Posts

Process

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  She will be 105 in September. She struggles to recognize her four children, let alone her countless grandchildren. Today, she said, "Nobody told me how to die." She has always wanted to die in her own home, an oversized place that has always had room for an endless parade of visitors. She has always been very "social." Although she struggles to remember the old friends dropping by, she chats happily "on automatic." There are a lot of relatives. She was raised on a farm near North Battleford, Saskatchewan, where her Russian parents raised 16 children. I asked "AI" - specifically Claude 3 Sonnet , to describe this situation in a short essay. I have taken the liberty of letting Grammarly , my AI writing assistant, make a few corrections to Sonnet's purple prose. This is the slightly edited version: She sits in  the twilight of her extraordinary life, a living embodiment of resilience and grace. At 105 years old, her eyes, dimmed by time, still...

Bow River - Practical Utopia

 This post is home for ideas for the " Practical Utopia " project. It is constantly under revision and open to comments. I call the scenario "Bow River." It will focus on my hometown, Calgary, with an eye on the general region known as "Western Canada." (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) and the "North" Yukon Territory, etc. Raw materials do not appear magically. Extreme shortages of materials we now take for granted (such as steel and copper) and problems transporting materials from the rest of the world must be built into the scenario. We assume a virtual collapse of the international supertanker industry. ASSUMPTIONS This is "quality" Science Fiction. As much as possible, math, engineering, and physics are consistent. For example, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics still applies, as do all the physics of climate. The climate is consistent with known climate models. CLIMATE The climate is assumed to be  sub-tropical , similar to the current...

Climate Change: The Political Dimension

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 While I am sympathetic to many "Liberal" or "Socialist" ideas, I see that there are many still far to my "left." I refer to these as the "Utopian Far Left." Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot would fall into this classification. The common thread is a promise of Utopia if only reason and individual rights are swept aside. In this post, I take a close look at the inaugural address of the current head of the IPCC, Yensan-gun. My reasoning comes from many sources, but the reader who finds my thinking novel should refer to: The False Promise of Green Energy , Andrew Morris, et al. How to Spend $50 Billion to Make The World A Better Plac e, Bjorn Lomborg The IPCC report itself (IP6 ) and what it really says, not the "summaries." How to Avoid Climate Disaster , Bill Gates.  Exactly what "net zero" would take. United Nations Environmental Program ( UNEP ) provides the complete UN vision of Utopia. It is important to notice that UNEP prio...

A Conversation With ChatGPT

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  Images generated by DAL-E from description such as "Cute image of a robot writing with a quill pen" Who are you?  Hello! I am an artificial intelligence assistant trained to help with a variety of tasks and answer questions to the best of my ability. My primary function is to assist users by providing helpful and accurate information in response to their questions. Is there something specific you would like to know or anything I can help you with? Do you make mistakes? As an artificial intelligence, I am not capable of making mistakes in the same way that a human can. However, I am only as good as the data that has been used to train me, and the algorithms that have been used to build me. This means that I may not always have the correct answer to a question, or I may not be able to provide a response if the information I have been trained on does not include the specific topic or context of the question. In general, I strive to provide accurate and reliable information to ...