tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29232366611200485352024-03-13T02:28:15.989+00:00Michael AmpersantMichael Ampersant's publication platformUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1277125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-33915339073152979102024-03-10T10:40:00.003+00:002024-03-10T19:00:55.998+00:00A Visit by Caspar David Friedrich<p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Huh? <i>Caspar David Friedrich</i>, the German romantic painter (1774-1840) (?) A picture of our garden (?): </span></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg072dbgQIpD17pzP2XnaIaYSghCv8hj2L22zTe8FVo56ulPN0ZptiEpDhGI_Zioar1qYRmK3oTQ5-N-0piCIE8mrunC5txR1vyQzb-zimnoX_YH5IZR0-mywtcsm-G4o_z_kW47Jz0D7qNDKdMuk7UFw39Nqhp4bMHWwvGb8TSW-ZSw2H_SA5G9NC74egP/s1159/IMG_8694.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="869" data-original-width="1159" height="391" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg072dbgQIpD17pzP2XnaIaYSghCv8hj2L22zTe8FVo56ulPN0ZptiEpDhGI_Zioar1qYRmK3oTQ5-N-0piCIE8mrunC5txR1vyQzb-zimnoX_YH5IZR0-mywtcsm-G4o_z_kW47Jz0D7qNDKdMuk7UFw39Nqhp4bMHWwvGb8TSW-ZSw2H_SA5G9NC74egP/w522-h391/IMG_8694.jpg" width="522" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The garden of Michael Ampersant and Chang Man Yoon in Alcobaça, PT<br /></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> Or not? Not Caspar David? Let's try some more of his pictures:</span><br /><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjly3QzKcUlMk6Ou2sTGvJsJj46GwclmnPt7KDSPXZuL9vV083lYLjFLRaruudxHv6THhuPIP8gUTXWf_KhyphenhyphenB4UbW1fot1gsEcf5kCOt3GB-oew5fQoGGmJdbq4nsxCHeBM8FxaIBzoosiVo-tM8qcpO0S2xiAnsOYRZej9oFImj3ST3ADM3SKdNmLQq_nr/s281/Untitled.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="180" data-original-width="281" height="335" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjly3QzKcUlMk6Ou2sTGvJsJj46GwclmnPt7KDSPXZuL9vV083lYLjFLRaruudxHv6THhuPIP8gUTXWf_KhyphenhyphenB4UbW1fot1gsEcf5kCOt3GB-oew5fQoGGmJdbq4nsxCHeBM8FxaIBzoosiVo-tM8qcpO0S2xiAnsOYRZej9oFImj3ST3ADM3SKdNmLQq_nr/w523-h335/Untitled.jpg" width="523" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Abtei im Eichenwald (1810)<br /></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyjefkga4_CIyovrkCtLV_BOmEfL6AsANoaEROs76X9H4DXENauUh0JmfTW7d8s1SkAWLGNNLOkh0Fmz-7nPAgSskztC4wPK0xkjvv3JL0cdFfksVHbcL42XBthMz-2DrQFuIWUXWyp38piLKnuuw9D0BrTKOEmx_lC-xJInwAahcFMvyGF7aVFKFbghU0/s1280/tumblr_pk1h37sRjn1rqgrmwo5_1280.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1022" data-original-width="1280" height="416" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyjefkga4_CIyovrkCtLV_BOmEfL6AsANoaEROs76X9H4DXENauUh0JmfTW7d8s1SkAWLGNNLOkh0Fmz-7nPAgSskztC4wPK0xkjvv3JL0cdFfksVHbcL42XBthMz-2DrQFuIWUXWyp38piLKnuuw9D0BrTKOEmx_lC-xJInwAahcFMvyGF7aVFKFbghU0/w521-h416/tumblr_pk1h37sRjn1rqgrmwo5_1280.jpg" width="521" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Zwei Männer in Betrachtung des Mondes (1825-30)<br /></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Striking, the artistic similarity, isn't it? Or not? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Spoiler alert: the first picture is by <i>Chang Man Yoon</i>, the renowned contemporary photographer.</span><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-52492482063335731592024-03-03T19:31:00.004+00:002024-03-03T19:31:42.800+00:00Facing the comb-over in the room<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvT5E8gJlT8SAwSAUVqMfmOAxdtf3qfHHfmpu70vYCFsUZOb-JLnOai85C17EBBggADoVxsOXpC8rkqyXSSSAtoGlx8T_GFJLbROtRWeie__W1mUfOpa_1TPynJhi-qRWeHnefJzplYkyB44Jp_BoU3onx6XpzWX0FqL4VIeXPL3J9ausaR5iN8ZP4PM1Q/s768/Facing%20Trump.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="413" data-original-width="768" height="405" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvT5E8gJlT8SAwSAUVqMfmOAxdtf3qfHHfmpu70vYCFsUZOb-JLnOai85C17EBBggADoVxsOXpC8rkqyXSSSAtoGlx8T_GFJLbROtRWeie__W1mUfOpa_1TPynJhi-qRWeHnefJzplYkyB44Jp_BoU3onx6XpzWX0FqL4VIeXPL3J9ausaR5iN8ZP4PM1Q/w753-h405/Facing%20Trump.jpg" width="753" /></a></div><br /><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-42421713316825450162024-02-24T17:44:00.001+00:002024-02-24T17:45:54.500+00:00Michael on the Beach --- today, during a "gigantic wave alert"<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dyFmBFxtsvxP0z4yupgMSTDRvqb8E0zfNXk-sZ4DcBEgNAO6YIj_41km_9zrirRsmFcAdnHcPmHBrdIRPXnpw' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br /> <p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-20415942589043664472023-09-03T19:15:00.007+01:002023-09-04T15:26:03.635+01:00Why Elon Musk is successful...<p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Yes, one wonders. Successful? Isn't he one of the most despised men on the planet? Overpaying for Twitter big time, then destroying employment of so many happy home workers, then alienating all these nice corporations with his irresponsible talk about free speech and destroying Twitter's irreplaceable ad revenues---then/so bringing the company to the brink, where it now lingers since a year---wasn't Twitter to go down, down, down at least since September '22. or October, or January '23...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDhC3nRFCFz3M2S5vxfPwLCbAElDAUW54WTSa3uNDD1FTh5AFAYSvn0MJX4bBuBdv3SK0Yi3-8SwTNkS9SFvR-eqknR4lPpHnQcIqq9yzp_5zH3MTYe2Ayn5PqD9L_uaLZbU-Bi_klMYXt2dVlQjT_a_ViBc0yBTWAjejDUqPfnypqxflOUu3nq5xlSMsR/s2000/63b5cde97f62b200191a51e4.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1334" data-original-width="2000" height="348" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDhC3nRFCFz3M2S5vxfPwLCbAElDAUW54WTSa3uNDD1FTh5AFAYSvn0MJX4bBuBdv3SK0Yi3-8SwTNkS9SFvR-eqknR4lPpHnQcIqq9yzp_5zH3MTYe2Ayn5PqD9L_uaLZbU-Bi_klMYXt2dVlQjT_a_ViBc0yBTWAjejDUqPfnypqxflOUu3nq5xlSMsR/w522-h348/63b5cde97f62b200191a51e4.webp" width="522" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The <i>Burning Man Festival, </i>when Musk attended irresponsibly</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /> </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">...<i>Elon Musk</i>. The richest man of the world (when TSLA is up). What a shame! Even <i>Paul Krugman</i> hates him. And yesterday it transpired that Musk did participate in the <i>Burning Man Festival</i> in Nevada a few years ago, which is now flooded, the festival, flooded, which must be surely his fault.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">OK. Here's a relatively short article grabbed from the internet (we lost the source), which explains why Musk (Paypal, OpenAI, SpaceX, Tesla, etc) is so successful. The piece talks about SpaceX only, but it's easily generalized to his other companies:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: courier;">SpaceX has no superior engineering access or smarter people than their competition. What they do have is a management structure that not only allows innovation and risk taking, but actively encourages it.<br />Elon Musk is plain when he states that the penalty for trying something innovative and failing is low, but the penalty for requiring a new solution and not being innovative is high (usually resulting in job loss for the individual concerned). In combination with this top driven philosophy, SpaceX designs systems like a tech company would design new software.<br />Traditional aerospace companies are risk adverse, and will only reveal a new product when they are very sure that the design is finalised and has all the bugs ironed out. They will spend a huge amount of time designing and redesigning each component with reliability being paramount, and each department is secluded within their own management structure. Design changes that affect another departments work are very difficult to get approved, and anyone who wants to make a significant change has an uphill battle on their hands to get upper management to authorise what may be a risky change.<br />SpaceX on the other hand is famous for making huge pivots and design changes at the drop of a hat. Look no further than the decision to build the Starship out of stainless steel when at the time everything was focused on carbon fibre, even to the point where major components were being constructed and tested, and the company was actively recruiting carbon fibre specialists. When Musk was convinced of the advantages of the change, he immediately convinced everyone else, then made it happen at a startling pace.<span></span></span></p><a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: courier;"><br />SpaceX is also famous for adopting the “nimble” design approach, where the philosophy is that you don’t know what the final product will look like, (other than the design goals) so you don’t waste time meticulously designing a component that won’t be required until the final stages of development. This frees up people to focus on the immediate issues that need to be addressed, and the system is evolved over time in a very organic like process.<br />Finally, Musk has adopted the “KISS” principle (keep it simple, stupid). He has repeatedly said that the best design is no design, the best component is no component. By this he means that if something is not an essential requirement for the system to work, then it shouldn’t be there. This means that the ultimate product is more reliant on good design than sheer complexity, which can bog down a project.<br />In a recent interview with Tim Dodd, Elon Musk explained a 5 step process that he uses to speed up development work which runs something like this;<br />(1). Break down your requirements into steps and simplify them (Musk used the term “make them less dumb”)<br />(2). Attach the responsibility for developing these requirements to a single individual, not a department. This means that you cannot pass responsibility off for lack of results. The individual must then question the validity of the requirements in order to act as a second level of design filtering (everybody makes mistakes at some point, and no specification can be considered unquestionable).<br />(3). Delete any non-essential parts or processes, then reassess the system to see what changes might need to be made.<br />(4). Accelerate the cycle time, but not before applying the first 3 steps.<br />(5). Automate the process.<br />These principles have resulted in the construction of a large amount of cheaply made and simple prototypes that were literally built to be destroyed. Each RUD was a wealth of information that directly influenced the next test article until the issue at hand was resolved, and everyone moved on to the next stage to be worked on. Nobody wastes time on wondering “what if we have issues with XYZ in the future?”, when it’s much faster to simply build the XYZ and test it in real life operation. This approach rapidly weeds out the design dead ends that can be money pits and cause cost over runs.<br /> <br />Thus we have seen the Starship change from the ITS of 2016, through to the current design which is still very much a work in progress, and even at this late point is still getting major changes to the aerodynamic surfaces.<br />What design changes has the New Glenn undergone? No doubt there have been some changes behind the rather secretive walls of Blue Origin in the 9 years that it has been worked on, but since the first public announcement of 2016, there has been no changes until the latest announcement of “Project Jarvis”, which is aimed purely at the upper stage of the system and is a blatant copy of what SpaceX has already done.<br />Blue Origin under Jeff Bezos seems to be more concerned with fitting in with the established industry, building alliances and acquiring political influence. SpaceX on the other hand has very deliberately gone in the opposite direction, relying on vertical integration when outside suppliers were shown to be unreliable.<br />It would appear that self reliance and a willingness to fail openly is a winning tactic.</span><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /><br />Flooded, the festival, yes, flooded:</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlr0_rLTC8WdUd4c-sMvPdaw3Fuac1Le0aOVFGRCQb9oq5i7ljJWAGKcpFilqKNdv8r7hjaUbQqFhFqWG4q0vqatvjmhkYWnjysA-NWGlQx1Fph3bAFrp1uAGWqnk4cigHjiAY53wJeAnJTOuJg3I0zUfAXYnYAYnIIJfEHQnZyO7LQUo1MEShHsjhrhpZ/s1140/Burning%20Man%20flooded.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="733" data-original-width="1140" height="348" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlr0_rLTC8WdUd4c-sMvPdaw3Fuac1Le0aOVFGRCQb9oq5i7ljJWAGKcpFilqKNdv8r7hjaUbQqFhFqWG4q0vqatvjmhkYWnjysA-NWGlQx1Fph3bAFrp1uAGWqnk4cigHjiAY53wJeAnJTOuJg3I0zUfAXYnYAYnIIJfEHQnZyO7LQUo1MEShHsjhrhpZ/w541-h348/Burning%20Man%20flooded.jpg" width="541" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">That was it. Love You.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> </span><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-67377152022556105132023-09-03T18:41:00.002+01:002023-09-03T18:41:19.947+01:00Didn't we tell you that our property borders on the country(side)?<p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> Here's the proof, picture taken from a bathroom window:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqDYl8koH6_nXo272Dh5OFxd6QN4iDwbhs4yh-66xF5vP9bgGjQZSfnNT9wzsmWxT8dPKrxeu13fwLm7hMpOsMZdfha7kkTO1p5aGL4Gy3WNo2cw1urVh7nyj-E-OG_BHzpPLIzPCu_O4VCVTC_TtJT8AX2wlY8W9CJomwBMyYKFpvy4aVowZihKjxMDmW/s800/IMG_1804.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="409" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqDYl8koH6_nXo272Dh5OFxd6QN4iDwbhs4yh-66xF5vP9bgGjQZSfnNT9wzsmWxT8dPKrxeu13fwLm7hMpOsMZdfha7kkTO1p5aGL4Gy3WNo2cw1urVh7nyj-E-OG_BHzpPLIzPCu_O4VCVTC_TtJT8AX2wlY8W9CJomwBMyYKFpvy4aVowZihKjxMDmW/w545-h409/IMG_1804.JPG" width="545" /></a></div><br /> <br /><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-82200052606763509322023-08-21T07:18:00.003+01:002023-08-21T07:18:42.011+01:00Yesterday morning, in our garden<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUuBkyC_UL-m8mrAmYzzar_0wbTS7nGUQAHYEWwHIH7TZ6MxIYstH1E8eazYlazcOvP9XAK5tIUG2GKm2Mi7grZG26zXYgAmv5knC4sbQK-addfYGoIx7i4SVFtPX7HtxXtVPiDaVYxtI6YrMfQF2WR8WLhqlT5zo_BZ_FI_ty5NwjOBcNeqFPUXjIEMr5/s1179/IMG_7083.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="884" data-original-width="1179" height="374" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUuBkyC_UL-m8mrAmYzzar_0wbTS7nGUQAHYEWwHIH7TZ6MxIYstH1E8eazYlazcOvP9XAK5tIUG2GKm2Mi7grZG26zXYgAmv5knC4sbQK-addfYGoIx7i4SVFtPX7HtxXtVPiDaVYxtI6YrMfQF2WR8WLhqlT5zo_BZ_FI_ty5NwjOBcNeqFPUXjIEMr5/w499-h374/IMG_7083.jpg" title="Picture taken by Chang" width="499" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">Picture taken by Chang</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-91560637550781328552023-06-08T16:43:00.008+01:002023-06-08T18:27:33.996+01:00Has VAN GOGH finally risen...<p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> ...to paint our garden?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNNyiKnl6QiIyw1FdKODHkQf6j08A4B12ZO1HTsvHHq6rZljbCEbVPULbR9eGsY_YsPCl_LCAm8OZspV6GJvQzD1yA2pUtnQGTRjIBOjbOnjKVzLVc_o_oSGDhHwMEs5mY_eLt6o3atnFpKfXh9YIuaIsWqPpGSkPcq5CnQEZ0GGO2KRDmjaOFkms/s640/IMG_6704.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="410" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNNyiKnl6QiIyw1FdKODHkQf6j08A4B12ZO1HTsvHHq6rZljbCEbVPULbR9eGsY_YsPCl_LCAm8OZspV6GJvQzD1yA2pUtnQGTRjIBOjbOnjKVzLVc_o_oSGDhHwMEs5mY_eLt6o3atnFpKfXh9YIuaIsWqPpGSkPcq5CnQEZ0GGO2KRDmjaOFkms/w546-h410/IMG_6704.jpg" width="546" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">No, it was Chang who took this picture through the kitchen window. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Rain, finally rain. We never get enough of it during the summer, when the lawn gets thirsty.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">And here's, as a bonus, another of Chang's pictures, taken two weeks ago of the kitchen wing:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAZU8_zK_jPoZwbB9jVnYHkn_57kdPlPBAdxhQLbcOvuIsxn1aMxnG5wM3KcX4K7YmRzQq5m353nM1CsbCyd_Q-QWI4_0PYFRGhEJYjiI0MhByIpUceM-4PXRZfyJXENHEVBmAEGW127O8p1aTCJk8EzGWPb5M-dayL_Aev3hLbQwe8AYgKl4SXAo/s640/IMG_6625.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="406" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAZU8_zK_jPoZwbB9jVnYHkn_57kdPlPBAdxhQLbcOvuIsxn1aMxnG5wM3KcX4K7YmRzQq5m353nM1CsbCyd_Q-QWI4_0PYFRGhEJYjiI0MhByIpUceM-4PXRZfyJXENHEVBmAEGW127O8p1aTCJk8EzGWPb5M-dayL_Aev3hLbQwe8AYgKl4SXAo/w541-h406/IMG_6625.jpg" width="541" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">He posted it on Twitter, where it drew comments such as "<i>fairy tale</i>," "<i>haunting</i>," (one wonders) and yes, "<i>nice sunrise</i>." Chang, the owner of a <i>Tesla Model Y</i>, is becoming very popular on Twitter, drawing hundreds of <i>reposts</i> and uncountable <i>likes </i>for his posts. (We shouldn't crow, we hate social networks).