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“Coming To Life”
Read more: “Coming To Life”If you are a writer of fiction [and I’ll state here for the record that what I have to say doesn’t really apply to poetry or nonfiction], do your characters come to life on the page for you? Two of mine did just recently. By “coming to life” I mean more than just seeing them…
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Can Intelligence Really Be “Artificial”?
Read more: Can Intelligence Really Be “Artificial”?I’ve never been too much in favor of the term “artificial” as applied to what we now call “Artificial Intelligence.” There has always been something about the term that just doesn’t seem right. It seems to me that what we call intelligence is the ability to deduce a result from two or more independent concepts,…
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What Can “The Music Man” Tell Us About Writing?
Read more: What Can “The Music Man” Tell Us About Writing?Have you ever seen the musical comedy “The Music Man”? Either the stage production or the movie? At least one movie channel on DirectTV, a TV provider through the internet, has been showing the original movie recently, and I’ve seen it again after I-don’t-know-how-many years. I’ve always liked it for its catchy music, well-done comedic…
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Speed Redefined
Read more: Speed RedefinedLast week in my post on this website, I blogged about the vast distances between star systems and how difficult it would be to travel between them. It’s a contention of mine that those immense distances are at least one of the main factors, if not the main one, that keeps aliens from other planets…
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The Superintelligent Species
Read more: The Superintelligent SpeciesIn this post, I want to continue, in a more limited way, from the post I made last week, about traveling the universe, or at least our Milky Way galaxy. Last week’s post was about why we haven’t been visited by aliens from other planets, and I gave some reasons why this hasn’t taken place. …
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The Other Guys Out There
Read more: The Other Guys Out ThereI’ve noticed recently several postings on social media questioning why haven’t we heard from intelligent beings from outer space. The question has so often been asked, if we are capable of listening to signals from outer space, and observing all the stars and planets and galaxies and all the other stuff that exists out there,…
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Crewed or Crude?
Read more: Crewed or Crude?I’ve decided to not like the term “crewed” when referring to a spaceship that has human beings in it. Granted, the term is now used as a replacement for the word “manned” because spaceships nowadays have women in them too, either as crew or passengers. In the beginning of the US “Man in Space” program,…
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A Review of the Book “Inner Space” by Jakub Szamalek
Read more: A Review of the Book “Inner Space” by Jakub SzamalekThis is a review of the book, “Inner Space,” by Jakub Szamalek, with the translation from Polish to English by Kasia Beresford. The book takes place largely on the International Space Station and involves a United States crew and a Russian crew. But Earth-bound personnel also play a role, especially those in the upper echelons…
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A Couple of Notes About the Artemis Project
Read more: A Couple of Notes About the Artemis ProjectI just have a couple of comments to make about the Artemis project that NASA has developed to return astronauts to the surface of the moon. First, humans haven’t been to the moon since the Apollo program was shut down prematurely in 1972 after Apollo 17 returned. There were three more Apollo flights scheduled (they…
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The Logic of Other Worlds
Read more: The Logic of Other WorldsAs I was watching on television a few days ago one of the first three Star Wars films to be made (they’re now numbered 4, 5, and 6) I kind of became aware of just how much the film*—although ostensibly taking place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away—was using so many…