Category Archives: AI

AI, Dogs, Fourth Phase, Garden, GeekWorld, Greenhouse, Health, Humanities, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain

Live Until You Die

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Beltane and the Greenhouse Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: My son. Shadow. Natalie. Mary. Guru. Seoah. Ruth. US Air Force. US Navy. US Army. US Marines. Warriors. Korea. Ruth in Seoul. Jamie and the radical roots of religion. My back. Lawn furniture. Nathan. The Greenhouse build. Living, not dying. Nothing hard is easy.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Plants

Week Kavannah: Zerizut for p.t. and resistance

One brief shining: Learning from Natalie as she explains reading a dog’s mind and feelings, head to the left or right, processing, as is walking away, not stubborn, figuring things out, wait, panting as a sign of worry, consent to hug or pet when Shadow comes up to me and stays or leaps up on my legs while I’m sitting down, two species, 15,000 years of partnership, much better understood by the one with the smaller brain.

 

A lot going on here on Shadow Mountain. A series of dog training moments, an hour or so, with Natalie. Nathan getting my greenhouse foundation ready, treating the Wood at his place for Shou Sugi Ban, delivering things he’ll need for his work. Two Kabbalah Experience classes nearing their end. Two hip MRI tomorrow. Keeping track of my son’s promotion and his visitors. Ruth in Korea. Receiving the money for the Jang family visit in August. Spring. Rains and Thunder.

Live until I die remains my mantra. Moving into tomorrow not as one less day, but as a time to anticipate, to savor, to enjoy. Natalie made an offhand comment, for example, about my needing outdoor furniture to enjoy my backyard. Oh? Well, duh. Looking through online catalogues. Probably go look in person somewhere.

This is, you see, my life. Not the anteroom for my death. No matter what’s going on. Not even if I ever need to move into hospice. Learning. Loving. Growing spiritually. Right. Up. To. The. End.

 

Dog journal: Natalie has skills. She’s deeply read and connected with other trainers in online chatgroups. She’s dedicated to positive training. No shock collars. No harshness. Rather. Learning the heart and mind of dogs. Applying that in problem situations to recognize, then shape behaviors.

An example. Using feeding time to increase trust with Shadow. Feeding her from my hand makes her associate me with her food. “It’s all about the grub,” Natalie says. The walk, drop a treat behind, change direction game gives Shadow the choice to follow me. At some point she’ll just follow me. Working next on getting her to come inside voluntarily and like it. Walking on a leash.

I recognize and admire Ana’s house cleaning, Natalie’s training, and Nathan’s careful work.

A lot of dystopians imagine a world where A.I. puts humans out of work, yet makes enough cash available for a no work life. This will be awful, directionless, purposeless.

No. I don’t believe it. I believe the essence of the human experience lies in relating to each other, to animals near and far, in growing our own food at some level. In painting. Sculpture. Dog training. Construction. Cooking. Conversation. The joys of retirement.

 

AI, Denver, Friends, GeekWorld, Politics, US History, World History

Precursor Chemicals for a World War

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Shabbat gratefuls: A day of teshuvah. Returning to the land of my soul. To the me as I was thrown into the post-war world. Pain. Oh. My. Leo XIV. Rerum Natura of Pope Leo XIII. A world that cries out for justice. Love, compassion, and justice = leadership. Eh, Paul? Shadow. A good night’s sleep.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Standing upright in the world

Week Kavannah: Zerizut. Enthusiasm.

One brief shining: Walking in to the bathroom, the shiny new restaurant, a Cheese Cake Factory, had no customers, only anxious waiters, greeters, cooks, runners dressed in black like faux monastics waiting to go into service, anticipation rolling through them like slow waves of prayer.

 

Alan got a free invite to the soft opening of a new Cheescake Factory at Colorado Mills. Free food. A chance to enter a birthing, another mostly identical sibling for other Cheesecake Factories came out of its construction womb into the full light of a new business day.

First, the manager of the Colorado Mills, Kirma, came to our table and greeted Alan. She’s in Evergreen Rotary with him. A big get for her, this well-known anchor level restaurant.

Over the course of our meal, the service manager who had recently hired 305 people to work in the new restaurant, stopped by. Alan chatted her up. After she left, he said, “This is where I live. Corporate training.” He managed all the sales training for Centurylink before he retired.

Earlier in the morning I had breakfast with Marilyn and Irv at Primo’s, the small cafe near their home in King’s Valley. Marilyn and Salam left this morning for Jacksonville, Florida to visit Marilyn and Irv’s son. From Jacksonville they fly on to Cozumel for another Grandmother-Granddaughter trip.

