moon traveller herald

  - Pin on hand-carved backdrop by CJEVaughan- - Julie Newmar played Robot on 1964 sitcom My Living Doll- I got to go to the robotics conf in Boston this week. This was a different experience for someone who hasn’t been to a show with much real hardware for ages. The first technical conference I ever covered was IEEE Electro in Boston. And the memories rushed back. My hopes to succeed in this business were somewhat dashed at the start of Electro – it was a crush of imagery undeciphered. The impression remains: I was at a medieval bazar in a Star Wars universe. And without words. In those days they had well-built women [the derogatory term pocket protector men used was ‘booth bunnies’] along with [what I know now could be] shabbily built printed circuit boards (jerry rigged to make the show deadline with jumper cables here and there]. I remember looking at a pile of colorful metal shapes, wondering what was what [they were heat sinks of wide variety]....

The Philosophy of Modern Song comes as a nifty package with some great pictures, tho you have to go on the Internet to figure out who is who on some of them. The cover is part of the package, not that you can tell a book by the cover. On the Internet there's some discussions to figure out Who is the young woman rocker on the cover pic with Little Richard and Eddie Cochran? I couldn't guess. The Guardian put some heavy legwork into trying to figure out who and why. It’s Alis Lesley. Why? Why does there have to be a why? You have to think that somebody showed Dylan the picture and he said THAT’S IT! Just as he did when he put Claudia Cardinale in the set of inner sleeve artwork on the original copy of Blonde on Blonde. The photographer had the picture there on the drafting table and Dylan said YEAH, THAT. Later editions switched it out. But we weren’t waiting baited breathily for for the pics! Bob Dylan is a frigging Actual Institute in himself. He is where artists study the me...

the word expired on a virus  splaat the asteroid took off its hat metaphors were facile and easy you picked them off a tree all sleepy & sneazy before  the academy.  - j.v. Comment: In recent years, Natural Language Processing has been the driver advancing Artificial Intelligence. In recent months that has taken the forms of Large Language Models that mimic human intelligence using statistical analysis to learn the connections between words and finish unfinished sentences. Along the way these technologies have conjured for me recollections from reading Tzara and others who blew up sentences like painters blew up visual represenations.  More especially than most these concepts were plied by William Burroughs who said "the word is now a virus". I guess I've wondered if it always was, and it came from space on a comet. There's more on the topic I suppose in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader . When I was a lad his writings would sometimes appear in Harper, ...