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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 2025 Events and Some Thoughts
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Week started January 20, 2025. There will be several very worthwhile events, many of which are listed here. Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Humanities Medal, will deliver the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Distinguished Lecture on February 5, 2025 at the University of Iowa Medical Education…
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Should We Trust Artificial Intelligence?
I‘ve read a couple of articles recently about Artificial Intelligence (AI) lately and I’m struck by how readily one can get the idea that AI tends to “lie” or “confabulate” and sometimes the word “hallucinate” is used. The term “hallucinate” doesn’t seem to fit as much as “confabulate,” which I’ll mention later. One of the…
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Big Mo Pod Show: “Blues: The Universal Mixer”
We listened to the Big Mo Pod Show (Sena stuck with it for about the first hour anyway) last night and then I got a mini-education in the forms of music, at least, as it relates to timing and rhythm. The theme was “Blues: The Universal Mixer.” Frequently, the blues show and the podcast remind…
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Artificial Intelligence Can Lie
I noticed a Snopes fact check article (“AI Models Were Caught Lying to Researchers in Tests — But It’s Not Time to Worry Just Yet”) today which reveals that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can lie. How about that? They can be taught by humans to scheme and lie. I guess we could all see that coming—or…
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The Flowers Are Doing Well
The Christmas Amaryllis/Hippeastrum flowers are doing well. I’m getting older and often I wake up early in the morning feeling anxious and a little blue. I look at the news headlines about people who die and often they’re my age or even younger. Maybe the Christmas holiday does that. When I get this feeling of…
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Dirty Deepfakes
I saw an article about the unreliable ability of humans to detect digital deepfakes in audio and video productions (Mai KT, Bray S, Davies T, Griffin LD. Warning: Humans cannot reliably detect speech deepfakes. PLoS One. 2023 Aug 2;18(8):e0285333. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0285333. PMID: 37531336; PMCID: PMC10395974.). I was a little surprised. I thought I was pretty…
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Little Autumn Promenade
Yesterday, we took a stroll on the Terry Trueblood trail. It was a little breezy and warm for late October. The fall colors were gorgeous and there was a lot going on. We saw a woman with her toddler flying a butterfly kite. It sailed on the wind beautifully. We saw the quilted hearts hanging…
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Thoughts on the Big Mo Pod Show 034: Laughing in the Face of Death
I heard the Big Mo Blues Show just (Halloween theme) this last Friday night and was not surprised to see that one of the songs discussed on the Big Mo Pod Show on Saturday was Peetie Wheatstraw’s “Devil’s Son-in-Law.” When I first heard it, it got me chuckling because I didn’t understand hardly a single…
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Thoughts on The Big Mo Podcast 033: “A Balance of Old and New”
This is just a short piece on the Big Mo Podcast last Friday night and his comments about one of the songs he played that night. It made the list of 5 songs he and Producer Noah discussed a couple days later. Big Mo’s had great comments about all the songs, but I took special…