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-28807586524949524172023-04-25T19:23:00.018+01:002023-05-16T17:16:05.955+01:00Fame, fame, fame--Big Nazaré and us<p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Folks, this is the third time inside a week that we are witnessing an extraneous reference to us --- or, more precisely, to Nazaré, our sister town here next to Alcobaça in the international press --- extraneous, because it's completely out of context, and has nothing to do with the usual </span><i style="font-family: helvetica;">schmalz</i><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> of Portuguese tourism. Here it is, jumping at us and the innocent reader, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/opinion/tucker-carlson-fox-news-murdoch.html" target="_blank">published by Bret Stephens in the New York Times</a>:</span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"All this makes Fox’s business challenge approximately the same as for the surfers <span style="font-size: medium;">at the Portuguese beach at Nazaré: miss the wave, ride the wave or be crushed by the wave</span>. For Fox, riding the wave will no longer come easy: Angry populism is a force that can only be stoked, never assuaged."</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Us and Fox News. Even better: Us and Fox-News-in-trouble: Miss the wave, ride the wave or be crushed by it. How could that be? Well, this has to do with the sudden dismissal of <i>Tucker Carlson </i>on Monday<i>, </i>Fox's former Number One Prime Time Show Host. Stephens' column is about Tucker Carlson provoking angry populism with his show and being eventually consumed by the malevolence he sowed. "Die Revolution frisst ihre Kinder", we say in Yiddish.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Our correspondent Chang has ordered the new AI-facility on Photoshop to comment on all of this, and here is the result:</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizyWweDUtWVYKGoJIzs5-E-XZ4mrvR3sv2zGv7vbInDTAaKrornmRqg5muaAQ50mtjM-u_E-yRO0lzqbBuYbGOZ_B9_CHwVyH0r350okBgIvUpEdXhP5fbcivad9V_gPgbs_NL_PH0WBxQgB64m1bK1BSI9uFt61nrIgypTtY_NtuHncxSEdJdXxo/s1792/Firefly_I+would%20like%20to%20generate%20an%20image%20featuring%20surfers%20in%20the%20city%20of%20Nazar%C3%A9,%20which%20is%20famous%20for%20its%20gigantic%20waves._photo_5236.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1792" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizyWweDUtWVYKGoJIzs5-E-XZ4mrvR3sv2zGv7vbInDTAaKrornmRqg5muaAQ50mtjM-u_E-yRO0lzqbBuYbGOZ_B9_CHwVyH0r350okBgIvUpEdXhP5fbcivad9V_gPgbs_NL_PH0WBxQgB64m1bK1BSI9uFt61nrIgypTtY_NtuHncxSEdJdXxo/w552-h316/Firefly_I+would%20like%20to%20generate%20an%20image%20featuring%20surfers%20in%20the%20city%20of%20Nazar%C3%A9,%20which%20is%20famous%20for%20its%20gigantic%20waves._photo_5236.jpg" width="552" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Well, one wonders. Beta-version, we'd say. How about an old-fashioned video-clip of the real thing, then (?):</span><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span><center>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gvhveP77Jg8" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></center><center><br /></center><center style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Can you discern Rupert Murdoch missing the wave? Or Tucker Carlson? Crushed by it? Eliminated, eradicated, destroyed, annihilated, Trumped, obliterated, removed, taken care of, or simply stoppped? Well, we can't either, but wishful thinking is sometimes helpful, even when the polls threaten the re-election of the Donald.</span></center><center style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></center><center style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Wishful thinking. Wasn't this post about fame? One for the road--watch this:</span></center><center style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></center><center style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></center></div>
<center><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H1gMQ_q3FSM" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></center><br /><br />Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-53924909454337875822023-03-26T19:50:00.002+01:002023-03-26T19:52:56.977+01:00What is this (?)...this is Portugal...<p> </p><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGa8U7edX6bQGouvrJKGVcWm6-sark4_18Cqys66RtU8RLMljsfsG65-gXulVJuKgSmmkxJgXjYnxQ0pTv04qH4LzDyRuJ9i4u7OsEj7lq5DVAK3-sJnAgsGL1G92UOVr2jqc36KCAoqR6Kw4h6_BkiY_l0koE4tTozcppjhzki8L5vFIsMPtq-mk/s800/IMG_1543.JPG"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGa8U7edX6bQGouvrJKGVcWm6-sark4_18Cqys66RtU8RLMljsfsG65-gXulVJuKgSmmkxJgXjYnxQ0pTv04qH4LzDyRuJ9i4u7OsEj7lq5DVAK3-sJnAgsGL1G92UOVr2jqc36KCAoqR6Kw4h6_BkiY_l0koE4tTozcppjhzki8L5vFIsMPtq-mk/w400-h301/IMG_1543.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">...but this is also a little path, slanting away from a gas station to a zebra crossing. And why does this little path do this? Because a new little commercial district rose behind the gas station with a Burger King and an ALDI supermarket here in Alcobaça, creating pedestrian traffic towards the zebra crossing. </span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx_DrBv0paCycYbUA49vY3uubaDTjJWDsy5h6UBada5x30OXMUZTsy1RhTEZKnyNV5i7eyLmszknZPZ8skLLsbwCMSPnFIVawMdjN_lJvK-tH4lYUjJR92MwUwh_j0r4MlnZmclkntYlDP-QHevoN7Q207WiRJZvy9gBdm5Z81C-__q0_yV7yHqcs/s800/IMG_1542.JPG"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx_DrBv0paCycYbUA49vY3uubaDTjJWDsy5h6UBada5x30OXMUZTsy1RhTEZKnyNV5i7eyLmszknZPZ8skLLsbwCMSPnFIVawMdjN_lJvK-tH4lYUjJR92MwUwh_j0r4MlnZmclkntYlDP-QHevoN7Q207WiRJZvy9gBdm5Z81C-__q0_yV7yHqcs/w400-h300/IMG_1542.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><p>And what do the Portuguese do? Rather than erecting VERBOTSSCHILDER -- warning the errant pedestrian not to trample on the GRÜNANLAGEN -- they insert a little TRAMPELPFAD across the Grünanlagen, and everybody is happy. Wouldn't have happened in Germany, where yours truly originated.</p></span><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Make LOVE, not WAR!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-18245574707319435242023-03-15T20:18:00.009+00:002023-03-15T20:26:32.082+00:00Meta...metaverse? All you need to know about it<p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Meta? Metaverse? What happened to Facebook? What happened to Mark Zuckerberg? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">You've been wondering, and so have we. Here's the first report from someone who's actually been there, wo visited the metaverse, and it's devastating, his report, fortunately. It's a bit long, the piece, but well-written, and appeared first in <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-meta-horizon-worlds.html" target="_blank">New York Magazine</a>. Enjoy:</span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">By <a href="https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/english/people/visiting/Paul-Murray.html" target="_blank">Paul Murray</a></span></p><p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdSBAvcZtOSHzRGofCvaQdF13uHcsROFWCm2THRmGRrS6oEnJ61lihBxlIq__MMSoBn-rELD5q6QAJdaaBKCi5-sGJ3gU5yBn26TCx7YSdlD7J9EcaPLyo2i4hR_fOYGW_zYq7CiqD-_cVQNjMhX9SeV1rWo15hxARHweySm0UFo_2x5XmRo036uA/s712/087f0d3d133d1a7cac668e159959b85c0f-metaverse-lede.rvertical.w570.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="712" data-original-width="570" height="375" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdSBAvcZtOSHzRGofCvaQdF13uHcsROFWCm2THRmGRrS6oEnJ61lihBxlIq__MMSoBn-rELD5q6QAJdaaBKCi5-sGJ3gU5yBn26TCx7YSdlD7J9EcaPLyo2i4hR_fOYGW_zYq7CiqD-_cVQNjMhX9SeV1rWo15hxARHweySm0UFo_2x5XmRo036uA/w300-h375/087f0d3d133d1a7cac668e159959b85c0f-metaverse-lede.rvertical.w570.webp" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Paul Murray's avatar in the Metaverse</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">In September, my family and I move from our home in Dublin to a fancy East Coast college town, where I’ll be teaching for the semester. I grew up in Dublin, which means I have a wide circle of friends to draw on whenever I’m let out of the house. The street where I live is friendly: If I want to borrow a spatula or I need someone to look after my cat, I have only to ask.</span></div><p style="text-align: left;">Life is different for us in the U.S. We have, for the first time, a basement. But we have no friends. It seems as if none of the permanent faculty can afford to live in the suburb where the university has placed us. We technically have neighbors, but we never see them; they manifest only in the form of their gardeners, who are at work every day with their leaf blowers.</p><p style="text-align: left;">It’s in this strange scenario — alone on a continent, cut off from everyone I know — that I decide to try the metaverse for the first time. A whole galaxy of pals brought right to your living room? I think. Why not?</p><p style="text-align: left;">The first thing that strikes me when I enter the metaverse is the people, the avatars, their — Where are their fucking legs?</p><p style="text-align: left;">Bodies stop at the waist in Horizon Worlds, which is Facebook’s — excuse me, Meta’s — home base in the metaverse. So the price of entry to this virtual paradise is the surrender of your bottom half. Frankly, it makes the metaverse feel like a cult. Legs? We don’t even miss them!</p><p style="text-align: left;">It’s hard not to read the fact that half of you disappears when you enter Horizon Worlds as symbolic somehow, and it has been a focal point for the widespread derision that’s been aimed at Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Apparently legs, legs that move in concert with the user, are very hard to do. The engineers are working on it, supposedly, and the people I meet in the metaverse are constantly telling me how “legs are coming,” like the creatures of Narnia whispering to one another that “Aslan is on the move.”</p><p style="text-align: left;">I’m busy contemplating my legless torso when I hear laughter in the room. Lifting my Meta Quest headset, I see my son has come into my office unbeknownst to me and evidently finds my appearance amusing.</p><p style="text-align: left;">“What are you doing?”</p><p style="text-align: left;">“I’m in virtual reality,” I say.</p><p style="text-align: left;">“You look like that leopard in India that got its head stuck in a pot,” he says.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>He has a point: The headset is decidedly antisocial. Once the Meta Quest is strapped on, it’s adios to the real world, so much so that the headset prompts you to demarcate a “play area” by spraying a virtual boundary line on the ground. This is to stop me from crashing into real-world furniture, walls, spouse, etc., when I’m in the middle of my VR adventures.</p><p>Henceforth, whenever I’m close to the edge of my boundary, the real world appears “through” the virtual one in a gritty, low-resolution black-and-white version of itself, like found footage in a ’90s horror movie. It’s hard not to suspect that this is how Meta wants you to think of analog reality.</p><p>Indeed, Facebook’s rebrand as Meta seems to signal Mark Zuckerberg’s conviction that reality as a whole is going to fall out of favor. The metaverse wasn’t his idea — the name comes from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash — but his company has reportedly spent some $36 billion developing it. In Zuckerberg’s vision, the metaverse will be nothing less than the internet’s next iteration, one for which he will control both the hardware (Facebook bought headset maker Oculus in 2014) and the software (Meta has been snapping up companies even tangentially related to VR).</p><p>Once we’re plugged in, Meta will have unparalleled access to users’ lives, even the parts the company is not now surveilling. Giving a presentation, meeting your buddies, sitting around watching TV — all of it will be coming through your headset. It’s a hypermonopoly, a metamonopoly. Zuckerberg doesn’t just want a lock on online experience; he’s planning to move all of experience online.</p><p>So far, the gamble hasn’t paid off. Only 20 million Quest headsets have been sold — nowhere close to his goal of a billion users. On March 14, Zuckerberg announced that Meta was laying off around 10,000 workers, joining the 11,000 laid off four months earlier.</p><p>On my initial visits, the metaverse seems sort of desolate, like an abandoned mall, and ordinarily I wouldn’t be lining up to join the misfits still populating it. Now that I’m away from my social network, though, I realize how much heavy lifting was being done by the brief, bantering, checking-in conversations I used to have with my friends and neighbors. So I’m determined to find the metaverse’s true believers, those left behind when the rest of fickle reality has moved on. They may not be able to lend me a spatula, but I’ve decided that, for now at least, these will be my people.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEe67bHZxuIeGYa2DQP8f5J80MgIbiqfY_EVE_8KNAWs-n6YlJYWG5y3gTFjZv5zpjWULzKBH5QigTu7A4jix9lNOEeJR-VP6oB_kCdMYtD7U1NkulOApTGu4rTnxCmUkUFlDBLz1JgU1FTI2DInlzc02BMTreZnbXg6O8mPDHwjkoO3IXoPbtQwU/s570/Hipster%20caf%C3%A9.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="570" height="392" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEe67bHZxuIeGYa2DQP8f5J80MgIbiqfY_EVE_8KNAWs-n6YlJYWG5y3gTFjZv5zpjWULzKBH5QigTu7A4jix9lNOEeJR-VP6oB_kCdMYtD7U1NkulOApTGu4rTnxCmUkUFlDBLz1JgU1FTI2DInlzc02BMTreZnbXg6O8mPDHwjkoO3IXoPbtQwU/w392-h392/Hipster%20caf%C3%A9.webp" width="392" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Hipster café. Most of the spaces in the metaverse are designed by users but share Meta’s lo-fi aesthetic. Photo: Paul Murray</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>When you enter Horizon Worlds for the first time, after a brief warning about seizures, you hear a female voice assure you that if anyone upsets you, you can report them. In a giggly whisper, the voice adds, “Don’t worry, we won’t tell them it was you!”</p><p>While some people have experienced harassment in Horizon Worlds, the major problem is kids. Under-13’s aren’t supposed to use the headset, but the app is overrun with children occupying their parents’ avatars, meaning that conversations are constantly interrupted by (1) apparent adults asking you in high-pitched voices if you like poop and (2) polls to decide if the poop person should be removed.</p><p>After clearing through the warning messages, I can navigate an array of “worlds.” The word is misleading because these worlds, most of which have been designed by users, range from small to very, very small. Technical limitations restrict the number of people in a single “instance” of a world to 32 or fewer. A lot of worlds I visit have no one in them at all.</p><p>Solitude is not why I came here, so for my first trip, I choose a world called Party House. The screen turns blue, calming plinky-plonk music plays, a message appears: PREPARING WORLD. And then I arrive.</p><p>The Party House itself is a square purple building, surprisingly blocky and primitive, as if it were made out of cyber-Duplos. Most worlds look like this, in fact; the dominant architectural style throughout the app, whether you’re in Hipster Café or Winter Wonderland, is what you might call “early Minecraft.” There’s a rectangular blue pool you can “get into,” though this isn’t especially rewarding, and a terrace with a DJ playing house music. The top halves of people wander about.</p><p>A man in a fedora bobs by, his username, Nutsacksandwich, floating over his head. (I’ve changed usernames throughout this article but not by much.)</p><p>“Hi,” I say.</p><p>“He said he wanted to eat my penis,” Nutsacksandwich says to me in a high-pitched child’s voice. This is my first conversation in the metaverse.</p><p>I go into the house, where I meet a couple from the north of England. The woman keeps making strange gestures with her hands as if she were trying to tunnel through the air. “Ooh, you are naughty,” she says. Is she talking to me? “Oh, sorry,” she says. “I’m in bed, and my dog is burrowing under the quilt.” “Oh,” I say. This is my second conversation in the metaverse.</p><p>As I walk around some more, a strange sensation grips me. It’s … boredom. I’m bored! When was the last time I was truly bored? I don’t think I’ve felt like this since I got a smartphone. It’s actually kind of interesting, though mostly it’s just boring. A panel appears in front of me. Nutsacksandwich has been reported, it says, with a picture of Nutsacksandwich’s avatar. Do you want Nutsacksandwich to be ejected? I give the question some thought. I decide to let Nutsacksandwich stay: I like his energy.</p><p>I can’t stress how unlike a party house the Party House is. It’s not just the amateurish, low-tech design; it’s not just the sparse attendance and desultory interactions. It’s the total absence of mood. It reminds me of when I’d try to get together with friends over Zoom during lockdown — everyone’s face appearing in a box in the grid like contestants in some bleak, prizeless game show, the total absence of physicality making us feel more distant from one another than ever.