Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

Apparently computers will never write good novels or poetry. That is according to a carefully crafted narrative in Nautilus by Angus Fletcher dated February 10, 2021 entitled Why Computers Will Never Write Good Novels . Thank you again to the Arts & Letters Daily website for pointing me in the direction of another story that is helping me make sense of this confusing post Trumpian and COVID world. Angus Fletcher's thesis in Why Computers Will Never Write Good Novels is beguiling and quite encouraging, and it does seem to help neutralize Cameron Hilditch's thesis in National Review, discussed a couple of posts earlier on this blog, that Technology Will Destroy Us . Fletcher's proposition is that because computers think only in the syllogistic Boolian language of AND/OR/NOT, which is necessarily directionaly neutral and non-causal, computers cannot create imagined causes and connections that are the essence of authentic disbelief-suspending narrative. It was quite an eye...

Perhaps to help stop technology destroying us we might each day seek to unplug . Say... Leave your mobile on the bench today, become unplugged, yes, tablet free, go out the opened door to play;  touch, taste, sing and see.   Be beguiled by beckoning birdsong , brace brazenly 'gainst the blust'ring breeze, bypass business and the bustling throng, bend time, slow space, incept brain freeze .   Sieve slimy sand though sandalled soles,   smear sweating  skin with sunscreen oil,     slide seaweed strands through swimsuit holes,    savour sweet stenched  sea and soil. Wonder at the wideness of the world's night, wistfully wander where there's no walkway, plunge dark pools and  rise up to light, then wake to silently laugh out loud, OK?   Technology is impotent to destroy such doggerel emerging from depths of our sub-consciousness. So  threalm  on.  Less blogging and more jogging and snogging 'til we've pulled out of th...

In the cacophony of the interesting times in which we live it has been difficult to sustain a coherent picture, let alone a coherently articulated explanation for why such chaos has now enveloped us. This may partially explain the long silence of the Realm of Threalm through the time of Trump and COVID. There has been all too much to talk about in recent years but not really a lot to say that makes sense of it all.  I have been prompted however to return from my social commentary somnolence to blog again here by a Nation Review article of 23 January 2021 by Cameron Hilditch entitled " Technology Will Destroy Us ". I might just have been shown a plausible story that helps coherently explain what the hell is happening in this noisy, fractious, partisan and unforgiving world we now seem to live in. Here's a summary (using the article's own words) of what appears to be its thesis: Technology allows human beings to shape reality in such a way that it conforms to their own ...

Good news is gradual. Bad news is sudden. If the world is getting warmer slowly it's not news. It's only news if it happens quickly. People who want to slow the warming or who sell news for a living, or both, must speed up this perceived slow warming to make it newsworthy. Alarmism is the answer. Sudden weather events are good for this, especially when the weather event can be said to be evidence of the Warming. The nomenclature of this issue has therefore consciously progressively moved over the last 30 years from " Global Warmin g" to " Climate Change" to " The Climate Emergency " in the service of this imperative. But if the weather doesn't comply with this narrative?  What if the weather event'shows coldness, not heat? Is there anyone out there with an incentive to accelerate a slow cooling to make it newsworthy; that the warming is slowing? This could after all be good news. The planet may not be heading for a catastrophic warming...

The title of this post is a quote from an article entitled " If it ain't broken, it must not be America"  by George Korda in the Knoxville News Sentinel of 1 November 2016. That article suggests things may not be as bad as they seem. We humans do seem to have a proclivity towards pessimistic presentism whereby, when we feel that things are going badly for us (like now in the midst of this appalling US presidential election campaign), we tend to think that our lot is worse than it has been in the past. Clearly this is an over-reaction. In the  previous post  on this blog I suggested that although things do feel pretty rum in the world right now, fear not; we are all probably not going to ruin, provided enough of us stick to our jobs and do our duty undistracted by the whirling noise of potential chaos. Similarly, George Korda in his article quotes his own father as telling him:   “Quit worrying. Times are always desperate.”  And George counsels us to le...

Things sure do look like they're going to ruin on planet Earth at the moment: Russia seems intent on provocatively escalating its saber rattling in the Baltic, Syria and Ukraine. China is aggressively asserting its hegemonic claims in the South China Sea and seems to have incomprehensibly large domestic debt problems. Iran is now actively developing a nuclear warhead capability, unrestrained by the international community.  North Korea is testing nuclear capable ballistic missiles that can reach Japan and beyond. The interminable war with Islamic extremism intensifies yet again. This time its Mosul, Iraq. Aleppo, Syria is being bombed into oblivion in the proxy millennial war between Sunni and Shiite Britain has voted to Brexit.  France is on a path to electing Marine Le Pen. Academia in the West is progressively and inexorably losing whatever slight grip it may have had on reality. Each day we seem to read yet another story of an educational institution abrogating i...

So said Ludwig Wittgenstein. I did not stumble on this beguiling jewel of language reading Wittgenstein. Nein. That would require too much grit, wit and deutsche. I found it reading an intriguing article in Slate by David Auerbach titled " The Limits of Language ", subtitled " Wittgenstein explains why we always misunderstand one another on the Internet" . It was very prescient of Ludwig, who died in 1951, to do this for us. He just knew that the Internet was going to be a poor medium for us to communicate in. Some may claim he was merely saying that humans are poor at communicating sometimes, but then they would clearly not get Witt. Mr Auerbach's  proposition appears to be that because the later period Ludwig held that the meaning of what we say can't be abstracted away from the context in which we say it, this means that the inherent abstraction of our communication on the Internet results in our words losing their appropriate context and therefore ...