing himself, he's carved and created a niche, become a loveable caricature of himself, and he's shown some growth, and gotten to know himself. And so I was a little pleased to see that they've made a movie
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKiW0yxfbSQ
And now, perhaps time to congratulate him on being himself, time has proven that it's been more than enough. And he's an inspiration for everyone that's ever been on their way and yet never arrived that sometimes that's all you gotta be...
3 Body Problem
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 322
This has been getting a lot of publicity lately. So I watched it. No spoilers (or none of any relevance), but I was surprised that I quite enjoyed it. Not perfect, or great even, but a damned sight better than most of the other "made for Netflix" series I've watched. Now to survive the cliffhanger until the next season...
Vertex, Gemini
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 311
And more statistical analysis, feeding my numbers this time into Vertex, Gemini - Google's own AI.
And, again, it's not doing the heavy lifting, rather instead giving me long-winded explanations as to how I can calculate these things for myself. Totally not the point. Asking the computer to do it for me is why I'm asking the computer to do it for me.
Although I was impressed, it guessed that I was feeding it lottery numbers.
I'm beginning to smell a cover-up by big-lotto.
While I doubt the "intelligence" in AI is going to be upon us as soon as they say, I'm rather dismally impressed at their ability to chat with natural language, make excuses as to how tough what I'm asking is, deny, stonewall circumnavigate and ignore my questions. We've developed computing programs and AI models that spend all their computing power arguing that I should be doing all the work. Our AI overlords are proving disheartening like our own leaders.
"In our own image", unfortunately does not imply intelligence.
Stalking the Wild Pendulum - Izhak Bentov
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
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Found this via Reddit - and am quite enjoying it. Nothing I didn't "Know" - or speculate, but I'm not even 100 pages in.
You can find it online here: https://archive.org/details/itzhak-bentov-stalking-the-wild-pendulum-on-the-mechanics-of-consciousness
The writing style reminds me of Guy Murchie's "The Seven Mysteries of Life", or "Godel, Escher & Bach", by Hofstadter, which were books that I also greatly enjoyed once upon a time. And any number of others which seek to reconcile science and spirituality. But I'll come back to this...
****
Note, having finished it it was fine. Not Terrific, but I've long been informed of these various theories through various other channels. But he has a way of wrapping it all up. In the vein of "Dancing Wu-Li Masters" or various other books from the 70's that attempt to reconcile science and spirituality.
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