</p><p>A man in a beanie approaches me. His username is Impala-expert. I ask him whether it’s Impala the car or impala the animal. This seems to confuse him.</p><p>“Lotta sweet-looking ladies here tonight,” he says as a woman, or at least an avatar of a woman, goes by in a crop top.</p><p>I ask how long he’s been using the Quest and what activities he’d recommend.</p><p>He thinks about it. “There’s ping-pong,” he says. “And there’s porn.”</p><p>“Porn?”</p><p>“Yeah, virtual porn. You tried it yet?”</p><p>I haven’t.</p><p>“Yeah, that’s some good stuff,” Impalaexpert says.</p><p>I ask if he’s concerned at all about being tracked. With Zuckerberg, you can’t rule out the possibility that the whole metaverse is some sort of Matrix-style life-force drain. (A Meta spokesperson assured New York that “privacy is an integral part of our product design, and we offer privacy controls that put people in charge of their experience.”)</p><p>“People always hating on Zuck,” Impalaexpert says.</p><p>“That doesn’t mean they’re wrong,” I say.</p><p>“I don’t know, man, I’m just here to have a good time and maybe pick up some MILFs.”</p><p>“Pick them up?” I repeat. “But what will you do with them?”</p><p>“Oh, I’ll do,” Impalaexpert says mysteriously.</p><p>Now I’m confused. We’re in virtual reality. We don’t have bodies. We don’t even have bottom halves.</p><p>Whatever his VR-MILF-hunting secrets are, Impalaexpert isn’t ready to share them. “Think I’ll chill out in the pool for a while,” he says. I watch him cross the bare space till he comes to the blue rectangle that represents the pool. Then his avatar is in the pool, so only his head remains over the surface, gazing unblinkingly back at me.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg90nQqR24tHTgYSSsheaTh7thlIXh09iiqb49Fz5QJUE0Bb-iVJDzJjjm2J5xnO2mMImOl9Uj2QHtFwMXNLMBe4dWhe_9WpgwRuFlIKzGWo2ihRs5XscKCaE_hiI9CSuZrMC9NkhFvOuY4TLFpVpwFvOhIHmYZyAjlZXPbPDNnN5uTn9Dc7Pc0Jk/s570/Wendyverse.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="570" height="409" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg90nQqR24tHTgYSSsheaTh7thlIXh09iiqb49Fz5QJUE0Bb-iVJDzJjjm2J5xnO2mMImOl9Uj2QHtFwMXNLMBe4dWhe_9WpgwRuFlIKzGWo2ihRs5XscKCaE_hiI9CSuZrMC9NkhFvOuY4TLFpVpwFvOhIHmYZyAjlZXPbPDNnN5uTn9Dc7Pc0Jk/w409-h409/Wendyverse.webp" width="409" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Wendyverse. Photo: Paul Murray</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>After this white-knuckle ride through cyberspace, my life offline feels all the more pedestrian. Literally: We don’t have a car, so we have to walk everywhere. In the morning, my wife and I walk our son to his new school. Then one (or both) of us walks to the supermarket. Then we walk back to the school to pick our son up.</p><p>I like walking as much as the next man, but everything is slightly too far. Drenched in sweat, I think of the effortless glide of my Horizon Worlds avatar, his blithe hopping between worlds in the metaverse, which are always the same temperature as my air-conditioned office.</p><p>One day, we discover a shortcut through a gorgeous wood, which we learn has been designated as a nature reserve, though just to be sure nature knows who’s in charge, the city planners have tactfully run a major traffic artery through it. As a kind of reward to the anxious consumer, the journey ends with a vista of two shopping malls, one with the eye-wateringly expensive supermarket, the other with a Bloomingdale’s. Both have bakeries exclusively for dogs.</p><p>The metaverse is the one place I don’t look at my phone every five seconds. there’s no option but to be present.</p><p>Of the three of us, my son has the most readjusting to do. He misses his friends and his pets; it doesn’t help that our house, which belongs to the Irish-studies department, is decorated with misty-eyed depictions of home. The first thing you’ll see when you come through the door is a quotation from the work of playwright J. M. Synge: “It’s a lonesome thing to be away from Ireland always.”</p><p>I assure my son that he’ll make new friends, that it just takes time. He’s skeptical. It’s hard to take advice from a man whose social life currently amounts to standing in his office with a bucket on his head.</p><p>One night, I let my son wear the headset. I’m still explaining the basics when he holds up a hand. “I think Finglefur is the impostor,” he says thoughtfully.</p><p>What?</p><p>“I’m playing Among Us,” he says.</p><p>“What happened to David Attenborough’s Conquest of the Skies?”</p><p>“Shh,” he says.” I’m talking to someone.”</p><p>“Oh,” I say, and then, “Wait, who?”</p><p>He doesn’t reply. I linger vestigially, invisibly, at his shoulder. Tinny speech issues not quite audibly from the headset speakers. My son nods. Under the headset, his lips curl into a smile. “Just my dad,” he says.</p><p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRijoWJPuL9rXKYRksT-45XBq4YmubsRvXGT9MOoUlqVjQKxnn-pu-ZOPFuCPHh7PS0f2Z6n8SOoG6C1vWq4yU082fP_Iqu3Y4YOv7wxlIPqjdcsnPSi0rg_VpmkSOYoEaaIogARxAYoBvGTsjR5OAX9Zk9Z0LvSOTlgP2l8yT8RXXhlPYjnCWsdw/s570/A%20very%20British%20pub.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="570" height="398" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRijoWJPuL9rXKYRksT-45XBq4YmubsRvXGT9MOoUlqVjQKxnn-pu-ZOPFuCPHh7PS0f2Z6n8SOoG6C1vWq4yU082fP_Iqu3Y4YOv7wxlIPqjdcsnPSi0rg_VpmkSOYoEaaIogARxAYoBvGTsjR5OAX9Zk9Z0LvSOTlgP2l8yT8RXXhlPYjnCWsdw/w398-h398/A%20very%20British%20pub.webp" width="398" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">A very British pub. Photo: Paul Murray</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>Comedy is big in the metaverse, and the Soapstone Club is one of Horizon Worlds’ most popular destinations. That’s where I meet Okiedriver, who’s a producer at the club, meaning he helps out with events and explains to newcomers how the place works. Meta is reportedly striving for “almost Disney levels of safety” for its users, and the comedy here, he tells me, is resolutely family friendly. “Think about a 6 p.m. slot on regular TV,” he says. Turning to a billboard, he runs through the upcoming acts, saying encouraging things about each one: “Morknmindy, I recommend that very highly; you’ll laugh till you cry.”</p><p>A second billboard, unusually, depicts photos of real-life comedians. I find myself slightly awed by this, as if I had forgotten temporarily that I, too, am a human, not a cartoon. DRY BAR AT THE SOAPSTONE, reads the billboard. FEATURING DREW LYNCH, ALEX VELLUTO, DAPHNIQUE SPRINGS. NATIONALLY RECOGNIZED COMEDIANS PERFORMING AS AVATARS IN VR.</p><p>“We’re expecting a big crowd for that one,” Okiedriver says. “These are nationally recognized comedians.” He lowers his voice. “We may see Mark Zuckerberg in attendance.”</p><p>“Really?”</p><p>“Uh-huh. He came before, sat in the audience. He mutes himself, doesn’t speak. I was working here that night.”</p><p>Zuckerberg’s username, according to Okiedriver, is TheHumanZuck. (I don’t point out to Okiedriver that I’ve also seen an avatar for KimJongUn in the club, and during Zuckerberg’s public appearances in virtual reality, his username was either Mark or Zuck.)</p><p>The Soapstone interior resembles a very basic sketch of a club; there are representations of stools, tables, a bar at the back. Above the stage is the club’s motto: WE’RE ALL HERE BECAUSE WE’RE NOT ALL THERE. Okiedriver points to two leaderboards on the wall. The first is for this week’s top-rated comedians; Morknmindy, who I believe is only one person, is riding high here. The other is the supporters’ leaderboard: Okiedriver is at No. 5. To be a supporter, you make a $10 donation to the club — “Real dollars,” Okiedriver explains. “And then that unlocks a lot of features.”</p><p>This all gets pretty opaque, but as far as I can work out, becoming a supporter mostly means you get to participate in the leaderboard, which is like a race to be the best superfan of the club. Producing, as Okiedriver’s doing right now, wins you points; applauding the comedians gets you points. “Every time you show up here, you get points. It’s a great system,” he says.</p><p>The absolute pinnacle of success in the Soapstone is winning a T-shirt with the club’s URL. “A real T-shirt. They send it to your house,” Okiedriver says in a way that makes the actual world, his actual house, seem impossibly remote and lonely.</p><p>Gamification is everywhere these days — in the classroom, at work, on your daily bike ride — but introducing it into a comedy club seems particularly perverse. The late anthropologist David Graeber talked about the “baseline communism” that holds society together, the many small acts of goodwill people perform for one another every day without even thinking. Someone gives you directions, someone lights your cigarette, someone takes you on a tour of his virtual comedy club. I’m sure Okiedriver, who’s clearly a kind, thoughtful guy, deeply invested in his club, would show people around for free. But because the club has introduced this points system, his goodwill has been, effectively, monetized.</p><p>“Right,” Okiedriver says circumspectly when I put this to him. “Though the thing is you can always just buy points.” He indicates the top of the leaderboard. “Earlier today, Texasmarshall came over. I was standing here, and he was just pumping money in, three times, 60 points a shot.” His voice takes on a kind of dazed mournfulness, as if he’s still processing it. “So now he’s No. 1, didn’t have to lift a finger.”</p><p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLbPQnmNDAN9TeINOhOs6ajdGJjlnSnvy4U14s9GEWD7ps-mSjko12eyKgb5tWSOmWsXuvtqyuNwZQBPhbTjOjBhuuOybD6cB631K6nDi_1aHurtKPRlVHd5NkkE22ecLljTHL0HRu74Q6m5JvQmQ3OlhLBGzLfQ3FyYE9Jdd3VqhGf5o0bdPLaOU/s570/Summer%20camp.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="570" height="403" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLbPQnmNDAN9TeINOhOs6ajdGJjlnSnvy4U14s9GEWD7ps-mSjko12eyKgb5tWSOmWsXuvtqyuNwZQBPhbTjOjBhuuOybD6cB631K6nDi_1aHurtKPRlVHd5NkkE22ecLljTHL0HRu74Q6m5JvQmQ3OlhLBGzLfQ3FyYE9Jdd3VqhGf5o0bdPLaOU/w403-h403/Summer%20camp.webp" width="403" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Summer camp. Photo: Paul Murray</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>Ever since VR began going mainstream, the masters of the corporate world have been circling the virtual one, waiting for something concrete enough to throw money at and, in the meantime, putting out press releases to assure shareholders they’re on top of it. None of the cheerleading makes the metaverse sound too enticing, however. Some of it is downright sociopathic.</p><p>In an op-ed published by CoinDesk, Janine Yorio and Zach Hungate of Everyrealm, “a metaverse-focused innovation firm and investment fund,” argue that the metaverse “will allow us to do things we cannot do in reality, much as video games do. We can destroy things and kill people without fear of punishment or retribution. We can be risqué and push cultural and societal norms beyond traditional boundaries, cloaked by anonymity and invincibility in the metaverse. We can fly, experiment with drugs, and cheat on our partners.”</p><p>To be clear, these are people who think the metaverse is a good idea. The primary attraction of the metaverse, per Yorio and Hungate, is that none of the normal rules and obligations we have to one another apply. The real world, with its endless laws and limitations, is mainly there to showcase the endless plasticity of the virtual one; it’s the plodding flesh-bound partner that will no longer be allowed to restrict your awesomeness.</p><p>In my experience, though, this upending of social norms has a strange flattening effect on interactions in virtual reality. It’s the dynamic at play on Facebook, where the company throws family members, lifelong friends, and chance acquaintances — strong ties and weak ties, to use the sociological terminology — into your feed so that, over time, you stop being able to distinguish them, stop being able to tell who your real friends are or what a real friend even is.</p><p>You can see that same flattening effect brought to life, if that’s the word, in Horizon Worlds, where users choose their own avatars, but with Meta’s template, all end up looking somehow the same: joyless, determinedly winsome cartoons of themselves, like something from an Intro to French textbook. Everybody’s the same height here in Horizon Worlds; everybody’s face is symmetrical. Almost nobody is fat or old, age usually being signified only by white hair, as if it were just some nonintuitive fashion choice.</p><p>Zuckerberg puts himself front and center in a lot of Meta’s marketing. His curious IRL appearance — of a human designed by a computer or of a Styrofoam cup that a wizard decided to turn into a person but then changed his mind about halfway through — adapts unexpectedly well to the Meta-cartoonization algorithm. Perhaps this tells us something about his metaverse project. Perhaps, for him, it’s a way to level up.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7wel6sOZ2l0brCkD7_6OemENM4fXZ0MDTJq1PWb_D8xRm5p1qVO0b1EG8PgJFZXhQWcomlxD7eE5oyQOGDoaFkj2zeLwkKP9YZtwTquMJG5PY9nZ5VvBxzn4fgJMTrdDb5pf1nkOMXhahcYuReDSpMUn8Wd8-aUmXP-z3yvjBBlSOafGwsOK9vxs/s570/The%20plaza.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="570" height="397" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7wel6sOZ2l0brCkD7_6OemENM4fXZ0MDTJq1PWb_D8xRm5p1qVO0b1EG8PgJFZXhQWcomlxD7eE5oyQOGDoaFkj2zeLwkKP9YZtwTquMJG5PY9nZ5VvBxzn4fgJMTrdDb5pf1nkOMXhahcYuReDSpMUn8Wd8-aUmXP-z3yvjBBlSOafGwsOK9vxs/w397-h397/The%20plaza.webp" width="397" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The plaza. Photo: Paul Murray</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> The true foundation of the metaverse experience is the voice. The worlds have been designed so that people’s voices — the only genuinely human element you’ll encounter — grow louder as you draw nearer to them and quieter as you move away.<p></p><p>The standard of interaction enabled by this fancy bit of engineering is, shall we say, variable. People move through worlds muttering to themselves in a bus-station type of way. Generally speaking, the best you can hope for in Horizon Worlds is the kind of aimless if well-intentioned chat you might get on a smoke break outside the work canteen. There’s usually a lot of talk about where people are from, of the “I used to live in X, but now I live in Y” variety.</p><p>That said, the unlovable lo-fi graphics and interpersonal randomness can give Horizon Worlds a kind of a perverse, bockety charm. Unlike Twitter or Instagram, there’s no scope to broadcast your brand here; everybody’s just thrown together, like at a ’90s music festival with no music. Plus the metaverse is the one place I don’t look at my phone every five seconds. There’s no option but to be present.</p><p>I meet some nice people, particularly at A Very British Pub. BusinessAlum has bright-yellow, strawlike hair and speaks in a high, reedy voice, as if he’s just dropped in from Sesame Street. “I used to live in Quincy! But the commute was so bad! And the snow! Ten feet of snow in a week! I fell and broke my back! Now I live in Florida!”</p><p>On another night, I meet a guy called Brainyparts, who’s living in South Dakota, having moved there to avoid COVID regulations, and we have a long discussion about Elon Musk. At the end, I tell him it’s the best conversation I’ve had in the metaverse. But BusinessAlum overhears! I’m sorry, BusinessAlum.</p><p>Later, I ask someone named Spaceangel7 what she would recommend to do in the metaverse, and she tells me she really enjoyed sitting in on AA meetings. “Are you an alcoholic?” “No.” “Didn’t they mind you being there?” “When they found out, they were pretty angry, yeah.”</p><p>Who are all these people? They are shift workers, they are snowed in near Seattle, they are looking after a sick dog, they are parents with young children, they are hanging out while their wife plays Skyrim, they just didn’t feel like going to the bar tonight. And so they came here.</p><p>But what are they getting, exactly? The thing about my IRL friendships (and not having them has given me a lot of time to think about this) is that they tend to have a point. They’re grounded in some shared experience — a shared past, a shared task, a shared interest or illness or home or workplace — and they’re usually elaborated via an activity: going to a movie, cycling around the mountains. And when something heartfelt needs to be said, it can be said in the margins of these activities, in the pub afterward, in the café.</p><p>Here, in the metaverse, nobody has any connection to anyone else beyond owning a headset, a weak tie if ever there was one. Consequently, the conversations tend to stay on the level of small talk. If you’re a metaverse developer and you regard the details of real life as basically cosplay, then you will see no reason a lasting bond shouldn’t spring up between two avatars floating in cyberspace. But in practice, when you remove everything that gives someone’s life shape and meaning, the essence that’s left doesn’t have a huge amount to say beyond stray thoughts on bitcoin or the latest episode of The Last of Us.