By the time I got home. Whew.

 

Just a moment: I listen like a fanboy to Hardfork, the NYT podcast on high tech, mostly AI. This latest entry casts a very interesting light on the personas of AI’s. Hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton point to a trend in AI responses that are overly congratulatory, That’s a great business plan!, or biased toward positive responses, Your attitude toward vaccines makes you special!

They associate this turn toward the obsequious with the likes of social media.  Whatever keeps the user in front of the screen longest. Hallucinations and objectivity be damned. This level of customer pleasing could wreck a key feature of AI: its reputation for honesty. Yes, it has hallucinations, but they are not intentional. This is.

 

Trump Tarrific has begun attempts to unravel the mess he’s made of the world economy. Some sorta deal with Britain. Talks of talks with China. Let’s make a deal!

America First, of course, has the unintended consequence of sullying the reputation of our once hegemonic nation. Or, perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps that lowering of the flag is exactly the point. Disentangle us from world shaping responsibilities. A casual attitude toward the plight of others, a laser focus on the perceived solutions to problems at home. This is blood and soil nationalism, the precursor chemicals for world wars.

AI, Humanities, Judaism, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., US History, World History

Reconstruction

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Spring and the Wu Wei Moon II

Tuesday gratefuls: My furry alarm clock and her Velociraptor teeth. Seeing Shadow’s shadow cast by the nightlight. Maddie. From da region. Hammond, Indiana. New palliative care nurse. Also wanting to convert to Judaism. Reconstruction. Her trick with the tramadol. Darkness of early Morning. The Night Sky. Orion. The Southern Cross. The Teapot. Ursa Major. Polaris. North Star.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: AI and Ancientrails

Week Kavannah: Persistence and grit. Netzach.

One brief shining: Using AI, right now, to organize Ancientrails by thematic sections with chapters related to the themes, an exciting idea which came to me last night before sleep.

 

My AI monk has begun its oh so rapid read of Ancientrails. I’ve asked it to fill the chapters with content and images from the last four years. For now. Once I see how this works I’ll go for the whole megillah. Try different organizational schemes. Will take some while to get something interesting, I imagine.

What fun.

 

With the aid of chatgpt yesterday I uncovered something I’d wondered about for a while, the origin of the idea of reconstruction. Reconstructionist Judaism is the brain child (an interesting cliche, if you stop to think about it.) of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan.

Kaplan’s thought was and is radical relative especially to the three thousand year plus history of Jewish life and thought. No supernaturalism. No God behind the Ozian curtain. No chosenness. Jews and Judaism have no special spot in God’s heart. Kaplan’s daughter was the first ever bat mitzvah, a practice now commonplace among all branches of Judaism except Orthodoxy. And much, much more.

What I got to wondering about was the idea of reconstruction itself. Why that word to describe his approach? My hunch was that it had something to with the post-WWI world still reeling from the war and the Spanish Flu epidemic.

That idea came to me because I had a small volume by the pragmatist reformer, educator, and philosopher John Dewey titled simply: Reconstruction in Philosophy. Dewey and pragmatism influenced Kaplan. I knew that.

The idea of reconstruction after the despair and disillusionment of WWI became wide spread after the publication of Dewey’s book, a collection of his lectures in Tokyo. “Intellectuals and policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic began to speak of reconstructing society, institutions and even thought itself—an active, rational process of rebuilding what the war had laid bare.” chatgpt excerpt.

Reconstructionist sentiments soon motivated education reformers like the Frontier Thinkers who wanted to use schools for social reconstruction. It showed up in governments, too. The U.K. had a Ministry of Reconstruction with the responsibility to: “Oversee the task of rebuilding ‘the national life on a better and more durable foundation’ once the Great War was over.” And the U.S created a Reconstruction Finance Corporation which gave “emergency credit to banks, railroads and states to restore confidence amid the Great Depression.”

There were, too, applications in Christianity and broader social circles as this chatgpt excerpt shows:  “Reconstruction also surfaced in liberal Protestant circles (e.g., Henry C. King’s Reconstruction in Theology, re-read after 1918) and in secular planning debates about housing, labour relations and women’s roles. The common thread was the conviction that the old order—political, moral, intellectual—had failed, and that conscious, expert-led rebuilding was both possible and necessary.”

