Moved

As the last few posts have suggested, I'm moving the Detritus of Empire over to Substack.  Also, probably, switching from three times a week to a once a week longer essay format.  Oh, maybe more often when fun stuff is happening.

Slide on over to:  Detritus 2.0

I'll be making a few changes to the prior "Blogger" platform in the next couple of weeks.  And probably putting it into sleep mode after that.

I'll keep my contact email from that site dagmarsuarez@gmail.com  as I still get interesting questions on 11 years of robots, archaeology and assorted nonsense....

Moving the Detritus

I'm about one week into the experiment of moving my "platform" over from "Blogger", an antiquated format owned by Google, over to Substack.  So far so good.

Google had neglected Blogger.  It was a legacy software, decades old in an industry where yesterday is vaguely remembered and there has to be a new software update every couple of weeks.  It had become klunky.

So...what to do with 15 years worth of thoughts?  All my three times a week postings are still "out there", if you count a series of 1's and 0's somewhere as existing.  Presumably the AI engines that constantly wander the hallways of the internet look at them regularly.  

Well, I'm going to give it a few weeks then put it into a sort of preservation mode.  I'll disable the Comments section, keep a contact email, remove the section on recommended links.  Some of them are to "blogs" that have similarly gone dormant.  

It's like the history of frontier boom towns.  There was some reason for them to be there.  A gold strike, a river ferry point, the rail road going through.  And then there isn't.  The gold ran out, or perhaps there never was any.  Trains replace river traffic.  Oh, and that railroad route you all were counting on?  Guess what, it's going a few miles north to some land my brother in law owns.

So Detritus of Empire will shortly become...detritus.  An modern day ghost town settling into genteel decay.  

I will continue to post on facebook via the new Substack platform, tentatively planning once a week and more thoughtful essays.  See ya there...

Detritus of Empire - Chipping with Stone Tools....

It's time for changes.  For fifteen years and then some I've been posting three times a week under the flag "Detritus of Empire".  It's been fun, and I'd say 2,704 posts is a pretty fair effort.  Mostly short essays.  Sometimes just photos and commentary.

I'm actually not out of things to say, but the world has changed.  More specifically, the unreal world of the internet has changed.  

I started in 2011, which was near the end of the classic blogging era.  The internet had promise then.  Anybody could think something up, post it, and others would read it and carry on the conversation.  There was no money involved, just people conversing on a larger scale.

Ah, but the rise and monetization of various search algorithms prioritized certain subject material.  Largely, how shall I put this.... crap.  OK, fine.  

So classic blogging became passe  Now, my initial venture into talking into the electronic void was tied to my archaeological ventures overseas.  And my digging pals encouraged me to cross post to Facebook.  

That worked for a while.  But Facebook too has deteriorated markedly.  AI has not helped.  Bad management has not helped.  Other than a few delightful eccentrics who still use heavily the platform - cheers, you know who you are! - it has become a bad joke. 

Recently it has intermittently refused to make a clean link to Detritus of Empire.  No real explanation.  No plausible fix.  My diagnosis?  I suspect this is a response to my overlapping layers of ad blockers.  Or maybe its just another unannounced change in their policies.  

There is no solution using existing options.   What I've been doing for years has become the equivalent of chipping away with stone tools while the tribe on the other side of the hill has discovered bronze.  

I'm going to try Substack.  It seems more functional, at least for now.  Maybe once a week.  You're welcome to wander over to that side of the hill.  Ignore all that stuff about paying to subscribe.  My stuff will always be free and worth every penny.

Back in a few days with the first installment of a Substack based Detritus of Empire.  I'll still cross post on Facebook until it most likely gets stubborn on the matter.  

Here's me in 2011.  I have not changed at all.  That blue shirt is still in my digging bag and makes the trip to Vindolanda every year!

 Next time I'll try posting from Substack with a link to same.

 

Looking Ahead to '26

Another year winding down.  Another year ahead.  So what will 2026 look like?

Some familiar things.  FIRST robotics build season commences shortly.  That tends to keep me busy and out of trouble until early April.  I'll do what I can to be of help to the local team, and will be volunteering at a couple of events.

I'll be back at Vindolanda in May.  