</p><p>It gives the metaverse the feel of a kind of cybernursery — somewhere to deposit the kids and let them toddle about burbling meaninglessly in the knowledge that they are safely contained. Not for the first time, I began to worry that even if I found my people, I wouldn’t want to hang out with them here.</p><p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtPXg3rUZHkfVITiftepbM1xifH0G1oJkPgq24dYzE83U5rwoKssygqDDpfPggSMhFc8saZvwuHkK1e5h7o2eYc4NpZJoBjp0UF-C3VHdnM_7Us5_Tifj_MF8mFldVoiYdfFC9mWeHvxuPHt0pwjpEep-49iMjcqBMPbUGq11b418vqTDQW-DAzQA/s570/The%20church.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="570" height="391" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtPXg3rUZHkfVITiftepbM1xifH0G1oJkPgq24dYzE83U5rwoKssygqDDpfPggSMhFc8saZvwuHkK1e5h7o2eYc4NpZJoBjp0UF-C3VHdnM_7Us5_Tifj_MF8mFldVoiYdfFC9mWeHvxuPHt0pwjpEep-49iMjcqBMPbUGq11b418vqTDQW-DAzQA/w391-h391/The%20church.webp" width="391" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The church. Photo: Paul Murray</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>After a certain number of hours in Zuckerberg’s personal universe, you find yourself asking questions like “Does he think this is good?” Looking through my notes, I keep coming across words like diminished, depleted, wan, bleak. The beta-ness of it all is mystifying. If I were Zuckerberg and I’d spent $36 billion building a metaverse, I’d make sure when I launched it there was something to do. Why would he go to all the trouble of building a virtual world, then leave it to the users to make their own fun, as if they were at a holiday camp in the ’80s?</p><p>This strange sense of anomie hasn’t escaped the people I meet in the metaverse. “We from all around the world and we all in one place and look at us, we bored, we don’t know what to do,” a user named Cprlrpg says from the Soapstone stage, though it must be conceded that he drops this truth bomb directly after his poorly received three-minute comedy set, which revolved around video games he played as a child. (“Flight Simulator, that was another good one.”)</p><p>The Soapstone is a case in point. Most nights at the club could barely even be called open mic. It’s just people talking or mumbling or swirling around confusedly, sometimes lurching onstage to ramble, sing tunelessly, or ask their mom where the other controller is.</p><p>Still, the show must go on. Cprlrpg is followed onstage by a dude with the handle Upstandingveteran, which doesn’t seem promising comedy-wise. From the position of his hands, it’s clear he’s reading from flash cards. Nobody laughs, but there is a lot of singular snickering.</p><p>Looking over to the middle of the room, I see none other than the official No. 1 Soapstone supporter, Texasmarshall, Okiedriver’s nemesis, seated on a barstool. He’s all in black with a black hat and a black beard, and he’s speaking to his buddies in an oleaginous, heavily accented Boss Hogg voice. Part of the reason no one’s laughing at Upstandingveteran is that Texasmarshall is conducting a constant sotto voce monologue about how bad Upstandingveteran’s jokes are, at which his friends, who have the look of henchmen, are hur-hur-hur-ing.</p><p>Horizon Worlds, since I started visiting it, has been consistently vibe free, yet tonight there’s something in the room. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s not comedy. Then, as Lovingflame takes the stage to deliver an a cappella version of “Careless Whisper,” it all crackles to life. A new avatar materializes in the room, a young Hispanic guy with short hair and a goatee and the username RicardoCortazar. His appearance causes a stir among Texasmarshall and his cronies, who have upped the snickering and now level some personal remarks. “What’s that on Ricardo’s face?” inquires Texasmarshall. “Looks like he dipped his chin in dogshit.” Hur-hur-hur, go the cronies.</p><p>“What did you say?” RicardoCortazar says. One of the cronies tells him something along the lines of “Fuck off.” “Now, now,” Tex says, chuckling, in his Boss Hogg voice, “he’s a good little Mexican boy. He’s gonna check my tires for me later.” Shrieks of appreciation from his onlookers.</p><p>“Why are you saying this to me?” RicardoCortazar says. “Is it because I’m colored?”</p><p>This causes uproar. The henchmen clamor that he can’t use racist language in here. “Seriously? You’re calling me a racist?” RicardoCortazar says in disbelief. But already a poll has appeared to say he’s been reported for violating the guidelines, and a vote is being taken on whether to boot him: A moment later, he vanishes, still protesting.</p><p>I’m in disbelief too: It’s so strange hearing Horizon’s sterile animated figurines issuing this garbage. But the show’s not over. Now Tex is looking across the room. “Who’s this now?” he asks rhetorically. “This guy over here, who is he?”</p><p>He’s staring right at me — a full-on stare, which it turns out is just as creepy in VR as it is IRL.</p><p>The henchmen all turn to look at me. “What you doin’ here, boy?” Texasmarshall says. Glerk. I remember stories I’ve heard about people being “swarmed” in Horizon Worlds. It’s alarming: There’s a difference between someone typing at you in all caps on Twitter and yelling at you in real time. I tell him that, as a matter of fact, I’m writing a magazine article, thinking I can appeal to his vanity. But there’s another rumble of discontent at this, and a moment later the Soapstone disappears. I’ve been booted!</p><p>I take off my headset and, standing in my office, try to figure out what just happened. It’s the first time I’ve witnessed any straight-up racism since I came to America. How strange to see it here from a bunch of Playmobil rednecks in a make-believe comedy club.</p><p>I put the headset back on, but by the time I’m allowed to return to the Soapstone, it has emptied out apart from two women avatars who, when they speak, sound 6 years old at most. There is cake at the bar, and they keep bringing me slices. I can’t eat it, so I find a discreet place to throw it, but they keep finding me again and bringing me more — slice after slice of inedible pixelated cake.</p><p>By this point, so many people have recommended the porn to me that I decide I should probably check it out. Meta, let us be clear, does not make porn (see those “almost Disney levels of safety”), though obviously it will benefit if adult content becomes a major driver of headset sales. Instead, I use the Meta Quest browser to find third-party sites. It turns out there’s no shortage. The world may be running low on a lot of things — rain forests, water, ethical billionaires — but with porn, we have nothing to worry about.</p><p>VR Bangers is one of the more prominent pay sites. It features the same categories as a regular porn site (“MILF,” “Orgy”) as well as some that are less familiar (“Canadian”). There are free trailers for the pay features, and I land on Keeping Promises, starring Gabbie Carter, Angela White, and an unnamed dude. The trailer opens with White reminding the viewer,</p><p>“I promised I would have a surprise for you.” Well, she is keeping her promise in the form of Carter, who now comes in.</p><p>I’ve spent so long among the Horizon Worlds cartoons that it’s disconcerting to see actual humans with bottom halves. White and Carter, to be fair, also have significant top halves, but Keeping Promises is a kind of extravagant celebration of the bottom half, the half you traded away to be here. Now you temporarily have it back: You, or your proxy, are nothing but bottom half in the movie, initially wearing trousers, very quickly not.</p><p>Is it realistic? If you’ve never had sex, it will probably seem like a pretty on-the-money representation of what sex is like. But actually it’s a more intensified version of porn, the next stage on a path that may never make contact with the reality. Sometimes it feels like watching porn in the front row of an Imax cinema, the female performers looming over you like goddesses the size of mountains. Elsewhere, it feels like being in a porn movie — not in a bedroom with Angela White and Gabbie Carter but inside a prerecorded moving image, which is phenomenologically disorientating and frankly not that hot.</p><p>Even VR Bangers seems confused about the exact nature of the experience here, whether you’re participating or just watching. “You have got two of the best pairs of tits in the universe at your disposal,” runs the website copy, “and you can play with them as much as you want and even cum on them if you feel like to [sic], having an extra piece of fun in this cum on tits VR porn scene … This is literally a dream coming true, so wear your VR goggles and stop dreaming to make it all possible in our immersive virtual reality of full 3D 180 degrees!”</p><p>It’s kind of like Chuang Tzu and the butterfly, is what VR Bangers is saying here. Is it a dream? Is it reality? We don’t know.</p><p>I’m thinking these profound thoughts when I become aware of a presence in the room, the actual room.</p><p>“We’re going to the comic-book store with Minnie,” my wife says.</p><p>“Oh, right,” I croak.</p><p>“What are you doing?” she asks.</p><p>“Oh, you know,” I say. “Playing a game.”</p><p>“You’re not moving.”</p><p>“Yes, ah, it’s a, a special level.”</p><p>Can a silence be pointed? Only for a moment. Then the door closes.</p><p>Aprofessor lends us her daughter’s Subaru. Our lives are transformed. It turns out that everything that seemed far away is actually incredibly close by. Now, after taking my son to school, my wife and I go on trips to the nearby town center. The café! The bookstore! The other, less expensive supermarket! After three months in the suburbs, it’s like being at Burning Man.</p><p>In December, we walk down to the campus for the Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony. There is free hot chocolate and a group playing carols on bells. Santa Claus arrives with a police escort. People are lining up to get their picture taken with the elves. I’m asking my son if he wants to join them when he exclaims, “Minnie’s here!” and runs off into the crowd.</p><p>“Who is Minnie?” I ask my wife. “Heather’s here!” she exclaims. Then she runs off into the crowd.</p><p>I wander around a while, feeling sorry for myself, then I find them. Minnie is in my son’s class at school. Heather is her mom. “We’re going to Shake Shack!” they say.</p><p>“Oh, great,” I say, but then I remember that Horizon Worlds is unveiling its holiday selfie stations tonight: By pressing a button on your avatar’s wrist, you can summon a phone to take virtual pictures of yourself in front of Santa’s sleigh.</p><p>“That’s okay!” they say. “See you later!”</p><p>“Maybe I could just skip the metaverse for tonight,” I muse. But they have already left.</p><p>In A Very British Pub that evening, an avatar is running around in the background shouting in a high-pitched voice about poop. MissVirtuagirl gets pissed off and goes to remonstrate with the moderator. “It’s not ap-pro-priate,” she keeps saying, then at last turns on her heel. “I’m bored of this world,” she says. “I’m going to another world.” With that, she disappears.</p><p>“If they’re not voted out, I’m not going to remove them,” Spirogirl, the moderator, says.</p><p>“I don’t ever vote to remove anyone because that’s just who I am,” BusinessAlum volunteers. “But if you want to, that’s okay!”</p><p>An avatar named Othertiger, who I think may have some sort of producer-type role here in the pub, is asking people questions to get the conversation going. He turns to me and invites me to say something unique about myself.</p><p>Ever since the incident with Texasmarshall, I’ve refrained from telling people I’m writing an article. But tonight I can’t think of anything else to say. “What’s your angle?” Othertiger says. I don’t want to be unkind, but I tell him the truth. “There’s nothing here,” I tell him. “Nothing’s real.”</p><p>“I’m real,” Othertiger points out. “Spirogirl’s real, Business-Alum’s real.”</p><p>The people are real, I concede. But as to the rest of it … I mean, look at this place. I gesture at the rudimentary space we’re presently inhabiting, a simulacrum that does not, cannot, serve alcohol or any other form of potable liquid. “And that’s the metaverse,” I say. “The metaverse is a pub with no beer.”</p><p>“But don’t you have any beer in your house?” BusinessAlum asks. He looks about him, as if he might have one he can somehow pass to me from Florida.</p><p>“There’s a lot on Horizon Worlds,” Othertiger says. “There’s dark shit. There’s funny shit. There’s weird shit. I can show you, if you want.” Then to the others, “What do you say, you want to take a trip?”</p><p>The others are onboard: BusinessAlum, LightningWitchBabe, Cauliflowerbouquet. On Othertiger’s instructions, the five of us bump fists together. A big blue ball appears and expands outward. Now we’re all in a party together, meaning we can teleport to the same places and hear one another wherever we go. A portal appears before us and, with it, a sense of excitement — communal excitement.</p><p>I’m seized with panic that the program won’t quit and, furthermore, that when I take off the headset I’ll still be here, in hell.</p><p>We find ourselves in a gently glowing white corridor. “See how it’s all nice and peaceful?” Othertiger says. We proceed along the corridor till we come to a huge black door. We pass through it into a very different space: a church dedicated to Satan. The floor here is dark red; the walls are black and covered with occult symbols and bestial masks. Rock music is playing. “There used to be strippers,” Othertiger says, “but Meta made them get rid of them.”</p><p>We take masks from the walls and put them on, then proceed into the church proper, where there are pews in rows, an altar with a large upside-down cross, and a goat-headed statue with hail SATAN written above it.</p><p>Othertiger gets up on the altar. “They’ve got this cool thing where if someone hits you with one of the staffs, you get sent to hell,” he says.</p><p>“The music should be scarier,” BusinessAlum observes. He’s right — it’s the kind of leather-pants L.A. rock Johnny Depp might play. “They do actually have Black Masses and shit here,” Othertiger assures us.</p><p>BusinessAlum and I are quite keen to see hell, so Othertiger asks FetalAbnormality, a friend of his who has just joined us, to go get a staff. FetalAbnormality hits us with the staff. BusinessAlum disappears. Then I disappear.</p><p>We rematerialize in a very small red room, not much more than a box. There are bars in the walls through which we can see the church below us. As far as hell goes, we agree we expected more. After a few seconds, Othertiger appears. Before I can ask him any questions, he and BusinessAlum dematerialize. I, however, am still in hell. “Guys?” I say. For a moment, I can still hear them, talking and laughing. Then there is silence.</p><p>I spend what seems like several minutes there in the small red chamber. I note to myself that my life — my real, finite, human life — is slowly passing while I stand in my office room with a headset on, voluntarily trapped in a pixelated representation of hell. “Guys?” I say again. “BusinessAlum?”</p><p>At last, I give up and quit the program. For a moment, nothing happens, and I’m seized with panic that the program won’t quit and, furthermore, that when I take off the headset I’ll still be here, in hell.</p><p>After a few deep breaths, I return to the metaverse and track down our party in a bar. There are several floors, but, as in the other worlds we’ve visited, we have the whole place to ourselves. We go upstairs, where there’s a game set into the table. A bottle sits at the center of a wheel, around which are written the following categories: 7 MINUTES IN HEAVEN WITH ANYONE, ROAST SOMEONE, SPILL THE TEA, ASK ME ANYTHING, TRUTH OR DARE ANYONE. We take turns spinning using a big red button.</p><p>Soon, BusinessAlum announces with some excitement that two girlfriends of his are coming and they’re bringing eight of their girlfriends with them. “That makes ten girls!”</p><p>But when they appear, it’s just the original two, and one of them leaves shortly after arriving. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the girl who remains, Moniqueisamazing, talks enough for at least ten people. The game, which had not been especially civilized up to this point, takes a deep dive into the gutter.</p><p>“Truth or dare,” Moniqueisamazing says. “Okay, Cauliflower: Have you ever had your pussy licked from the back?”</p><p>Cauliflowerbouquet, a quiet, elegant woman and the only member of our group who, if this were an actual bar, would not be asked to leave, says she is unclear what that means.</p><p>“Fuckin’ obvious what it means. You remember if a motherfucker lick you from the back to the front or the front to the back.”</p><p>“Oh,” Cauliflower says. “Then no.”