Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX has a new dream. Beyond technology for the earth and the stars, he wants to redesign humankind. If we don’t use our know-how to enhance ourselves, he believes artificial intelligence will conquer humanity. (“Hacking mortality,” The Week
Facebook went down the other day and what a blessing it was. I like keeping up with friends but I hate the commercials I have to scroll through to reach them. If scrolling can be counted as an aerobic exercise, I’m fit. Promos aren’t the only reason I needed a break. I’m t
The media seems to have ignored Judge Clarence Thomas’s comments during a recent libel case before the Supreme Court. He referred to a 1964 landmark decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, saying he thought it should be overturned. That ruling made it difficult for public offi
Over the holidays, a couple introduced me to their son who was visiting from Boston. As he was a young man, I asked what he did for a living. He said he was a medical researcher and was working on a drug for multiple sclerosis. A lump hardened in my throat as I remembered a br
The title of this blog says it all. On Facebook, our data doesn’t belong to us. Ditto our “authorial rights” according to information scientist, Amelia Acker at the University of Texas at Austin. (“Preservations Acts,” by Nora Caplan-Bricker Harper’s Magazine, Dec.
“You look better in person than you do in your blog picture,” said a former high school student of mine from 40 years ago. He was in town for a class reunion and looked me up. His remark I took to be gracious rather than true. The blog picture is me at 72. At 82, I’ve
It’s a joke so old, I don’t remember the punch line. A guy stands up in a town hall meeting and shouts a number. People around him laugh. A second person calls out another number and again those present break into applause. The community is so accustomed to one another, they’v
Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 65 million years. They may have managed it because they had small brains. They didn’t possess enough grey matter to imagine how to tinker with their environment. Homo sapiens used theirs to disrupt the planet. So many changes are far f
Recently, I got entangled with a company’s phone representative for whom English was a second language. Both her grammar and her accent made communication difficult. Finally, she brought her supervisor on the line. His, too, was hard to understand. “Do you live in the Unit
Six years ago, I wrote that Moby Dick was being translated into emoji. (Click) I hardly knew what emojis* were at the time. Since then, Facebook emojis have become familiar, but I’ve never given much thought to how they came into being or how there could be enough to translate a