And there will be plenty of "up north" time.  Continuous grand kid sporting events.  And much to do on the Hunting Land.  Clearing brush, improving the garage, planting more feed plots.  Pulling off lots of ticks!

And what about writing?

I've been scribbling away at Detritus of Empire since 2011.  As of  late 2025 I'm approaching 3,000 posts.  The world of the internet has greatly changed since I started.  I caught the tail end of "blogging", where one's individual musings would be out there for people to follow regularly or to find accidentally.  This has become an outmoded concept.  I grudgingly added links to Facebook for most of my posts.  Probably that's how most non-bot entities find me.  But Facebook has been sinking into the swamp of AI slop and crude content for years now.

So where do people go for "content"?  Honestly I'm not sure.  Platforms arrive, attain success, get bogged down and commercialized, then fade away.  The "arc" from clever start up to pop up ads for toenail fungus cures is very short.

Maybe Substack, if that has not gone south by the time I get around to it.

The Minor Crimes of Canines

Dogs make lousy crooks.  This is one of their great virtues.  Other species....well, cats are just plain sneaky.  It's no accident that we associate them with misdeeds (Cat Burglars) and dogs with the opposite (Watch Dogs).

But dogs are not perfect.  That's actually another virtue.  If they were just a bit more faithful, loyal and selfless we'd be uncomfortable having them around our imperfect selves.

But dogs, despite not being Driven from the Garden, are still capable of minor sins.

You put something on the counter that is just a little too tasty, just a little too close to the edge, and you stay away just long enough that they can persuade themselves that you've forgotten about that morsel, and, well...

Hank the Dog has another misdemeanor that he can't resist.  He likes to hop up on beds.  It's a combination of nice and cushy, plus it smells like his owners.  One of his owners disapproves mildly, the other, seriously.

But he can get up and down so quietly.  So its not always easy to tell he's been up there.  Enter modern technology.

Guest bedroom.  Recently slept in by visiting family members that the dog adores.  Looks fine, no?

But lets just take a peek with the thermal imaging scope you see laying on the bed.  A suspiciously dog temperature spot right in the middle!

Busted!  But how could a dog this cute, this innocent be trying to scam me?

Hint:  This is the same dog.....

AI in 2025 - What is it really Bad At?

Last time I went on a bit on the subject of what AI was reasonably good at.  Images.  Some body parts being done so very much better than others.  It won't, at least in the free version I was using, pass for real art, but its skill exceeds mine.  Yours too I should think.

But what is it still really bad at?

Creative writing.  Even with, or especially with, detailed prompts.

For example, here's what I wrote last time on what AI is good at:

At my advanced age I am allowed some element of curmudgeonism with regard to modern technology.  I've seen a lot of it come and go in nearly 70 years.  Much of it is simply reinventing the wheel.  And the real breakthroughs are often pulled into the For Profit realm rather quickly.  Still, I'm not such a tortoise that I am still using a rotary dial phone and a slide rule.

So, what is the much vaunted AI "good" at in 2025.

My initial answer is: Images.  Lacking any artistic talent to speak of I am able to come up with amusing pictures but I can't create them.   Here's an example.  I prompted Gemini - this is the maligned but free Google product - to create an image of a deer sitting at a computer studying trail cam images of hunters.  This is a remote possibility for my slow hunting season (up to gun opener), but you never know.  Here's the first draft:

I posed that same question for AI to answer.  In the style of Detritus of Empire!  You be the judge:

"Ah, 2025. The year when the digital dust motes have finally settled enough for us to squint at the landscape and ask: "So, what's this bloody AI actually for now?" Forget the utopian pipedreams or the Skynet anxieties, comrades. The truth, as ever, is far more pedestrian and far more insidious."

"AI in 2025 is a glorified clerk, a relentless, unblinking auditor. It's magnificent at sifting through the dross of human existence – the endless data, the digital flotsam and jetsam we produce with every click, purchase, and mumbled voice command. It finds patterns in our spending habits, predicts our next impulse buy with unsettling accuracy, and flags the 'anomalies' in our medical records before we even feel a twinge."