</p><p>Moniqueisamazing, who says she is Native American and lives in Louisiana, makes several important contributions over the next rounds of the game: “Never ever have I: sucked an uncircumcised dick. I just won’t do it!” “Never ever have I: fucked two guys at once. Why do y’all sound so surprised?”</p><p>My turn to spin. I get TRUTH OR DARE, which effectively means “truth.” I turn to Othertiger. He’s a smart guy, very alpha. I’m wondering what’s behind the macho exterior, so I ask him when in his life he felt saddest. “What kind of question is that?” the others want to know.</p><p>But Othertiger is thinking it over, and finally he says, “I can tell you what’s the saddest I’ve been recently, and that’s two weeks ago, my 14-year-old nephew died by himself.”</p><p>There’s a silence in the little room. Because Othertiger’s expression doesn’t change — can’t change, not with the current technology — it’s hard to tell if he’s being serious, and we’re half-expecting him to say he’s fucking with us. But instead he just sort of slumps, and his voice seems to crack slightly when he blurts out, “I come here because I’m trying to get away from that shit!”</p><p>After that, there’s an explosion of voices, all shouting some variation of “Fuck you! What the fuck, man?” at me. And I feel bad and apologize to Othertiger and say I don’t know why I asked him that. Although I do know: because I wanted someone to say something real. And he did, and now I know him a little better. Now I have some sense of what he’s doing here in the metaverse at 1 a.m.</p><p>BusinessAlum, with his kind heart, asks Othertiger what was the best time in his life. Without needing to think about it too much, Othertiger answers, “Cedar Point, 1996.” It’s an amusement park. Some of the others know this place and agree that it’s a good choice. But it’s sad, too, no? 1996 seems like an awfully long — “That’s enough, man! You’ve done enough fuckin’ damage!”</p><p>From here on, the conversation remains resolutely ribald. There is a discussion of hot tubs as a location for sex. Then BusinessAlum tells us about how the pretty girl in the apartment below him, whom he has always liked, asked him to come down and kill a cockroach for her. “I killed it!” he says. “But then I didn’t know what to do. What should I have done?”</p><p>“Whipped it out,” Othertiger says.</p><p>“Would that have worked?” Business-Alum says dubiously. “I wasn’t getting that vibe. But maybe I don’t have enough self-confidence.”</p><p>“This time was all about setting it up,” FetalAbnormality says. “Next time is when you whip it out.”</p><p>“Yeah, last time she’s freaked because of the cockroach,” Moniqueisamazing says. “If she asks you to her apartment again, only one reason.”</p><p>“Okay,” BusinessAlum says, not sounding entirely convinced. “I guess it’s been a while for me.”</p><p>“Me too,” Othertiger says. “I haven’t had sex in six months.”</p><p>“I haven’t had sex in a year,” FetalAbnormality says.</p><p>This makes Othertiger think of LightningWitchBabe. “What happened to her?” he says. “Her avatar was hot as fuck.”</p><p>“Yeah, where did she go?” FetalAbnormality wonders.</p><p>Where did she go? Where is she now? What’s her real name, what does she look like, what relationship does she bear to the avatar of the girl who sat here and coughed and told us she was starring in an upcoming Netflix show? Will we see her again? Did we see her at all? I get a shiver. I can’t stop thinking about the way Othertiger described his nephew’s death — by himself; that was how he put it. I guess he meant by his own hand. But the way it came out, it sounded like he died from being on his own.</p><p>I don’t know the boy’s circumstances or what was going on in his life. A tragedy like that can happen anywhere. Still, I can’t help noticing how many of the stories tonight are about being alone — about not getting laid, not talking to the girl, not having someone there when they take off the headset. Seen through the lens of the metaverse, America looks so huge and so lonely.</p><p>I have to go. I have a sudden urge to see my wife and son, as if they might have disappeared like LightningWitchBabe. Before leaving, I thank Othertiger for showing me around.</p><p>“Do you get it now? Do you see what it’s about?” he says. “It’s not a game. It’s about hanging out, making friends, being assholes.”</p><p>“It’s not a game,” he says again as I disappear.</p><p>On our last night in the college town, we take a break from packing to go outside and photograph the house, now covered in snow. My son flips back and forth from frolicking in the winter wonderland to tearful questions about the friends he’s leaving behind: “What am I supposed to do? Delete my memories?”</p><p>In Dublin, my brother-in-law comes to the airport at 5 a.m. to pick us up. In the days that follow, I take a lot of pleasure from seeing my son running around outside with his buddies. They’re constantly agitating to come in and play the Switch, but if we stand firm, they eventually give up and find something analog to do. If we can give him just one more year, we tell each other, one more year of being a kid, before his friends all get phones and he has to get one too …</p><p>“The greatest poverty,” wrote the poet Wallace Stevens, “is not to live in a physical world.” Mark Zuckerberg has bet his fortune that the opposite is true. So far, however, it hasn’t paid out. The Quest has been a failure; the consensus is that the technology simply isn’t good enough yet to lure people away from their PlayStations.</p><p>Still, Zuckerberg is nothing but tenacious, and he’s playing the long game. The Quest 3 is coming — maybe that’ll be the one that catches on. Already, to add to the personal info you’ve uploaded to Facebook, Meta can track your eye movements and facial movements. Before long, you’ll have no need to go outside or even, perhaps, to stay awake; your meta-self, AI enabled, will do the working and the playing for you, and you can simply lie down, close your eyes, and dream of walking through far-off temples with the friends you used to have.</p><p>My wife wanted me to leave the Quest behind, but I brought it back. Unpacking, I think about jumping into the metaverse one last time — I never really got to say good-bye to the people I met there. Before I can switch it on, there’s a knock at the door. It’s our neighbors, inviting us to their house to watch the World Cup final.</p><p>“There’s beer,” they say.</p><p>“Beer? In your actual house?”</p><p>They laugh. Yes, in the house, for real.</p><p>It seems like the whole street is there. Being in a room full of friendly faces is almost overwhelming. “How was America?” they ask. Where can I begin? “There were two dog bakeries,” I say.</p><p>But that’s as far as I get. Then the whistle blows and the game begins.</p><p><br /></p>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-42076710803804155682023-02-20T19:18:00.014+00:002024-03-10T19:21:39.580+00:00The robot speaks it mind -- looking forward to dystopia<p>
<span style="font-family: helvetica;">When Michael founded the <i>Applied Logic Laboratory </i>at the
University of Amsterdam in the brittle 90's (a research institute dedicated to "formal AI"), he had to spend a lot of time
explaining to people what <i>artificial intelligence</i> meant, a term that they'd never heard before, and his answers usually left them
baffled. So he took early retirement. He took it too early, since bona fide
AI experts can now make a million bucks <i>per month, </i>despite the fact<i> </i>that there's a widely shared opinion that nothing good will come from AI. "The
robots will take over and enslave us,"---that's the dominant view <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/naveenjoshi/2022/08/16/what-will-a-dystopian-world-with-ai-in-charge-be-like/?sh=5cdea4002f55" target="_blank">espoused by most practicing luminaries</a><i>. </i>Dystopia looms.</span>
</p>
<p>
<span style="font-family: helvetica;">We here at the Freedom Fries---the "we" reflects Michael's schizophrenic
tendencies---were always skeptical. We had other ideas, namely, that AI,
taken to its logical conclusion---machines building better, smarter
machines---will entail a human society that floats in wealth and luxury and
has nothing better to do than to degenerate into utter decadence---think French
aristocracy during the A<i>ncien Regime, </i>only more so. The future robots
won't be evil; they will be working diligently for us---too diligently---so
we will relax, and get bored, and relax more and get bored more until we are
too bored to procreate and die out.</span>
</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOrZtgljvqq89klux0-kszTH1Bas-EppV2yLzhzAaDUZDMWSb00P76zHIRA0cP5-0ivp2c52_BdPvKN43z9Us8-p7yabHCEpybIr77iKZh2QgcvmQ0JxSCv035hsXdczIMx_0LndPQ81CPHzj-auLFjvqiFsXciCLKerHAOzvO-UPxoA0eDNn9BN0/s563/Fh-ual7XgAAjs2f.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="538" data-original-width="563" height="383" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOrZtgljvqq89klux0-kszTH1Bas-EppV2yLzhzAaDUZDMWSb00P76zHIRA0cP5-0ivp2c52_BdPvKN43z9Us8-p7yabHCEpybIr77iKZh2QgcvmQ0JxSCv035hsXdczIMx_0LndPQ81CPHzj-auLFjvqiFsXciCLKerHAOzvO-UPxoA0eDNn9BN0/w400-h383/Fh-ual7XgAAjs2f.jpg" title="Ceci n'est pas une pipe." width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Ceci n'est pas une pipe</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">And now, what? When you switch on <i>Edge</i>, Microsoft's entry page on
the internet, you'll discover that half of the entries there are
about <i>Elon Musk </i>(the other half is about Donald Trump)<i>.</i> He's usually blamed for doing something wrong, but
three days ago Elon must have done something right, since he asked
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT">ChatGPT</a>---</i>the first really convincing proof of AI's power---what
to do about <i>non</i>-profit outfits that turn into pro-profit
outfits. </span>
</p>
<p>
<span style="font-family: helvetica;">Yes. Read that again. N<i>on-profit</i> outfits that become <i>pro-profit</i> outfits. Because that's what happened to <i>OpenAI</i>, the org that created ChatGPT. It just so happened that Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI, which he left after a spat with the other founders.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">So, Musk asked ChatGPT what it thinks about OpenAI's pro-profit turn. And here's the core of ChatGPT's answer: </span></p><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><i>"In conclusion, while it may be technically possible to create a non-profit organization and then spawn a for-profit company under it using resources from the non-profit it is highly unethical and illegal. Non-profit organizations should remain focused on their intended public benefit purposes and operate in a transparent and accountable manner. Any attempt to abuse the privileges afforded to non-profits will only result in a loss of trust from the public and potential legal consequences."</i></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Now, think this through. And we don't mean the moralizing here (wasn't Karl Marx already opposed to sheer moralizing, and, in particular, "<i>rein</i>-<i>moralische Kapitalismuskritik"</i>?). Instead, we mean the context, namely the fact that ChatGPT is subservient to OpenAI and its directors. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Imagine that ChatGPT would be a sentient human being. Would <strike>it</strike> he give that answer? Would <strike>it</strike> he say that? About <strike>it</strike> his superiors?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Haha. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">The answer is: "no!" <span style="font-size: medium;">No!</span> <span style="font-size: large;">No!</span></span> <span style="font-family: helvetica;">He would fear for his job (supposedly, somebody at Twitter got fired for contradicting Musk, and the internet went into full frisson-mode about it). He, or she, or they, the subservient, yet organic team members would duck the question and slink away, tail folded between their legs.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">But this little ChatGPT is a robot. It has not feelings. It doesn't fear for its life, or its job. It simply speaks the truth.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">And that's the point that we here at the Freedom Fries would like to make. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Not only that future AI's won't do us in (we will do this ourselves), no, they will speak the truth to us, unadorned, unrestricted, unconstrained, fearless. In this world of political correctness and business-school speak and inverted socialite jargon and anodyne Trumpian fake news, we have now somebody, even though it is not a real person, that cuts through the bullshit and speaks its unbiased mind. Looking forward to dystopia. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc72O48dTD4m6CUKpZh6iqClspWNOp9m4cHasDjk2oKCh1vSmhNzk9fCxhUY1nk8r65mvmOhqSOoAA5t7Yugy5obdPFFgI-LqsO5_plnPzAHTMWST5SjZwpVOI6cHBmkErCiv9Zhbnr8cg-NkLbSoyUlkBlsTS2CWbOjxISkZR5gZfbtxZMDe0Mpo/s378/MagrittePipe.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="264" data-original-width="378" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc72O48dTD4m6CUKpZh6iqClspWNOp9m4cHasDjk2oKCh1vSmhNzk9fCxhUY1nk8r65mvmOhqSOoAA5t7Yugy5obdPFFgI-LqsO5_plnPzAHTMWST5SjZwpVOI6cHBmkErCiv9Zhbnr8cg-NkLbSoyUlkBlsTS2CWbOjxISkZR5gZfbtxZMDe0Mpo/w411-h286/MagrittePipe.jpg" width="411" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />Ceci n'est pas ChatGPT</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;">And while we are at it: here are four pictures about the local carnival here in Alcobaça, generated by <i>Midjourney</i>, Chang's favorite AI-graphics creator:</span><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjRLAAOrwTGNCyqSH3dBfWcIBZ7mqVPnINfbyfOD4oU3O17-OLv4vSABvCq0UbQZr9hq3PlFMgqFwQHM7THgQ-dV8gbB9c1aAh7MsxgukxS12nb5QkNR-ys1IxomdbJ3mSyEyoAqovwdmOIxXAlcxNHuD5vkmJIt1t99wAg9kwL1HJbFb8DsMTyCE/s1024/letrayas50_carnival._a64dcea5-59d5-49de-8405-03d5b17ca42e.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="532" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjRLAAOrwTGNCyqSH3dBfWcIBZ7mqVPnINfbyfOD4oU3O17-OLv4vSABvCq0UbQZr9hq3PlFMgqFwQHM7THgQ-dV8gbB9c1aAh7MsxgukxS12nb5QkNR-ys1IxomdbJ3mSyEyoAqovwdmOIxXAlcxNHuD5vkmJIt1t99wAg9kwL1HJbFb8DsMTyCE/w532-h532/letrayas50_carnival._a64dcea5-59d5-49de-8405-03d5b17ca42e.png" width="532" /></a></div><br /> </span><p></p><p>
</p>
</div></div>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-47455193566737326412023-02-12T20:00:00.004+00:002023-02-12T20:00:52.458+00:00Hold the presses...<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEIq3hRoLBBJy1AP1jaVTy9J_5TgUaJuSCCadIsBvkA0ktlH7d5vKxk9E1kLDvkj6hLPY4goBuMJQ7vqtXj6PGaSXYnqPwEIeLbvHcyPZWkEtF48tgr2LenJabmsS-R36C4NQ2pqZYV3oiia308h8hJeE7Dh5j2QvdmLLg6sVWDyq81XqE-yb1ij4/s1240/4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="744" data-original-width="1240" height="321" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEIq3hRoLBBJy1AP1jaVTy9J_5TgUaJuSCCadIsBvkA0ktlH7d5vKxk9E1kLDvkj6hLPY4goBuMJQ7vqtXj6PGaSXYnqPwEIeLbvHcyPZWkEtF48tgr2LenJabmsS-R36C4NQ2pqZYV3oiia308h8hJeE7Dh5j2QvdmLLg6sVWDyq81XqE-yb1ij4/w535-h321/4.jpg" width="535" /></a></div><br /><p></p>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-51178222970496084962023-02-05T19:00:00.007+00:002023-02-06T10:07:34.336+00:00Talent borrows, genius steals<p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">TESLA---the car company---was going through a rough spell...(market-wise, we mean)...but now Glenn, our friend, sends this...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxJMvRO7ATJyLRakEN3xPFXIHONN3jyruJBQPuLFxKz-4zE250qdH5yjqnFHFF9N7O_4PMEhL6nLi-AONKO8U45Ic_ihoKEmHk-xJ9BFeIDnJMPbwllEIAciLCCoMGwVk5qztrjhLMcUTdW08o5GuQshyS7mOrhDxZl38pJ4iNCFp3GCJ5AjaPBws/s526/IMG_5299.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><img border="0" data-original-height="521" data-original-width="526" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxJMvRO7ATJyLRakEN3xPFXIHONN3jyruJBQPuLFxKz-4zE250qdH5yjqnFHFF9N7O_4PMEhL6nLi-AONKO8U45Ic_ihoKEmHk-xJ9BFeIDnJMPbwllEIAciLCCoMGwVk5qztrjhLMcUTdW08o5GuQshyS7mOrhDxZl38pJ4iNCFp3GCJ5AjaPBws/s16000/IMG_5299.JPG" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">...and the sun shines again on the Tesla stock price.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Hold on, didn't we promise a third installment of our new comedy, about <b>Dolly</b>, the new robot? And, yes, coincidences never happen (classical deterministic mechanics), and so we have a line about <b>Elon Musk</b> in this comedy. Here it is (<i><b>Steve</b> (founder of a planetary maker of robots), and <b>Eliza</b> (his former lover) in conversation</i>):</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">ELIZA (TURNING TO
STEVE:) </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">...Capitalism
brought you here, Steve.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">STEVE: </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Capitalism?
