Weather in the Tries: Oh, yay! We are back to PST. Spring forward, fall back. I just wish ‘They’ would choose a time and make it all year long. Daylight, Standard, or split the difference! Sorry for the rant. Most of our days will be in the mid to upper 50s, one day with a 40% chance of rain, and the overnight lows from 34 to 43. Yep. Fall has done fell.
Dune Again:
Remember last week when I reviewed Dune, and asked if any of you, or your friends, had seen the movie but not read the book and if so, did the movie make sense? Well, Craig Good (my brother) reviewed Dune 2021 on Letterboxd and indeed, a friend of his saw the latest movie, and had not read the book, and had no trouble following the story. I haven’t seen it again, but I hope to, soon, though the 3D version seems to have left the area so I’ll have to contend with the regular movie. Oh, well. It will give me a good comparison.
Do give Craig’s review a read-through. He brings a totally different element to his reviews than I do to mine. He’s worked in the industry for a long time—like, his whole adult working life 😉
News Again:
A week or two ago, Mary MacCarthy was questioned about human trafficking while she was traveling with her bi-racial daughter, Moira. A lot has been said but the one thing I’ve missed is the relief, the gratefulness of the airlines personnel who flagged the mother/daughter for possible trafficking. They were already in grief over the death of a family member, so weren’t acting “normal” when they boarded. They were quiet. For whatever reasons, they set off alarms, and those alarms were acted on.
It must have been a horrible thing, both for Mrs. MacCarthy as well as her daughter, who can be heard crying off camera. But at least the flight crew who reported it, and the cops were trying to protect the child from a nightmarish fate, if in fact, she had been kidnapped and was being trafficked. Now, if it was simply a brown skinned child with a white skinned woman, so of course there had to be something wrong with that picture, then it is not okay. Not okay for the flight crew to have thought that, and not okay for the cops to have acted on it. And if that’s the story, then shame on them all and may they lose some pay over it. Lots of pay. Enough to make them hurt.
But if it was not racial profiling, if they were in fact concerned for the child’s welfare, then hats off to them for thinking of the brown-skinned child and trying to save her. The world will be a much better place when we all have tea colored skin!
Photo of the Week:
Entertainment:
Book: Remember, if I finish a book, I (eventually) post a review at Rainy Day Reads
Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans —by Melanie Mitchell
My book group chose this book. It’s not one that would have normally found its way into my stack of ‘to read’ books, but I wanted to give it an honest try. I believe it was about halfway through chapter 5 that she snagged me. She talked about her time in school when she got zero on a math page of problems. She had the right answers but hadn’t proved her work. By golly, that happened to me, too. Only I got 50% for having the correct answers. After that, I had to prove my work, show that I knew how to get the answer. And I had to do it algebraically. Some of the most fascinating parts in the book was looking at two photos of the same object. In one, the computer guessed correctly in the identical looking one, it was way off. If the picture was of a dog, it would be a dog in one and an ostrich in the other. But they looked alike. Well, no, not quite. Someone had sabotaged the second identical photo by moving/deleting a few pixels just enough to through the computer off. A stop sign might have a couple of pixels added/deleted that the human eye couldn’t detect, but the computer could, and it might read it as a speed sign instead of a stop sign. Not so go on a self-driving car, eh?
Anyhow, I’m going to give her 5 Stars when I post my review. Ms. Mitchell took a subject in which I had no interest and wrote about it in such a way I finished the book early. By the time I finished, I realized I did have an interest in it. Oh, not enough to rush out and take college level courses in it, but I now have a better understanding of AI, and find it less frightening (that seems too strong a word) than I did before.
Quote of the Week:
“Forget artificial intelligence – in the brave new world of big data, it’s artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.” —Tom Chatfield
So, Gentle Readers, another week has come and gone, and you know what? Winter Solstice is coming. Yes, it is. Honest. Trust me. And with it an array of holidays from several different religions. If you know the person is a member of one, by all means greet them appropriately, but if unsure, Happy Holidays covers Kwanzaa, Christmas, Solstice and at least a dozen more. And remember, the Solstice is the Reason for the Season. The nights will get shorter, the days longer, and our politicians can mess with our minds and sleep cycles once again when it’s time to turn our clocks ahead an hour.