"It's superb at generating content, a veritable factory farm of text and images, flooding the internet with bespoke banality, finely tuned to whatever niche market can be carved out. Need a thousand variations of a product description? AI's your man. A news article indistinguishable from human-written pap? Done. It’s not about brilliance; it's about boundless, tireless mediocrity, optimized for engagement metrics."

"And let’s not forget surveillance. Oh, the glorious, all-seeing eye. AI excels at monitoring, categorizing, and cross-referencing. From traffic flow to social sentiment, it’s the ultimate panopticon, meticulously cataloging the minute details of our lives, all under the guise of 'efficiency' or 'security'. So, in 2025, AI is good at making money, controlling narratives, and watching us. The empire, in its digital guise, has found its most efficient bureaucratic tool yet."

It's crap.  Nothing about it resembles my writing style, and with almost 3,000 posts of Detritus of Empire to sift though it had plenty of grist to grind.  Either its being lazy, and I am mooching off a free version, or it pays no attention to the actual request parameters and just pours slop from the bucket.  So which is it?

I think it must have done a quick surface scan of my writings.  The descriptive term "bloody" would not be there without some hint that I travel in and write about England rather often.  And to pick up on medical matters....some note of my career as a family and later ER physician.  But it does not mimic my writing style in any way other than an excess of commas!  So I wonder how it "sees" me? Just for fun I asked it to generate an image of my alter ego Badger Trowelsworthy.  After it made a cute critter image I pointed out that BT was actually a human.  So.....

Much better than its writing!  I can in fact flag a half dozen or so photos that probably were used to generate it. And it even got the hand right.  At least the one you can see.....

AI in 2025 - What it is actually (somewhat) Good At.

At my advanced age I am allowed some element of curmudgeonism with regard to modern technology.  I've seen a lot of it come and go in nearly 70 years.  Much of it is simply reinventing the wheel.  And the real breakthroughs are often pulled into the For Profit realm rather quickly.  But hey, I'm not such a tortoise that I am still using a rotary dial phone and a slide rule.

So, what is the much vaunted AI "good" at in 2025.

My initial answer is: Images.  Lacking any artistic talent to speak of I am able to come up with ideas for amusing pictures but I can't create them.   Here's an example.  I prompted Gemini - this is the maligned but free Google product - to create an image of a deer sitting at a computer studying trail cam images of hunters.  This is a remote possibility for my slow hunting season (up to gun opener), but you never know.  Here's the first draft:

Now that's not too bad.  But a closer inspection shows a problem.  The hunters are all wearing camo.  And they are all holding fire arms.

Some of the weapons they are hefting look like big sticks, others like generic sub machine guns.  One guy - and admittedly these are blurry images - appears to be holding a stuffed animal!

But for gun hunting season they should be wearing blaze orange.  When I pointed this out and asked AI for an update it said: 

Okay, let's get those hunters in proper safety orange! Here's the updated image:

And here's what it came up with:

Better.  It just changed the one detail and did so competently.  It's a fun image....if you don't look too closely at it.  Behold:

Our friend Mr. Buck has two full cups of coffee.  He's never going to manage the one on the right, not with that clumsy hoof.  But the other side.......  Yikes!  A hideous freak of nature "hand" with a thumb and dark, Goth fingernails.   

This sort of thing has been a problem for AI generation since the get go.  It does some body parts very well indeed.  Others....frightening mutations.  Here's another example.  The basic prompt was to show me a waitress at a German Beer Garden bringing me a stein of beer.

At first glance all is well.  AI does faces nicely.  The back drop is passable.  And, well, as this is a serious study of the matter, AI does breasts with great accuracy.  One minor quibble, that stein looks a bit outsized, unless the waitress is elfin, and it would never do to bring a customer something that is 35% foam!  But do we still have mutant fingers???

Subtle, but yes.  Count the fingertips.  Slightly crooked thumb, 1,2,3....

There seems to be a little parasitic finger grafted onto the back of the ring finger.  

This is a common feature of AI images.  Indeed, weird extremities - hands in particular - are one way photo sleuths debunk controversial AI "fakes".  So how and why is this so?

Here's my theory.

Picture a conference room.  Full of computer nerds.  It's an AI startup and the manager has this to say:

"OK, its crunch time.  Eric, Cheng, Bill, Rashid, Cooper,  get your entire departments working on Boobs.  Divide yourselves up into Left and Right working groups.  Feel free to hire up to 500 freelancers.  Try not to spend more than your usual amount of company time looking at naughty stuff on the internet."