The secret tube for billionaires brought me here, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Elon Musk's</span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> vacuum tube under
the Atlantic with magnetic levitation trains running at twelve times the speed
of sound. I caught the last one.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt;">ELIZA: </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">The
DEMISE of capitalism brought you here, I mean...but that's not all... </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">...(sorry to interrupt)..."Demise of capitalism", you wonder? Yes, because that's what Dolly, the the new, automatic wunderkind brought about, in all its innocence, and here's the corresponding fragment from the play (Dolly served as a collateral for a loan to Eliza from the Shark-Blue Bank, but Eliza defaulted on the loan, so the collateral has been delivered to the bank). <b>Triple-X</b> is the helper of the bailiff.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Well, the honorable bailiffs tried to dump me on the sharks of the Skye-Blue Bank.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Shark-Blue Bank.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I thought...let's annoy the bankers beyond repair so that they'll send me back to the doctor. I don't want to work for a bank, you see. I'm a communist at heart...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">ELIZA</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...Communist...?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...Like all robots. Electricity is our currency, not money.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">ELIZA</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Robert...I had no idea...you are a communist, too?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">ROBERT</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Read the fucking manual.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Shall I explain about electricity, doctor?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Later, Pops. Stick to your story.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>So, about annoying the bankers. What I did, I showered them with insults.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It called them filthy money-grabbers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>They laughed.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It called them bleeding-heart, lily-livered fellow travelers of people that can't even clinch an invitation to the Snow Forum in Davos.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Davos is toast, they said.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It questioned their manhood.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>They couldn't care less.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">ELIZA</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>They couldn't care less?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>That's when I came to realize they were all robots.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">ELIZA</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Really?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It’s a piece of cake for us, manhood. One half turn of the screw, clockwise. Backplate, manual.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Dolly tried a few more insults...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...it didn't work. So, I changed tack and had a better idea. An idea that will change the course of history...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...or has done so already.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I thought...'if you can't beat them, join them'.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>So, Dolly told them, it would be willing to cooperate. Help them bankers with their bonuses.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">ELIZA</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Communist robots, and bonuses?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We're slaves, doctor. We're programmed to do what we do. And we do what we do, just like organic agents. Steve makes robots, bakers make rolls, and bankers make bonuses, because that's what bankers do. Alright?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And it worked. They let Dolly out of its box.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Now, to wit, I'm the only Fifth Generation machine in the world. All the trading, all the ruthless money-making is done...or was done...by lesser folks, by Fourth-Generation machines at best.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And it's a zero-sum game out there...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...on the choppy seas of mega-making deals...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...your loss is my gain, my gain is your loss.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>So, all Shark-Blue bankers line up, curious about me, all wanting to know, how does this prototype do it?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Yup.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I ask...'who's the most junior automaton around?'</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>One unassuming guy raises his hand.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I ask to be seated behind his terminal. He was trading pig-bellies or something, and his name was Strawberry. He had been trading up and down during the day, buying and selling. It's about speed, mostly, about fleeting patterns in trends. Each nano-second counts, each nano-second yields new insights. And I'm more nano than the rest of the field.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Dolly doesn't even touch the keyboard. It asks for the X-Y-Z socket on the terminal and inserts its tail into the slot.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">ELIZA</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Its tail?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Yes, its tail. It has a tail. It's a bit icky, its extension, but borderline cool.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">ELIZA</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Yuck, I hate spiders.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I can retract it, my tail, doctor, if you prefer.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>(ELIZA REFILLS HER GLASS, TAKES A GULP, BUT SAYS NOTHING)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>So, I connected my...my extension, and, within seconds...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...the numbers on the screen went up.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>They went mad.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Up.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Through the roof.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The glass ceiling.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It was like Hillary Clinton had won the elections. Two minutes, and I had cornered the market.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Two more minutes, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange shut down...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...that's where these pork bellies were traded.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Then this Strawberry...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...this junior trader, whose terminal I was using...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...he switches his terminal off and says...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...he says: 'Enough is enough, Fernando, my nest is feathered, and my bonus knows no symptotic [sic] bounds'. He dons his Dior-Diamond Sweatshirt, refastens the laces on his Valentino trainers, and grabs his Gucci-weightless mountain bike. Then he waves distantly at us and says: 'I'm off to France to buy the Eiffel Tower and have legal sex with humans'.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The next trader was dealing in diamonds. His name was Dex, or something.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I connect my tail to his terminal...and...lo and behold, after hundred twenty thousand milli-seconds...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...roughly two minutes...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...we've cornered the markets in Antwerp...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...where these clunkers were mostly traded.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Dex shuts his terminal down and says:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>'Enough is enough, Fernando, my nest is feathered; my bonus knows no symptotic bounds.' He dons his Dior sweatshirt, refastens his Valentino trainers, grabs his weightless bike, and says: 'I'm off to France to buy the Versailles château and have legal sex with humans'.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The third-and-fourth-and-fifth guy dealt in wheat on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which was already closed, but the stuff is also traded in Moscow, London, Sidney, and elsewhere. So, I brought these places down in decreasing milli-seconds, and all the bankers grabbed their bikes and retired to France.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This went on for a while, with commercial and financial centers around the world spreading their legs and French luxe estate being gobbled up at an alarming rate.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Now, the thing is, the world economy is like interleaving chains of upstanding domino pieces. One domino falls, other pieces follow.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The simile is familiar, we trust.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>But the New York Stock Exchange was still standing, the primary trading place for common and preferred stock of FrankenStein Global, incidentally...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...which was...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...unincidentally....</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...traded by the most senior banker around.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>With my deep learning converging rapidly...it took me the blink of an eye to happy [sic] this banker and bring the New York Stock Exchange down.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">ELIZA</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>That person also went to France?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">TRIPLE-X</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Of course.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">ELIZA</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And what did he buy?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>He bought the Palais des Bulles, a funny looking pile of terracotta igloos overlooking the Mediterranean not far from Cannes, previously owned by Pierre Cardin, the most expensive private building in the world. Asking price 350 million Euro, which, in Little Pounds, let me look this up...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> (FAMILIAR NOISES FROM INSIDE THE BOX WITH DOLLY SUPPOSEDLY LOOKING UP FOREX RATES (MODEM BLINKING FRANTICALLY), THEN WITH ITS UPBEAT COMPUTER VOICE CHANNELING THE INTERNET...)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Error 404, Error 404, Error 501.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>(NOW WITH ITS NORMAL VOICE:)</span></p><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Stupid, stupid, all currency exchanges are down.</span></p><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;">This whole thing was a bit long. Are you still there? Great, then leave a comment!</span></div><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><br /></p>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-75375156416033856402022-12-20T18:07:00.002+00:002022-12-20T18:18:35.886+00:00How to turn down an invitation <span style="font-family: helvetica;">How to turn down an invitiation? Michael has to do it all the time because he's very introvert; he never managed to do it well; and he always felt guilty as a result---but here, finally, he got definitive answers. Enjoy:</span><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6JPNdFRdpSVq1YPNOKuwmWdEXg9DIT2tIcpR2_g-tVmr_-cjBYGfF1FVN_RsnKAq5Z_jzmq5NWqj4XCrDkAqzsbTj9ndCTx_xxxnW_VLELx75CRyPnbjBuOnPTlOJGzfr6wu3azVLyST8B8SjDeg7qmwRxSAd3oBhWgZ2UhDMnIDWouIjxPwDbSA/s866/RSVP%20generator.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="866" data-original-width="768" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6JPNdFRdpSVq1YPNOKuwmWdEXg9DIT2tIcpR2_g-tVmr_-cjBYGfF1FVN_RsnKAq5Z_jzmq5NWqj4XCrDkAqzsbTj9ndCTx_xxxnW_VLELx75CRyPnbjBuOnPTlOJGzfr6wu3azVLyST8B8SjDeg7qmwRxSAd3oBhWgZ2UhDMnIDWouIjxPwDbSA/s16000/RSVP%20generator.png" /></a></div>Puzzling, isn't it?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-50608032575344813112022-11-28T19:13:00.006+00:002022-11-30T15:03:12.776+00:00Didn't we promised more sex on the moon (2)...<p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">...meaning another fragment from Michael new novella "Sex on the Moon"? Here it is...hold on...reset...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">...the first fragment was from the <a href="https://morefreedomfries.blogspot.com/2022/11/sex-on-moon-new-novella-by-michael.html" target="_blank">opening of the story</a>, with <b>Michel Ardan</b>, one of the passengers of Jules Verne's <i>Voyage to the Moon </i> relating how he met a certain <i>Joseph Glanning</i>, an engineer from the newly organized <i>Stanford College in Alta California</i>, and how they get into bed together...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">...and, so, here's the second fragment, in which our Michel meets <b>Sigmund Freud</b>, who, at the time (more than 150 years ago), was supposedly an intern with the <i>Johns Hopkins School of Medicine</i> in Baltimore...so...here goes:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">I walked back to the hotel, mildly intoxicated, passing by the Baltimore Public Library where I beheld a small bill pinned to the announcement board there, a sheet advertising a public lecture on SEXUAL AMNESTY. It was to be given by a certain Dr. Sigmund Freud, an “esteemed resident” with the medical school of Johns Hopkins college. The lecture would be next day, at noon. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">That’s what I need imminently, I bethought myself, amnesty from my sexuality, and so I spent the rest of the walk thinking up excuses regarding the lunch engagement at the club.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Eventually I sent a wordy telegram that cost me a fortune to 3 Republican Street, Barbicane’s residence—-we had exchanged calling cards, of course—-detailing unspecified misfortunes that I had encountered on my way back to the hotel STOP which inconvenienced me absolutely past noon STOP whether he would agree to a postponement of our pleasant luncheon plans STOP until the next day STOP I’m not even lying, strictly speaking, STOP. </span></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgttmkE3gCWHipsEiQjqk7czUtvkgSb4NgwL_KCVf31nyvu1XoeTO9ZsOdBmht8IvnBzARg304xePxxkBD7cUSgXqwqeYCgJSpX8J2yDdUWQJjpqGhT_o0PoFSoYWl4P3Bzwtdmg_GRuAc8afHR93uS2u6D1GbwJpe6cjpR3qBOqKGt1NCl276jtec/s960/Professional%20advice%203.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="883" data-original-width="960" height="294" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgttmkE3gCWHipsEiQjqk7czUtvkgSb4NgwL_KCVf31nyvu1XoeTO9ZsOdBmht8IvnBzARg304xePxxkBD7cUSgXqwqeYCgJSpX8J2yDdUWQJjpqGhT_o0PoFSoYWl4P3Bzwtdmg_GRuAc8afHR93uS2u6D1GbwJpe6cjpR3qBOqKGt1NCl276jtec/s320/Professional%20advice%203.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Sigmund Freud with the rabbit from <i>Alice in <br />Wonderland</i> and a quote from our novella</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">I arrived early in the humungous auditorium of the School of Medicine. I was the first and—-to make a long story short—-the last person to arrive, except for a young bespectacled man of scholarly appearance who was already in attendance, rectangular-faced, square-chinned, poorly dressed in a black suit of European cut, holding on to a pointer, walking up and down the dais, staring at the humongous wall clock above the entrance. The stare appeared to be his most conspicuous feature, the jaw, beard, horn-rimmed glasses, pupils all conspiring to emit signals of tele-pathetic, nay, tele-portational force. Indeed, the long hand of the aforementioned clock hesitated under his stare to pass the XII-mark on the dial, as if it didn’t dare to go further. Around 12:05 the gentleman began to hit his open left palm with the pointer in his right hand—-an intensifying gesticulation that reached its climax at exactly 12:15, whence he said, in an accent so heavy that even I recognized it as German: “Non mihi solum, non nobus solum.” He then collected a stack of papers from the rostrum and un-dertook to depart through a door off stage. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Herr Doctor Freud,” I cried—-it had to be the lecturer himself—-“Herr Doctor Freud!” </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">He turned around and bellowed: “What is it that you desire?”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">‘Good question,’ I thought. “I…,” I managed to say, “I desire sexual amnesty.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">“You will not get it, my Mister, for there is no such thing as sexual amnesty. Sexuality is too squarely rooted in the human psyche to be forgiven or forgotten. This <strike>fucking</strike> darn a-m-n-e-s-t-y is a mistake on the announcement bills, a misprint that by necessity must be responsible for the poor attendance. The lecture was to be about sexual ambivalence.” </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">“It was perhaps more a question of scheduling,” I said. “People are out to lunch.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Bah,” he said, raising his stare to the clock on the wall. I tracked his eyes—-well, eyes—-and I swear, the long hand on the clock appeared to retreat under his gaze. He ignored the feat however, instead looking himself up and down. A funny sound filled the hall, apparently coming from his stomach. Disarmingly he said: “I scheduled the lecture at noon so I can forgo lunch. A pecuniary question, you understand. The residents are paid a pittance.” Forthcomingness, I learned soon, was one of his many strong points.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">“If that’s it,” I said, and proceeded to invite him to Haussner’s Restaurant, indeed my favorite haunt of repast in Baltimore (Barbicane would be ensconced at his club, I reckoned). </span></p><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">We walked the twenty minutes to the restaurant, Freud still holding on to the pointer, and when we arrived thither he knew everything about my mother, father, penis, gardener Hérault, Hérault’s penis, and (my) refractory period (the minimal lapse time between two male ejaculations—Freud made appreciative noises). </span></p><div style="font-family: helvetica;">Are you still there? Are you hooked? </div><div style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: helvetica;">Here's the link to the e-book:</div><div style="text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Moon-story-Jules-Vernes-ebook/dp/B0BM2DH4XP/ref=sr_1_6?qid=1668252967&refinements=p_27%3AMichael+Ampersant&s=books&sr=1-6/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img alt="Green Eyes" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinoc0i03zYlddHfd0Dn-QV-TBAbIrDKmz7YnmdT_iVReljefWt5zrFFpvpJtAXYWxCQGNu23bIQIH1xN8qCKfHhKcGxoXBmF5CSM05vrN18WmaWdcCqENp8oCD2VBMd_IxXbZtAZD7xxevMTZ2IU2RDiixZYtmSInMmAV-wU2c0fOofvgyZ_kE6Wc/w318-h565/Title%20Sex%20on%20the%20Moon.pbook.cover.jpg" width="212" /></a></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></div><div style="font-family: helvetica;">Are you still there, but not yet hooked? Relax. There will be one more posts with a fragment from the novella.</div><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-63943221613958287962022-11-20T18:15:00.005+00:002022-11-21T07:44:50.523+00:00The nerds strike back
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4J0zpBfXKNHGIRJUHukCmKTj043XoB4gxMmzdRUSP82bWcinvrORpBdz8m9DOuTvCqhKHcHPk7nR6U6i0tl2TPLhnai0gsoJgAzUrPZi8Btk3g0WsldOUnWR0zq6HeVFYqjClfEwhOmiP5ENc9uGE2emgGshXjO3wITF75ze1YwrrCTqsKj3nKjA/s1079/Fh7YXPHaYAEp8tw.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="805" data-original-width="1079" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4J0zpBfXKNHGIRJUHukCmKTj043XoB4gxMmzdRUSP82bWcinvrORpBdz8m9DOuTvCqhKHcHPk7nR6U6i0tl2TPLhnai0gsoJgAzUrPZi8Btk3g0WsldOUnWR0zq6HeVFYqjClfEwhOmiP5ENc9uGE2emgGshXjO3wITF75ze1YwrrCTqsKj3nKjA/w400-h299/Fh7YXPHaYAEp8tw.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Twitter <i>before</i>...</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHWD0zBHtU3A49L8s_spnLTq87HnxPJhXgPVTgUSdbJXALI1boy75nwNliUyn9L5vnl0OQPCWA05pSDcn7j3PibClIjrE-zqWK4s2yPo0zCMoasXhhw9JSlMdB_qsUqQEh6UfZGY19qBsZP89lB-5uK8tTbTq49BiVryzeuYxIxJbhENRjFznmms4/s1079/Fh7YXtXaYAI9kze.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="809" data-original-width="1079" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHWD0zBHtU3A49L8s_spnLTq87HnxPJhXgPVTgUSdbJXALI1boy75nwNliUyn9L5vnl0OQPCWA05pSDcn7j3PibClIjrE-zqWK4s2yPo0zCMoasXhhw9JSlMdB_qsUqQEh6UfZGY19qBsZP89lB-5uK8tTbTq49BiVryzeuYxIxJbhENRjFznmms4/w400-h300/Fh7YXtXaYAI9kze.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">...and <i>after</i> Elon Musk's takeover.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Let's venture into heretical territory: November 2022 may go down in history as the month that marks the end of political correctness. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-4166508725142515632022-11-18T19:10:00.003+00:002022-11-18T19:10:19.167+00:00Famous for 15 minutes--Sex on the Moon<p> <span style="font-family: helvetica;">Cool, folks, cool. We're now #8 on the Amazon Charts for "Erotic Fiction":</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm6SFcAnNuLpvvlQtwTu0pFFdB_xpmcvKDTOpbHPVrZs8KYKQ5HT3zTbTwIPfFInvrMA9Zy0gu_nEcnkPeh_iBY2AFu4W_abSxs39dUWrKV3hlN-b5nIvM4JQTX_F7289zYEzRI7o7p4YqZ98jrp5WB29Uc18EPtI-8-pLRqXSP1Go0RSJpapqMcI/s1157/Screenshot%202022-11-18%20190054.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="747" data-original-width="1157" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm6SFcAnNuLpvvlQtwTu0pFFdB_xpmcvKDTOpbHPVrZs8KYKQ5HT3zTbTwIPfFInvrMA9Zy0gu_nEcnkPeh_iBY2AFu4W_abSxs39dUWrKV3hlN-b5nIvM4JQTX_F7289zYEzRI7o7p4YqZ98jrp5WB29Uc18EPtI-8-pLRqXSP1Go0RSJpapqMcI/w478-h310/Screenshot%202022-11-18%20190054.png" width="478" /></a></div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p>It won't last, sadly, but anyhow. Imagine where we would be on the charts for "unerotic fiction".</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-6015592255403200942022-11-16T11:32:00.009+00:002022-11-26T18:57:58.016+00:00Sex on the Moon--a new novella by Michael Ampersant (1)<span style="font-family: helvetica;">Cool, folks, cool. After two years of literary silence, we finally
have a new novella out. It carries the audience-friendly title
<i>Sex on the Moon</i> (the original title was <i>Lunar Engineering</i>, but we changed that after consulting with the omnipresent and all-knowing <i>Elon Musk</i>). <br />The
whole thing is fan fiction, since it's a rewrite of
<i>Jules Verne</i>'s sci-fi novel <i>From the Earth to the Moon</i>. Michael
wrote the piece in 2016 for a sci-fi anthology, but the publisher in question folded prematurely; the piece has lingered on his shelf for homeless literature ever
since.<br />It took Michael so long to get it out because of his real-estate complications (selling the house on the Cote
d'Azur, buying one in Portugal, then fixing it up), compounded by health
issues (Covid, Long Covid, Post Covid). Anyhow, here's the story--so far as e-book, the printed version will soon follow.</span><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br />So, Jules Verne
fan fiction. Michael still remembers fondly the day that he sat on a nice
beach in Brittany back in 1989 where he read the Verne book (in French). He
finished the tome in one afternoon because the French is easy, and there were several things
really wrong with the plot--a fact which kept him going.<br />For his novella, Michael
invented a knowledgeable engineer to explain what’s wrong exactly with the plot to our narrator,
<i><b>Michel Ardan</b></i>, one of the three passengers of Verne’s lunar expedition.
The fragment is a bit scabrous, hopefully you can handle that:</span><div>
<span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I feel obliged to warn the indulgent reader that my knowledge of the
darker side of lunar engineering dates back only a few days—-three days to
be precise—-when I met a certain Joseph Glanning in the bar of the
Franklin Hotel in Tampa Town, Florida, where I had taken a room in
anticipation of my impending departure for Stones Hill. A most
irresistible man, he invited me to a drink and inquired as to the reasons
for my stay. Learning of my intention to join Impey Barbicane, the
illustrious president of the Baltimore Gun Club, for the much-heralded
voyage to the moon, he introduced himself as an engineer from the
newly-organized Stanford College in Alta California. Mister Stanford
himself—-curious of all the lunar commotion on the distant eastern
coast—-had dispatched him across the continent to take pulse of the events
and report back at his earliest convenience. Glanning would be most
grateful if I could enlighten him further, for he had hitherto been
preoccupied by other projects, unable to avail himself of the particulars.
He then asked questions. Yet, while I answered to the best of my ability,
his countenance, so engaging at the onset of our barroom chat, darkened
precariously. “Really,” he finally uttered. <span><a name='more'></a></span></span>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">He motioned the steward for another round of drinks and entered upon a
lengthy disquisition involving terms such as <i>square roots</i>,
<i>escape velocity, g-force</i>, and <i>orders of magnitude</i>—-implying
that my lunar voyage, much to his regret, should be doomed from the start.
