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 ...