"Oh...I suppose we need to do hands as well.  Where's the new intern?  Melvin?"

"Um, right here.  And its Milton, sir."

"Melvin, our AI informs me that (reads from his phone) the human hand is incredibly complex, and is a main reason why we invented tools and as a species took over the world.  See if you can knock something together this afternoon.  But you still have to sweep up, and don't forget the usual donut runs!"

"Yes sir, I'll do my best."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

So how would AI depict that scene?

About as expected.  I'll make this a big as possible so you can see the Horrible Hands on several figures including Milton!  Maybe he trained the AI to model reality on himself!

America's Got Talent (probably with Flute-Girls)

My grandkids enjoy America's Got Talent.  I doubt they watch it, or in fact anything, on broadcast TV, but they sure like the YouTube videos of some of the acts.  Mostly my wife watches these with them.  I can enjoy them too, as there is considerable skill, energy and creativity on display.  But I have the sort of pesky analytical mind that wonders how many takes for each act, how scripted the apparently spontaneous banter with the judges really is, how many acts an audience is expected to sit through in a day.  That sort of thing.

And when my mind wanders thusly, etymology can never be far away.  So, what does Talent really mean?

It goes all the way back to Greek.  Specifically to Talantan which means "a balance, a pair of scales".  I've dug parts of these at Vindolanda.  Here's an example found at the "sister site" of Magna back in 2023.

You could weigh all sorts of things with these, but with the word at hand we need to concentrate on monetary matters.  A "Talent" in ancient times was a measure of silver.  Specifically, 6000 of a silver coin called drachma.  This is about 57.75 pounds of silver, assuming nobody has fiddled with the content, and would be more money than most people of that era would see in their lifetimes.  A drachma was roughly the equivalent of a Roman denarius, and each were about one day's wages.

Why, I've even found the occasional denarius

The Parable of the Talents.  Most of us remember it.  It appears in both Matthew and Luke, in versions that differ enough to suggest they did not come from the same primary source.  Essentially a Master has to take a long trip.  He gives three servants money.  One gets 10 talents, one gets 5, one gets a single talent.

As you recall, the first two servants invested the money and doubled it.  The more cautions third one buried it in a hole - about the equivalent of keeping it in a checking account - and was severely chastised for his caution.

In the middle ages the meaning of talent morphed from a big pile of money into "a gift given for one's use and improvement", then into the abilities - lets call them talents - that enable a person to make good on such an opportunity.  

I have questions.  Did this bit of metaphorical advice have anything to do with the antagonistic attitude of Christians towards Jews regards lending money for profit?  I mean, it seems like the Big Guy specifically endorses this business model.

I also wondered how much trouble a servant would have been if he hadn't even preserved the principle, but lost it all.  This happened pretty often even before cryptocurrencies came along.  One common avenue for investing was backing a trading expedition.  Ships sink.  Bandits gonna bandit.

And I was surprised to learn than an alternative version of the parable occurs in a fragmentary and apocryphal text called The Gospel of the Hebrews.  In it, one of the servants actually blows the entire sum on "prostitutes and flute-girls".  Now, I'm not sure quite what that second category actually is, but it sounds like something you'd find on America - or perhaps Judea's- got Talent!

A Forgotten Brewery Cave - Remembered.....and Now Sealed.

Leinenkugel's brewery.  No, not the one in Chippewa Falls.  The family had lots of branches.  This establishment was run by Henry Leinenkugel and was on the banks of Half Moon Lake in Eau Claire.

A brief history of the brewery.

Like the Jacob Leinenkugel brewery up in Chippewa Falls, this one started in 1867.  It was actually run by Henry Sr. and his son, Henry Jr.  It got off to a good start, and for a time was the top producing brewery in Eau Claire.  But in 1876 Henry Jr. died, and as his father had by that point retired, the enterprise was taken over by Caroline, wife of the Departed.  Things got difficult.  Their production dropped in half, and their credit ratings were not positive.

A partnership of Frase and Lissack bought the brewery and did their best for a couple of years, but also failed.  The next owners were Carstens and Hartwig, who with additional partners ran the place until it burned down in July of 1885.  It was never rebuilt.