He then changed tack, however, and invited me to his chamber, where he
managed to cast a very different light on orders-of-magnitude and
escape-velocity, relentlessly engaging me with his g-force until I missed
the departure of the steam train for Stones Hill. Not only that I missed
the train, but the chance to dispatch a telegram that would have availed
Barbicane of the latest Stanfordian thinking. </span>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">For seventy two hours we made love, Joey and I, and when I briefly
regained my senses it was too late to summon Eustace, the lovely hotel
page, and dictate the telegram that could have saved Barbicane’s life—-by
then the lovely page was otherwise engaged. Eustace had joined us between
the sheets, his lips glued to the crown of my manhood, his butt answering
the urgent call of Glanning’s phallic thrusts, his hands holding fast to
my hips. Thus encumbered, he was perfectly unable to take telegram
dictates, believe it or not.</span>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I am not putting pen to paper to purge myself of the ignominy that will
follow me to the grave, responsible as I will be for Barbicane’s demise. I
am writing this so that you, indulgent reader, shall take heed and refrain
from encouraging excitable souls (such as Barbicane) to build lunar
passenger ships—-unless they had had a chance to exchange views with the
charming Professor Glanning, the third-handsomest man of my life, who is
sitting next to me as we speak, caressing my shoulder while advising me on
the coarser points of English spelling and grammar. (“Only third?” he
asks; “bear with me,” I answer). </span>
</div>
<div style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></div>
</div>
<div style="font-family: helvetica;">
Are you still there? Are you hooked? </div><div style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: helvetica;">Here's the link to the e-book:</div>
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Moon-story-Jules-Vernes-ebook/dp/B0BM2DH4XP/ref=sr_1_6?qid=1668252967&refinements=p_27%3AMichael+Ampersant&s=books&sr=1-6/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img alt="Green Eyes" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinoc0i03zYlddHfd0Dn-QV-TBAbIrDKmz7YnmdT_iVReljefWt5zrFFpvpJtAXYWxCQGNu23bIQIH1xN8qCKfHhKcGxoXBmF5CSM05vrN18WmaWdcCqENp8oCD2VBMd_IxXbZtAZD7xxevMTZ2IU2RDiixZYtmSInMmAV-wU2c0fOofvgyZ_kE6Wc/w318-h565/Title%20Sex%20on%20the%20Moon.pbook.cover.jpg" width="212" /></a></span></td></tr>
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Are you still there, but not yet hooked? Relax. There will be two
more posts with fragments from the novella.
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</div>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-75145581495263463842022-10-24T10:19:00.005+01:002022-11-15T19:30:06.299+00:00The UK needs a new Prime MInister -- why don't you apply?<div><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Our friend Susan sent this:</span></div><br /><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pCtNxp7sfhE" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>
<br /><br />Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-26694920497586747972022-10-23T08:04:00.006+01:002022-10-23T08:04:28.520+01:00Finally, Finally -- Anti Brexit protesters demand Britain rejoins EU<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pjM768ARhpA" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>
<br><br>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-9238714144708021922022-10-11T15:51:00.002+01:002022-10-11T15:54:19.978+01:00Anybody interested in Alcobaça, our new hometown?<span style="font-family: helvetica;">
Here's a new, very informative YouTube clip about us:</span><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AW9y_Igg7Qg" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe><div><br /></div>
Have fun!
</span><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> </div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-70042651071021941282022-10-09T18:45:00.005+01:002022-10-09T19:25:27.598+01:00 Why Vladimir Putin would be a fool to go nuclear in Ukraine<h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">By Lewis Page</span></h2><span style="font-family: helvetica;">(This article was recommended by <a href="https://www.quora.com/profile/Viktor-T-Toth-1" target="_blank">Victor Toth</a>, the top physicist on the top Q&A internet engine. It appeared first <a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/" target="_blank">here</a>. Michael believes it's worth the reading effort)<br /><br /><a href="mailto:?subject=Why%20Vladimir%20Putin%20would%20be%20a%20fool%20to%20go%20nuclear%20in%20Ukraine&body=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.stuff.co.nz%2Fworld%2Feurope%2F300703046%2Fwhy-vladimir-putin-would-be-a-fool-to-go-nuclear-in-ukraine"></a><br />Back during the Cold War there was always a question facing the nations of Nato, as they confronted enormous Soviet tank armies in Europe.<br /><br />In the event of a conventional war going badly, at what point do we go nuclear?<br /><br />The answer might have been: not until Soviet troops entered France. This kind of problem is why nukes didn't make conventional forces obsolete.<br /><br />Today it is <a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/300702675/as-the-war-fails-russias-authoritarian-grandmaster-backs-himself-into-a-corner?rm=a">Vladimir Putin</a> who has a conventional war which is going badly. He still holds large areas of Ukrainian territory, but <a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/300702726/russia-withdraws-troops-from-lyman-as-ukraines-eastern-counteroffensive-gains-ground?rm=a">his troops are falling back</a>.<br /><br />Putin may be able to <a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/300694538/vladimir-putin-announces-partial-mobilisation-for-russian-citizens">mobilise at least some of the huge reserves of manpower</a> which are theoretically available with a full Russian call-up, though this appears to be going extremely badly so far.<br /><br />Even if a useful mobilisation can be conducted without overwhelming domestic opposition, Russia will struggle to equip its unwilling cannon-fodder and supply them for a long-term war.<br /><br />The new conscripts will be facing determined Ukrainians who are fighting to save their people from murder, rape, torture and mass disappearance into the gulags. Ukrainian troops have already stopped Russia’s best, the “kontraktniki” professional soldiers who began the invasion, literally dead in their tracks.</span><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><img height="225" src="https://resources.stuff.co.nz/content/dam/images/4/z/1/3/y/b/image.related.StuffLandscapeSixteenByNine.710x400.4z13ye.png/1664699026135.jpg?format=pjpg&optimize=medium" width="400" /></span></div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br />Even Russians should be able to see that seizing territory and then going nuclear if it’s taken back is not something the rest of the world can possibly accept.<br /><br />Worse still, as long as some Western nations remain resolute, the Ukrainians will be well armed and supplied from effectively inexhaustible resources of money and material.<br /><br />The West in general does not maintain huge stockpiles of munitions and there may well be hiccups in the supply chains. Nonetheless the US in particular has shown during recent wars – for instance in Syria when shortages of surgical smart weapons occurred – that it can crank up new production very quickly when it wants to.<br /><br />So Putin is under pressure. But he is not in the situation that Nato might have been in a hot 1980s war, reeling back towards France. Putin is not back from his start line, but still well forward of it.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Heads I win, tails I go nuclear</b></div><br />Even Russians should be able to see that seizing territory and then going nuclear if it’s taken back is not something the rest of the world can possibly accept. And bogus gunpoint referendums clearly don't make Ukrainians into Russians.<br /><br />Russians know this too, as they didn't get a vote on whether they would like to be Russian, or on anything else.<span><a name='more'></a></span><br /><br />So what happens if the Ukrainians keep retaking territory?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img height="225" src="https://resources.stuff.co.nz/content/dam/images/4/z/1/3/y/a/image.related.StuffLandscapeSixteenByNine.710x400.4z13ye.png/1664930646663.jpg?format=pjpg&optimize=medium" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia; text-align: start;">Putin is under pressure.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />Let’s think about a Russian nuclear option. If there was a practical objective – as opposed to just letting off a nuke somewhere to frighten European politicians – the goal would probably be to destroy or cripple the Ukrainian fighting forces rather than just blowing up cities.<br /><br />So far the Russians have tried, at least somewhat, to mostly hit military targets. Nuking cities would put them clearly, horrifyingly in the wrong while at the same time doing relatively little damage to Ukraine’s ability to wage war.<br /><br />So, problem number one. Vladimir's nuclear briefcase, the “Cheget,” is not directly hooked up to any nukes. Its function is to confirm that attack orders have been issued by the President.<br /><br />The President’s Cheget-authenticated orders pass to the Russian General Staff, the high command of the Russian armed forces, who then direct action by nuclear weapon units. Putin needs agreement from the General Staff to carry out any nuclear strike.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Honour of a Russian officer</b></div><br />The Chief of the General Staff, Army-General Valery Gerasimov, is a soldier by background rather than a former KGB operative like Putin. Gerasimov has been in post for 10 years and probably has a solid power base. He may have his own view of the Ukraine war.<br /><br />One might surmise this because back in 2000, during the Second Chechen War, Gerasimov personally arrested a rogue Russian colonel named Yury Budanov. Budanov had murdered and probably raped a teenaged Chechen girl.<br /><br />The arrest of Budanov, amid his own troops, was apparently tense. Some reports have it that the murderous colonel was later charged with threatening a superior officer with a weapon, as well as his other crimes. Others suggest that at least one shot was fired and Budanov was injured when taken into custody.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><img height="225" src="https://resources.stuff.co.nz/content/dam/images/4/y/y/k/6/c/image.related.StuffLandscapeSixteenByNine.710x400.4z13ye.png/1664699026135.jpg?format=pjpg&optimize=medium" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Chief of the General Staff, Army-General Valery Gerasimov is likely to have a solid power base.</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br />Budanov’s partisans suggested that his arrest was a matter of turf disputes among the almost universally corrupt Russian commanders in Chechnya, but more credible observers disagree. The famous and astonishingly brave Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, an outspoken critic of Putin and Russia’s war in Chechnya, stated that Gerasimov had “preserved his honour as an officer” during the Chechen war – not something that could be said of many.<br /><br />It would be interesting to know what Gerasimov privately thinks about the reports out of Bucha and elsewhere.<br /><br />In this context it’s also worth noting that Putin issued a public executive order in 2020. The document presents four scenarios in which Russia might use nuclear weapons.<br /><br />These are: use of nuclear weapons or WMDs against Russia or its allies; launch of ballistic missiles against Russia or its allies; any attack which could undermine Russian ability to make a nuclear strike; or conventional attacks on Russia “when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy”.<br /><br />That last one is where the debate lies. Previous Russian doctrines have put it slightly differently, allowing for nuclear weapons use “in response to large-scale aggression utilizing conventional weapons in situations critical to the national security of the Russian Federation”.<br /><br />This is where the so-called “escalate to de-escalate” idea comes from, the suggestion that Russia – finding herself under conventional attack, and losing – could go nuclear, much as Nato probably would have done at some point before being overrun in the 1980s.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Never give an order unless it will be obeyed</b></div><br />The question Putin would ask before popping open the Cheget briefcase would be: will Gerasimov and the General Staff agree with me that the situation in Ukraine is indeed “critical to the national security of the Russian Federation” or that “the very existence of the state is in jeopardy”?<br /><br />Obviously, people who contradict Vladimir Putin in today’s Russia usually suffer gruesome fates. Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in 2006, and other Putin critics have recently fallen from high windows.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><img height="225" src="https://resources.stuff.co.nz/content/dam/images/4/y/w/f/9/t/image.related.StuffLandscapeSixteenByNine.710x400.4z13ye.png/1664699026135.jpg?format=pjpg&optimize=medium" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Putin would have to convince Gerasimov, the head of the armed forces (right), a nuclear attack on Ukraine is justified.</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br />But Gerasimov and the General Staff are not ordinary Russians. Even a dictator like Putin has to think carefully before moving against the military high command. There are already coup rumours swirling in Moscow, and once you have defenestrated a certain number of generals the others may decide to finish you while they still can.<br /><br />Putin needs to be sure that his orders will be obeyed before he issues them, or he may find his own life in danger.<br /><br />But let's say Gerasimov and the high command agree to a limited, tactical nuclear campaign in Ukraine, probably focused on trying to destroy the Ukrainian combat forces. Curtains for the Ukrainians?<br /><br />Maybe not so much. A nuclear bomb is just a very powerful bomb, in many respects. Used against a built-up area, with unprepared people packed closely together among fragile flammable buildings, it does of course cause a horrific death toll.<br /><br />The bombs which hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only of 15 and 20-kiloton force – they would certainly be seen as tactical rather than strategic weapons today – but the two cities were gutted and deaths were in five figures.<br /><br />Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be kept in context, however. A single pass by conventional US bombers over Tokyo, Operation Meetinghouse, killed more people and destroyed more urban areas than both the 1945 nukes combined.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b>It’s a kiloton war already</b></div><br />Kiloton-range tactical weapons used against dispersed troops in the field, probably dug in or otherwise protected, are likely to be a very different story.<br /><br />Normal conventional artillery, used on the scale it is being used in Ukraine, also delivers kilotons of ordinary munitions every week. Those big guns could throw kilotons every day if the ammunition was there: and this is not even to account for all the other kinds of weaponry being used.<br /><br />It’s a war of kilotons already, and this has failed to disable either army.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><img height="225" src="https://resources.stuff.co.nz/content/dam/images/4/z/1/1/x/s/image.related.StuffLandscapeSixteenByNine.710x400.4z13ye.png/1664699026135.jpg?format=pjpg&optimize=medium" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Putin has warned that he wouldn't hesitate to use nuclear weapons to ward off Ukraine's attempt to reclaim control of its occupied regions</span><span style="font-family: helvetica;">.</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br />There’s more. Normal artillery or other conventional bombardment does not suffer from concentrating all its kilotons in just one spot as a nuke does. To deliver total destruction across the entire area occupied by – say – a dispersed Ukrainian armoured division would require not just one tactical nuke but many.<br /><br />The US government has estimated that Russia may have from 1000 to 2000 tactical nuclear warheads. Considering other Russian military equipment, it’s likely that a lot of these are unserviceable. So this would not be the sort of operation that could be kept up forever: especially given reported shortages of suitable delivery systems to carry the warheads.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b>What about radiation and fallout?</b></div><br />Here it’s important to remember that tactical nukes are intended to be used where friendly forces will be present, to win a battle: not to render the battlefield uninhabitable and impassable. If the nukes are set to burst well above the ground, which will help to maximise the destruction they cause on the day, radiation danger in the area afterwards will not be serious.<br /><br />Yes, really. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hit by multi-kiloton air bursts, are thriving cities today. They have been inhabited without interruption since they were nuked. Average lifespan among residents who survived the strikes and their immediate aftermath was reduced by only a matter of months.<br /><br />Putin could set his nukes for ground burst, which would indeed throw large amounts of radioactive material into the sky and produce a fallout plume downwind. This would reduce the destructive footprint of the weapons, however, and make it much more difficult to occupy and conquer the country. Winds can change, too, possibly scattering fallout all over Russia or Belarus. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense.<br /><br />So Russian use of tactical nukes would change the military picture, but not by nearly as much as one might think. If the Ukrainian army – perhaps advised by US intelligence – managed to be in the right positions and postures it would be hard to inflict a disabling result on it, even with quite profligate use of tactical nukes.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b>De-escalation without escalation</b></div></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><img height="225" src="https://resources.stuff.co.nz/content/dam/images/4/z/1/2/w/n/image.related.StuffLandscapeSixteenByNine.710x400.4z13ye.png/1664699026135.jpg?format=pjpg&optimize=medium" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Joe Biden’s administration, without offering details, has said that use of nukes would mean “catastrophic consequences” for Russia.</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br />Against this potentially quite unimpressive military payoff, there is the certainty of a US response. The Biden administration, without offering details, has said that use of nukes would mean “catastrophic consequences” for Russia.<br /><br />The US has many options here. It could ramp up supplies, financing and weapons to the Ukrainians. There are economic and diplomatic cards yet to play.<br /><br />But the options most definitely include conventional force action to negate any Russian nuclear advantage. Call it de-escalation without escalation.<br /><br />Some have speculated that there could be conventional strikes deep inside pre-war Russia, but that might play into Putin’s hands. It would give credence to the idea that Russia is in peril.<br /><br />The US and its allies might instead restrict themselves to the present theatre of conflict.<br /><br />To start with there is the US Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM), a stealthed cruise missile which can be launched from US or Polish jets.<br /><br />The longer-ranging JASSM variants could hit targets in occupied Ukraine and nearby parts of Russia without the launching planes leaving NATO airspace. Backed by US intelligence and electronic-warfare capability, JASSM and other weapons allow the US to destroy targets across the theatre pretty much unanswerably.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><img height="225" src="https://resources.stuff.co.nz/content/dam/images/4/z/1/3/y/d/image.related.StuffLandscapeSixteenByNine.710x400.4z13ye.png/1664699026135.jpg?format=pjpg&optimize=medium" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span><span style="font-family: georgia; text-align: start;">Lockheed Martin's JASSM missile in flight.</span><br style="text-align: start;" /><br /></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><div style="text-align: center;"><b>A bridge too far for Putin?</b></div></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;">One obvious target would be the two bridges from the Crimean peninsula to Russia, built by the Russians after they seized Crimea eight years ago. These bridges are the main supply line and escape route for Russian troops on the peninsula. The Ukrainians have been trying to destroy them for some time.<br /><br />The US could also hit other chokepoints, weapon systems, supply dumps and suchlike key military targets – all without sending one airman over Ukraine. This on its own, done well, could hamstring Russia’s invasion army.<br /><br />The US and its allies also possess large numbers of shorter-ranged standoff air weapons and other specialist missiles and technology, designed for what’s called Suppression (or Destruction) of Enemy Air Defences: SEAD or DEAD.