I’ve lately been paying attention to AI-based systems that create media for ordinary consumers. ChatGPT is all the rage just now, but there’s been a real explosion in the number of models trained up on large text, audio, image and other creative corpora. …

A while ago, I wrote a longish post about a clock I built to keep metric time. I promised I was going to polish it up, build a case for it and make a pretty piece of desk furniture out of it. I haven’t done that yet. Instead, I made…

I’ve been playing around with some of the consumer-accessible large-model AI systems lately. I have enjoyed making novel images using Stable Diffusion via DiffusionBee on my Macbook. I’ve played some with GPT-3 to explore text generation. It’s neat. …

We have lots of ways to describe distance: feet, furlongs, meters. You can measure volume in liters, quarts or cubic miles. We weigh things in stone, pounds and kilograms. Same is true for geometric angles, acceleration, power, torque and so on. It struck me a while ago that that’s not…

We took a three-week, 3,857-mile road trip a month ago to visit eight US National Parks and to see friends in Colorado and Utah. Here are some Bryce Canyon hoodoos for you to look at: The parks visit had been on our list for a long time. Besides that, we…

Lately, I’ve gotten obsessed by the daily New York Times Spelling Bee. It’s a word puzzle with seven letters. Your job is to find as many words that use some or all of them as you can. Every word has to include the letter in the center. Words must be…

I talked my way into the beta program for Google Earth Studio and have spent a few days experimenting with the software. It’s surprisingly easy and fun to use. For years, you’ve been able to visit the Google Earth site and, by clicking and dragging and scrolling, wander around the…

I have a copy of Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience. The book was compiled by Shaun Usher. It’s one of my favorite flip-it-open-to-a-page-at-random books. It seldom disappoints, and never takes more than a few minutes to read something really interesting. This morning…

This is the second article in my series on quantum computing. Part one is here. I didn’t start out to write a series. After my original post on quantum, though, I got to talk to a bunch of folks working in the industry. …