Skip to content

Monthly Archives: April 2024

My rabbit hole

Saturday, April 27, 2024

AI image by Adobe Firefly. Click here for higher resolution. Do we all have old friends who have gone down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories? I certainly do. Arguing never works, does it? The only way I could think of to tell someone that they’ve disappeared down a rabbit hole is to acknowledge that […]

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (0)

I’m counting on Apple to do AI right

Friday, April 19, 2024

An article yesterday at MacRumors.com asks “Should Apple Kill Siri and Start Over?” My answer to that would be yes. Siri was (and is) terrible. Siri fell far short of the vision that Apple described in 1987 in the video above, which gets the vision right. Siri was a huge embarrassment for Apple. I remember […]

Filed in Technology | | Comments (0)

At last, a whipporwill

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

When I was a young’un in North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley, I often heard whipporwills. But in the 16 years I’ve been living in the Blue Ridge foothills, I had never heard a whipporwill until last night. It was very close — in my front yard, or in the edge of the woods that adjoin the […]

Filed in The land | | Comments (2)

A podcast with Ken

Tuesday, April 9, 2024

Regular readers here will remember Ken, who lived here at the abbey on and off for a number of years and who wrote his books here. He’s featured in a new podcast from The Art of Manliness that I think is brilliant. The podcast is about Ken’s first book, Walden on Wheels. Podcast #980: Walden […]

Filed in Culture, Literature | | Comments (0)

Down the rabbit hole

Monday, April 8, 2024

Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics. Edited by Shan Gho. Oxford University Press, 2022. 520 pages. First, a disclaimer. I am by no means qualified to review a book like this. The book is a mix of theoretical physics and the philosophy of physics. Theoretical physics goes way over my head, though I do think I can […]

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (2)

Remember Madras?

Thursday, April 4, 2024

I can’t remember what made me think about Madras shirts last week. It might have been because we were having uncommonly hot weather for early spring, and that started me thinking about whether I needed new warm-weather shirts. I’ve made a bad habit of buying Harris tweed jackets on eBay, so of course I went […]

Filed in Culture | | Comments (3)

The Taste of Things

Wednesday, April 3, 2024

Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel I have some complaints about the plot of “The Taste of Things,” but the plot really isn’t the point. The point is the food and what happens in the kitchen and at the table. The amazingly beautiful food in this film makes me feel like a complete slob in the […]

Filed in Culture, Food | | Comments (1)