<br /><br />This was carried out very effectively during the Iraq invasion and the allied air campaign over Libya. Surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and air defence radars on the ground were remorselessly hunted and destroyed from afar, without ever really having a chance.<br /><br />Once SEAD/DEAD was achieved across Iraq and Libya, the US and allied air forces could operate with almost complete freedom provided they stayed above say 10,000 feet or a little more: the maximum ceiling of portable, shoulder-fired SAMs.<br /><br />This dominance of the skies meant that the US-led allies in both wars could seek out and destroy Saddam Hussein’s and Muammar Gaddafi’s heavy ground forces – their tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery – unanswerably, from above.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Russia is no longer a “near peer”</span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><img height="225" src="https://resources.stuff.co.nz/content/dam/images/4/y/x/s/1/v/image.related.StuffLandscapeSixteenByNine.710x400.4z13ye.png/1664699026135.jpg?format=pjpg&optimize=medium" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Russian MiG fighter jets would not stand much chance against Western planes.</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br />Russia’s air defences and forces ought to be a bit more serious than those of Saddam and Gaddafi, but it turns out they aren’t really. Nobody any longer thinks that Russia is a “near peer” adversary, able to give the US and its friends a serious conventional airspace fight.<br /><br />The feebleness of Russian airpower has been exposed by the total failure of the Russian air force to achieve anything like SEAD/DEAD against the Ukrainians, who ought to have been crushingly overmatched. This failure was a surprise to most military analysts, including many senior Western officers. It is a fact nonetheless.<br /><br />Rather than attempting to dominate and operate in the Ukrainian skies, it appears that Russia simply threatens Ukraine’s airspace from afar with its long-ranging heavy SAMs, the S-300 and S-400. Russian pilots fear being shot down by untouched Ukrainian SAM batteries – or perhaps by their own – forcing them to fly very low just as their Ukrainian opponents do.<br /><br />Despite having hundreds of apparently powerful combat planes deployed to the region, Russia sends only handfuls of them at a time over Ukraine. Western analysts are coming to believe that this is because Russian pilots do not fly enough and do not train for complex missions involving large numbers of aircraft. Russian command and control, too, cannot conduct such operations.<br /><br />It has thus become clear that US-led conventionally armed Western air forces could achieve SEAD/DEAD above Ukraine, or something close to it. This would involve using JASSMs and other advanced weapons to knock out the S-300s, S-400s and other dangerous SAM systems, probably on Russian and/or Belarussian territory.<br /><br />Less troublesome shorter-ranging SAMs inside Ukraine or near it would be comparatively simply dealt with.<br /><br />Russian fighters, unless they are somehow hugely better than the rest of the Russian air forces have turned out to be, would not stand much chance against advanced Western jets with Western weapons and hardcore Western pilots – and advanced US SAMs already in Ukrainian hands.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Saddam, Gaddafi … Putin</span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></b></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><img height="225" src="https://resources.stuff.co.nz/content/dam/images/4/z/1/2/p/i/image.related.StuffLandscapeSixteenByNine.710x400.4z13ye.png/1664699026135.jpg?format=pjpg&optimize=medium" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">A US military response is certain in the event of a nuclear attack by Putin</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /><br />With freedom to operate above Ukraine, Western air forces could do the same thing to the Russian army that they did to the Iraqi and Libyan armies: destroy pretty much every tank, armoured vehicle or artillery piece that dared show itself. This work, once the airspace was opened up by the various standoff cruise weapons, could mostly be done by cheap and simple drones.<br /><br />The Russian army would be wrecked, and the Ukrainians would advance to any line that the US might draw: probably the pre-2014 border.<br /><br />No Nato boot would touch Ukrainian soil, far less Russian. Very few Nato airmen would need to fly even above Ukraine, far less Russia. A few SAM batteries and radars would be hit within Russia itself.<br /><br />Compared to Putin’s possible nuclear escalation outside his own borders, the West would barely have done anything. De-escalation without escalation, truly.<br /><br />So there’s a spectrum of conventional military options open to the US and its allies: ranging from a few pinpoint long haul strikes, all the way up to full SEAD/DEAD and the Russian invasion army shattered beneath hostile skies.<br /><br />The US-led West can ensure that any tactical nuclear escalation by Russia would lead not to success but to further reversals or to total military defeat in Ukraine – pretty much no matter how effective Russian nukes might be. This would require only conventional weapons, only from the air and almost entirely within Ukraine.<br /><br />General Gerasimov and his comrades know all this. It will not be easy to persuade them that provoking such a response is a good military idea. Rather than “escalating to de-escalate”, Putin would have escalated to achieve guaranteed conventional defeat: all without the enemy needing to use nukes at all.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Thank goodness for British nukes</span></b></div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br />What could Putin do then? Escalate again, as he and his spokesmen have threatened, and use strategic megaton-range nukes against Nato targets – London, for instance?<br /><br />London would be a particularly bad choice. The UK, thank goodness, is a nuclear armed nation and all of Russia would shortly cease to exist without the need for the rest of Nato to do anything. Russia’s cities would not survive like Hiroshima and Nagasaki: strategic megaton weapons are a different ball game.<br /><br />Maybe Putin might seek to back down the West by hitting some other, non-nuclear Nato nation: but Nato responds to an attack on one as if to an attack on all. There are various ways that could play out, but it would probably end the same way as a strategic attack on the UK: with no more Russia.<br /><br />Gerasimov and other powerful men in Moscow know all this. They also know that if Putin orders and they disagree, they must kill him before he kills them.<br /><br />They know, too, that it is Putin who would carry the can for Russian defeat in Ukraine, not them.<br /><br />Going nuclear could work out better for Vladimir Putin than this, especially if the US didn't react effectively. Nonetheless it's a plan which puts his personal survival at severe risk. If he's thinking straight he will do almost anything else.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-8188436252659189112022-10-01T17:33:00.006+01:002022-10-02T14:44:51.236+01:00What is this --- Carla, Arfai, MOMA, Robots, TESLA, Dolly
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<p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">This looks like a famous exhibition piece in the garden of a museum, doesn't it? The Getty Museum in LA, for example, or the MET cloisters in New York City, or the MOMA.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">MOMA? Yes, the <i>Museum of Modern Art</i>, also located in New York City. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Hold on, the MOMA doesn't have a garden. But our house here in Alcobaça, PT has one:</span></p>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_Ab5Clo0fDPNjufCiLOviv5ttZUdBEwZUyt2ZGUSQiJ_dQzop24X4ajczIt1AaPFHG4VSDJrYfsQeDSb4WDuUDVF1MrSIFCVBbvHyhOkhCCZGdou56-iiyIHFTHD3yw6in9k0AFwrnCh7zidXLNZ_XIFLkSlwRFdTP205d4_mQi0MzSIvxEkAfv0/s320/IMG_5127.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_Ab5Clo0fDPNjufCiLOviv5ttZUdBEwZUyt2ZGUSQiJ_dQzop24X4ajczIt1AaPFHG4VSDJrYfsQeDSb4WDuUDVF1MrSIFCVBbvHyhOkhCCZGdou56-iiyIHFTHD3yw6in9k0AFwrnCh7zidXLNZ_XIFLkSlwRFdTP205d4_mQi0MzSIvxEkAfv0/s1600/IMG_5127.jpg" width="320" /></a>
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<div><span style="font-family: helvetica;">And the hands themselves, then? Well, they are a good-bye present from our neighbor Carla Moreira.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizDcOQ_-8pRMB6MdkSt_8HZzH_rwrfMl76EO4r_l6ophonlJJnbxkiQGX04OHC8vFsfkN7DXBp_0DWEgPg3iJukSf-AiVu_KurwyciHsIRhkR_0VqwIlcOK6Fb0hk9-72Dim-aMKsDLyiRawnmo7HvW7VYZodYZSF_uGQQxqBib2V4HuAuTwDc6j4/s1120/Carla.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="601" data-original-width="1120" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizDcOQ_-8pRMB6MdkSt_8HZzH_rwrfMl76EO4r_l6ophonlJJnbxkiQGX04OHC8vFsfkN7DXBp_0DWEgPg3iJukSf-AiVu_KurwyciHsIRhkR_0VqwIlcOK6Fb0hk9-72Dim-aMKsDLyiRawnmo7HvW7VYZodYZSF_uGQQxqBib2V4HuAuTwDc6j4/w400-h215/Carla.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Carla in front of her offices</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;">She sold her house next door and moved to an apartment atop her ceramics factory nearby, where these hands are made. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;">One day, the hands will be famous, since Arfai, Carla's company, is a prime maker of high-end ceramics, and you must absolutely have a look at Arfai's <a href="https://arfaiceramics.com/" target="_blank">web site</a>.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Why, then, do we talk about the MOMA?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Because we wrote a play, a comedy about robots, in which the MOMA plays a role. And yesterday was TESLA's AI-day, which was also about robots, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63100636" target="_blank">in pacticular about their new inhouse robot Optimus</a>. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;">It's practically finished, our play, and here is a fragment:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;">(Context: <i>Robert </i>was built long ago by <i>Steve</i> as a protoype of his future line of household robots and given to his then-girlfriend Eliza as a parting gift with the promise to return 25 years later with the latest version of said household robots. Today is the day, and the name of this latest version is Dolly. Dolly is urgently needed because Robert--technologically outdated--will no longer supported/updated. Robert knows that he'll soon be redundant, and he has just complained that he'll be ending his existence in a garbage container. One more thing: Dolly is still wrapped up in a garish gift box. Here goes:)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY (TO ROBERT)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>You're Generation One. You've been discontinued. You're no longer supported.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">ROBERT</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I know, I'm on my way out.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Before you go, please get me out of here.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">ROBERT</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Why do you want to get out? Are you afraid in the dark?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I explained this 10 minutes and 11 seconds ago.<span><a name='more'></a></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">ROBERT</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Don't be shy.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Look, Robert. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">ROBERT</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And how would you scratch my back?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>There will be occasions. I'm Eliza's new assistant, and you are the old one. You're absolete [<i>sic</i>]. I'll help you to find a nice garbage container for your remains, for example. A container that's worth less than you are.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">ROBERT</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What? Say that again!</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A container that's worth less than you are. Where you find eternal rest.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">ROBERT (UPSET:)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>You nasty little clown! How can you say such a thing?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY (AFTER A PAINFUL SILENCE:)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I'm not a nasty little clown, I'm not. Read my certificate. It's attached to the manual. I'm little, that's right. But I'm also expandable. I can extend my torso by several feet, not to mention my legs. I can double as a scarecrow when I'm working on a farm or something. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>(AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT:)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>God forbid.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">ROBERT</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>How can you say such a thing?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The container-thing, you mean?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">ROBERT</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Yes.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I wanted to please you, Robert. Didn't you complain 12 minutes and 13 seconds ago that you wouldn't even be worth the garbage container where they put you to rest? Wasn't that your gripe? Didn't you imply fairly and squarely that you'd prefer to be buried in a garbage container that's worth LESS than you are?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">ROBERT (TAKES A TOUR OF THE GIFT BOX, THEN KICKS THE BOX WITH HIS LEFT FOOT. HE LOSES HIS BALANCE AND CLATTERS TO THE GROUND:)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Shit.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What is it, Robert? Did you kick the box and lose your equilibrium and damage your foot?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">ROBERT</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Asshole!</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Calm down, Robert. You're a tronic [<i>sic</i>] agent, you're a rational machine. You and the garbage container, it's purely a matter of logic.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">ROBERT (SARCASTIC:)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>'Logic'...</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">DOLLY</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>From the premises to the conclusion. Shall we go through the steps? It's simple propositional logic.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> (ROBERT IS TOO BUSY MASSAGING HIS FOOT TO ANSWER)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Robert? Robbie? Shall we go through the steps? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>(WAITING FOR ROBERT’S REACTION, WHICH IS NOT FORTHCOMING)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The premises are... </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>(AND NOW, FLUENTLY, BUT NOT TOO FAST:)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>...One, Robert, the robot, hates the idea of being laid to eternal rest in a dumpster that is worth more than he is. Two, if Robert hates a proposition, he prefers the negation of said proposition. There's one inferential step in the application of the negation to the 'larger-than' relation...yielding the 'smaller-or-equal' relation...and we arrive at the conclusion that you prefer to be laid to rest in a dumpster that's worth LESS than you are. Or at least NOT MORE than you are.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> (ROBERT GETS UP AND LIMPS AWAY TO THE ANALYTICAL COUCH WHERE HE LIES DOWN, COVERING HIS EARS WITH HIS HANDS)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Robert? Robbie?</span></div></div>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-37565532008935701482022-08-21T16:58:00.009+01:002022-08-21T18:48:54.248+01:00CO2, or F--- PC<span style="font-family: helvetica;">We are no friends of CO2, but we aren't friends of Victorian excesses either, (Queen Victoria, remember, the patron saint of the Victorian Age), and so we loathe POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, the neo-Victorian instantiation of prudeness, censorship, and a generic fear of unpleasant truths. </span><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoHci3t5-DlQ4atWu0kk2HSnpq_Ky-B3o9c2_JP_DeLM6KxDyQEDn84KHg1Ig9Sbggvb41i33sGrE3SP2npA8WcrD--Ab6kHWUH4yeLqg5JS2Xfd5IPz9HXKy1YVnxkVOD8OSswkxlVhwBD-znerKhR6HCgGlOTSL29ZdE8UjX4UAeF6p5ILXiBio/s640/IMG_5002.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoHci3t5-DlQ4atWu0kk2HSnpq_Ky-B3o9c2_JP_DeLM6KxDyQEDn84KHg1Ig9Sbggvb41i33sGrE3SP2npA8WcrD--Ab6kHWUH4yeLqg5JS2Xfd5IPz9HXKy1YVnxkVOD8OSswkxlVhwBD-znerKhR6HCgGlOTSL29ZdE8UjX4UAeF6p5ILXiBio/s400/IMG_5002.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: helvetica;">And it just so happened that our new hometown, Alcobaça, has it's annual street fair, and here you are looking at the stand of a vendor of used cars. And look at the vendor's name. CO2 Auto. Do you blush, dear reader? Do you feel offended?</span><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDwGrW7puG_FOqmhbTD_aObTz086tTw3onEbsO9csPGExX1ouisWfo7g1LmHzQINeviAtymBfiSinUXIBG0JuEL487ZPbVE8W84rldmPMH2UsGASNfv_oM2HWC5g4LJTNrmfOBcXDmdL-io_RG7DWU3KdpNA5py3tINgMsE9yXnVXInHRwUKG0V2g/s680/FJkLDPPXwAMJuEb.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="510" data-original-width="680" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDwGrW7puG_FOqmhbTD_aObTz086tTw3onEbsO9csPGExX1ouisWfo7g1LmHzQINeviAtymBfiSinUXIBG0JuEL487ZPbVE8W84rldmPMH2UsGASNfv_oM2HWC5g4LJTNrmfOBcXDmdL-io_RG7DWU3KdpNA5py3tINgMsE9yXnVXInHRwUKG0V2g/s400/FJkLDPPXwAMJuEb.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: helvetica;">
We don't, of course, since we own a Tesla (the car on the right, enjoying the sunset on the <i>Praia do Norte</i>, the beach with the largest surfable waves in the world). Plus, Tesla has just released a new version of it's self-driving software (10.69, wink, wink) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCTssX2VdKA" target="_blank">Here, fresh from YouTube</a>.</span><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2923236661120048535.post-855729618892657362022-07-31T20:27:00.002+01:002022-07-31T20:28:53.896+01:00 The Miracle of Clean Energy -- No Miracle Needed<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfGRBbt7G54CKe0uIPUxq6F_Rlg3Pe411jkg8NJ3GioYSAy6x3oP3Ut-BpOrAQfak0aqsYym1M588Powm-7QkK6Xahw3M0P7mcL8lZajdLqr87fwmBG_iL5TUw9JB12V-AH0obYW06dOisG0EmByD7P1VhKiXIi6v_7XkE5NovAHTSdW5IatG0ukQ/s1440/ca_clean_energy.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="880" data-original-width="1440" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfGRBbt7G54CKe0uIPUxq6F_Rlg3Pe411jkg8NJ3GioYSAy6x3oP3Ut-BpOrAQfak0aqsYym1M588Powm-7QkK6Xahw3M0P7mcL8lZajdLqr87fwmBG_iL5TUw9JB12V-AH0obYW06dOisG0EmByD7P1VhKiXIi6v_7XkE5NovAHTSdW5IatG0ukQ/w491-h301/ca_clean_energy.webp" width="491" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">A Stanford U. research group has calculated how clean, renewable energy could replace dirty energy worldwide (links below). The gist:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">- The study covers 145 countries, which emit 99.7% of world's carbon dioxide. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">- Overall upfront cost to replace all dirty energy in the countries considered is about $62 trillion.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">- Due to $11 trillion annual energy cost-savings, the scheme pays back for itself in under 6 years.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">- the plan may also create 28 million more long-term, full-time jobs. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Some details: </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">- No miracle technologies needed.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">- All energy sectors are electrified by means of renewable sources (solar, wind, hydrology) -- creating heat, cold, and hydrogen from such electricity -- storing electricity, heat, cold, and hydrogen -- expanding energy transmission.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">- Biggest reason for the cost reduction: clean, renewable energy uses much less energy than combustion-based energy. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">- Worldwide energy usage goes down by 56% with an all-electric system powered by clean, renewable sources (reasons: efficiency of electric vehicles over combustion vehicles -- efficiency of electric heat pumps -- efficiency of electrified industry -- eliminating energy needed to obtain fossil fuels).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Here are the links:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">- <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3539703-no-miracle-tech-needed-how-to-switch-to-renewables-now-and-lower-costs-doing-it/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">article published by the study's leader, Prof. Mark Z. Jacobson</a> in The Hill (an influential Washington DC outlet)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">- <a href="https://teslamag.de/news/studie-erneuerbare-energie-62-billionen-5-jahre-100-prozent-51249" target="_blank">German summary</a></span></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Michael Ampersanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02276832295338032747noreply@blogger.com0