moon traveller herald

In honor of our trip to New York … I am running a picture of…. Racine. Es Kewpies! File under blast from the past. My son and I are going to be in NYC and we're hoping to see John Ruetz and the OneTwoManyBand at Cornelia St. Brusha and Paul DeMark told me about this band. I am psyched. Will AIM high. With mustard and pickles. Note: Kewpies used to be hunkered down under a public parking garage when I was a kid. Who would have known it was so breathtakingly streamlined? One wonders if Zippie ever went here. Kewpee: A buddha-like doll baby committed to Food for the folks. It's next to what was Reihls there. Thrifty Sandy used to be in the garage too. Smell of mustard on hamburger still brings back the time...Dave and [Bob H., John C?] ditched me and Jim. Ran into Norman of Soulville with his family there too much later on.

David Brooks is one of the heavier denizens of the New York Times op-ed pages. And PBS convention coverage. And so forth. Very middle of the road; rightish, but not so that his veins bug out. He wrote an interesting piece on ‘when world’s collide’ On Friday, July 07, 2006, or thereabouts. Page One’s Missing Characters takes him back to his young career and the Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago. “The golden age of Chicago journalism was just then coming to an end” he writes by way of exposition. [If this was still the golden age of the Internet I could link to it and you could see for yourself, but, alas, and, alack, the op-ed page is now premium content.] Different classes met. The reporters spanned all class, and had to misplaced sense of the noble poor. They probably worried about declining circ and agate dollars, but they didn’t blog in response. The Billy Goad scene described resonates for me because it is something of a world I’ve seen glimpses of …. Ben Hecht, who he mentions, after ...

We worry about the machines taking over, therefore we are. But the flying machines of cyborgdom that plummet down the cliff still out pace the Roombas - and Orek and Hoover are not shaking at the thought of the Roomba. Those who have read the accounts of the Dartmouth Conference, and who credit it as a starting point for a new look at machines, generally know too that it finally lead to dissolution. In 1956, Marvin Minksy, Claude Shannon, John McCarthy and others gathered at the Ivy League school and started the long formal trek to Artificial Intelligence [AI], although machine intelligent may be the better term. Kubrik’s movie 2001, much more than is posthumous film, AI, gave artificial life to some heady machine notions, but after Cambridge’s AI Alley [a home for several commercial ventures aimed at harnessing young AI] went sour, the AI egg had a great fall. Fuzzy logic and Neural Nets did not carry the baton much further. The intelligence of a three-year-old human is still an elus...

In the morning we’d drive down Main Street. From 3 Mile Drive to Point Blank. Dr Shroud in his Vette would pass us – the smallest semblance of a wave - and we would thereafter tail him. Dr Ai Moloch Shroud in his blue corvette motoring down to the laboratory. Where they tested and researched. Within Shroud chemical tower complex the test tubes were vast. Inside, Shroud orchestrated a flow of chemical elements. Gorf [Shroud Jr] sent away for the Dr Shroud patch symbol from Elliptictine ersatz drink. Gorf saw array of glass tubing; imagined it as the palace of wisdom. I’m a Man played on the car speakers.

Inside framework design with author Krzysztof Cwalina : "A look inside Microsoft's thinking on framework design comes now via Framework Design Guidelines by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams. It can benefit any developer. "

Jr. Shroud heard the signals through the Zenith. To look into the box from its vented backside was to peer upon mystic vaccuum tubes, amber and gold like the mead in Beowulf's den of old.

Vacation Day 1, 2006 -- At home quite near the great lake, the signals came through the night -- masked in the murk - dark secrete sparks would speak as I sat out back and watched. While cicadas in the trees radioed their cryptic presumptions; while sleeping monarchs with their intentions prayed to the great up yonder. Back in the day signals were electronic, electrical, hydraulic, pneumatic –but not yet a memory web for a robot insect army. I heard feedback. And echo. On many nights the Zenith like a fireside. I would star through the holes in the radio’s backside. I saw feedback, wondering at tubes -- the glass vacuum tubes, were golden with hot filament lights radiant. The Midnight Special would come in from Chicago …