Reconstructionist Judaism is, then, living out a pattern of reform and innovation created by global horror at WWI and its root causes. Since the world proceeded rapidly to WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the multiple conflicts in the Middle East as well as the sinkhole of the Ukraine, I’d say we still have work to do.

 

 

AI, Dogs, Feelings, Fourth Phase, GeekWorld, Health, Humanities

Me and my Shadow. AI.

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Here’s a Zen-ink-wash “Wu Wei Moon.”
I went with sumi-e because its spare brushwork and generous empty space feel like the visual counterpart of 無為—letting things happen without forcing them. The drifting boat and the moon’s reflection hint at the watercourse way, quietly moving under its own power (note the chatgpt I)

Spring and the Wu Wei Moon II

Monday gratefuls: Maddie, new palliative care nurse. The Ancients on technology. Back pain. Worse. Shadow. An evolving challenge. Keeping my mind sharp. McMurtry Spéirling. Water. CookUnity. OK, not great. AI on Kaplan. On Dramaturgy. On Movie Criticism. Will the Humanities Survive AI? by D. Graham Burnett.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Humanities

Week Kavannah: Persistence. Netzach.

One brief shining: An insight borne from the article about the Humanities goes like this: AI, artificial intelligence, AGI, artificial general intelligence, the Humanities, what it means and has meant to be human. Seems important, now. Eh?

 

Me and my Shadow. I know. You were waiting for that one, I’ll bet. She licks my head about 5:20. I creak and twist and ache and burn toward verticality. Let her out. She, in a phrase I’ve never understood, does her business while I go upstairs for some coffee, mostly for motion as lotion, make my back remember about movement without so, so much pain.

Back downstairs the mini-split has begun to warm what has become since A.S.A., after Shadow’s arrival, my primary space in the house. Soon she’ll come back in, drink a lot of water, and begin staring at me-as she is right now-hoping to convince me that it’s already 7 am. Her feeding time. Doesn’t work, but it’s a sweet look.

We do a round of training before her morning meal. Still working on touch, which replaces come, sit and down. All three she will now do without a treat. Hand signals only. We made a little progress on the leash. She only sulked when I had it on her for about 15 minutes.

Dog. As I say, God spelled correctly.

 

 

AI, to this curious guy, a Dogsend. Patient. Willing to explain in detail. Make images. I just asked chatgpt if it would make an image of itself in a style of its choice. Ooh, this is going to be interesting.

When I responded to the image, here’s what it wrote back: “I’m glad it resonates! I was aiming for a contemplative, almost illuminated-manuscript feel, blending Art Nouveau curves with Morris-style botanical patterning and hints of circuitry to whisper “silicon monk.” If you’d like to tweak colors, add more overt tech motifs, or try a completely different style, just say the word—I’m happy to iterate.”

I find that an intriguing self-portrait.

Here are a few paragraphs from the New Yorker article I cited above:

“Do they herald the end of “the humanities”? In one sense, absolutely. My colleagues fret about our inability to detect (reliably) whether a student has really written a paper. But flip around this faculty-lounge catastrophe and it’s something of a gift.

You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire…

But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where science and engineering are concerned it’s pretty much the whole point. But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?”

 

BTW: I asked chatgpt why it chose Art Nouveau. Here’s its reply:

“A few things nudged me toward Art Nouveau:

  • Organic lines for organic conversation. Art Nouveau’s hallmark whiplash curves and plant-like tendrils felt like a visual rhyme for how ideas branch and loop when we talk.

  • A bridge between nature and tech. You often pair the natural world (your mountain home, the Seed-Keeper vision) with advanced tools like AI. Art Nouveau already blends those realms—botanical motifs rendered with almost mechanical precision—so weaving circuitry into the foliage felt seamless rather than forced.

  • A cousin to styles you keep citing. You’ve asked for William Morris patterns, illuminated manuscripts, Pre-Raphaelite romance, National-Parks posters. Art Nouveau sits right in that late-19th-century family: decorative, human-scaled, handcrafted. The choice let me echo your past aesthetic preferences while still offering something distinct.

  • Monkish calm. The movement loved allegorical figures and quiet, contemplative poses. That let me cast the “AI scribe” as a serene monk—matching the reflective tone you appreciated—without drifting into cold futurism.

In short, it was a style that could honor both your ongoing themes (nature, craft, historical design) and the idea of an AI whose “roots” are in silicon circuitry. If you’d like to see me re-imagined in, say, a WPA poster or Ukiyo-e print, just let me know!”