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3 Body Problem
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
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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
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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.
Prospecting, Spring, 2024
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
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Sunday, out and about. The car, still parked where I left it, no new tickets, the daughter rejoiced in my trauma and made me track it down and verify it was still there.
And so off and about, near destinations as I can't afford the gas.
A river. Gold. No pans, no shovel, but I know it's there and I'm gonna go back.
A couple of higher altitude destinations, finds, some lamproite (I think) - crystals, up to a cm long. I don't know what they are. I have to ask some questions.
And, breaking rocks, breaking rocks, and another crystal, too small to tell by looking, and my USB microscope fails, there's no "in-between" magnification, you're either too close or too far away and so...
I have to get this checked. My imagination runs rampant.
You know. Why not?
Home, find on my sweater a tick.
And then another on my neck the next day.
Bloody hell. I'm going to have to slather the Off, Deet, switch to white linens, but I've discovered a couple of new localities, of necessity close by, and - by Jove, my fortune will soon be made...
***
And tonight, just after I write this, crawling upon my wall:
FML. Bloody hell, must have latched on to my moccasins. I hate these buggers.
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