war
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Fendsday
How to prevent the all-knowing and all-doing from doing wrong. Very wrong. Just one approach. Wired: Anthropic Teams Up With Its Rivals to Keep AI From Hacking Everything And, of course, Gary Marcus is less worried. When you whack a hornet's nest with a baseball bat while standing naked, what are the hornets going to do? Continue reading
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War on Peace
You may have noticed there is a war going on. I’m not here to cover it. I’m here to cover, or at least visit, stories about it. See, stories themselves are a problem, both in human nature (we love and live stories) and in journalism, which feeds and is fed on the human appetite for stories, Continue reading
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Rethinkings Out Loud
Anchors Away Nothing is more North Atlantic than Greenland. If the US siezes it, NATO will transform from an alliance to a war zone, where allies become combatants. Does anyone outside Trump’s amen corner want that? But what if the US buys Greenland from Denmark, like it bought the Louisiana Territory from France and Alaska Continue reading
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We’ll see
Daniel Barkhuff has a serious one-liner bio (“Husband, Dad, Emergency Medicine physician, Veteran”) and speaks with earned authority from all of them, especially the last two. His latest, On Living Memory, reminds me of two dads. One is my father, who re-enlisted in 1944 at age 35, because he wanted to fight in The War. Among other Continue reading
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Remembering a Good Man
Pop loved being a soldier. He served in the U.S. Army Coastal Artillery Corps in the 1920s, stationed at Fort Hancock in New Jersey’s Sandy Hook. Here is a photo collection that he shot there during that time. The only dates I know for sure during that time in his life are 1929-1930, when he Continue reading
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Puppet Tree
I guarantee insights and learnings. Great podcast interview with the world's leading authority on the puppets in Star Wars, and author of the book A Galaxy of Things. But… Japan? A leaked FSB email says Russia had a "maniacal desire for war" and that Ukraine was (or may not have been… unclear) its first choice. Continue reading
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Revolutions take time
The original version of this ran as a comment under Francine Hardaway‘s Medium post titled Have we progressed at all in the last fifty years? My short answer is “Yes, but not much, and not evenly.” This is my longer answer. In your case and mine, it has taken the better part of a century to Continue reading
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Desert warfare training in live ghost towns, seen from the sky
I’ve been fascinated for years by what comes and goes at the Fort Irwin National Training Center— —in the Mojave Desert, amidst the dark and colorful Calico Mountains of California, situated in the forbidding nowhere that stretches between Barstow and Death Valley. Here and there, amidst the webwork of trails in the dirt left by Continue reading