The newpaper article that described the fire mentions that the beer in the underground vaults was preserved.  So lets visit these "vaults".  Or actually, revisit them, as this is one of the brewery caves I have previously shown but not given a location.

While not generally known, the location did attract the usual unwelcome visitors.....

That picture was from a later visit.  The first time I crawled in it looked like a bit more of a cozy hangout for neighbors.

Yes, crawled in.  The entrance had been sealed at least twice in the past.  

Here's what the entrance looked like until recently.

Summer of 2025.

I can actually trace the history of the cave since 1885 in some detail.  I've seen a photo circa 1900 that shows the remnants of what would have been the original entrance.  It was of course a straight run out, so that beer could be hauled out and ice hauled in.  This was about the time period in which the local paper describes it as being a hideout for local delinquents who were stealing things from cabins around the lake.  

In the 20th century it was used for a time by Silver Springs, a company now known for various mustard and horseradish products, but back then they had a larger line of veggies, some of which required cold storage.  The nice cement floors and the remnants of an electrical system must date to this era.

Times more recent have been troubled.  Eau Claire has a significant problem with homelessness.  And brewery caves naturally attract people with nowhere else to be.  Both this cave and "The Cave of the Mad Poetess" have had semi permanent residents in recent years.  There have been issues.  Danger of people being hurt.  I've heard there was a sexual assault.  It's worth noting that this cave is adjacent to a public park/beach.

So the "other" Leinenkugel cave has been sealed off.  Its the right call.  Everything is still down there and now preserved, perhaps for some happy day when history is appreciated more and the troubles of the world are fewer.

After I took the last photo, Hank and I walked past the beach.  It was about 9am and a homeless guy was sleeping on the ground next to the beach house.

A One star review, and a Shot across the Bow.

Ah, Facebook.  There was a time when it was the unquestioned global information exchange.  Also of cat videos which I'm fine with.  I had little use for it until my archaeology friends encouraged me to hop on as a way to stay in touch.  I've stuck with it.  So far.....

I know many people are unhappy with the platform for reasons political.  Me, I'm tolerant of such things.  You provide a service that I find useful, respond to what your customers want, and are not total jerks.....I'll stick around.

But in the last six months Facebook has, as I see it, taken a huge nose dive in quality.

Not across the board.  I still stay in touch with those far flung friends and enjoy seeing their posts of travels, adventures.  And in some cases, cute cats.  But there's all this other "stuff" now.

I'm fine with Sponsored Posts.  FB needs to make money.  I glance at them and move on.  But there are other more intrusive ways FB shoves stuff in front of me.

For a while it was big batches of people (?) they suggested I follow.  Most of them were of no interest to me.  Every professional and semi-professional sport in the US and the UK was suggested.  As well as lots of other junk.  I only really got annoyed when the suggestions got Suggestive.  Scantily clad young ladies who, if followed into a dark alleyway, would at best rob you at knifepoint.

You can get rid of these suggestions by using the established FB system, just hitting the "no thanks" button near the top of such solicitations.  If they come back a second time you can report them for a variety of things.  Selling illegal animals was my favorite.

The Suggestive suggestions are now gone, but something worse lingers on.  Facebook Reels.

No doubt in response to Tiktok, FB launched this a year or two back.  And the subject matter is A) not relevant to me and B) often disgusting.  A majority seem to come from Asia, and I suspect more than a few are AI generated.  You can click on Show me Less of This at the upper right corner of a batch....and the same ones turn up instantly.  You can also click on individual Reels and report them as disgusting, violent, etc.  This seems harsh, but the content is in many cases precisely that.  You get people draining abscesses, both human and veterinary.  You get people collecting huge hauls of small unhappy looking fish from muddy ponds in the Philippines.  You get tattoos and tattoo removal.  You get stuff that - from the teaser photo - falls into the "Don't know, don't wanna know" category.

Reelly now.  We have the equivalent of the Great Library of Alexandria, the Library of Congress and pretty much every classic of stage, screen and page available in a hand held device....and we get this:

Facebook ignores any guidance along the lines of "For the love of Zuckerman, don't show me this".  And there is no official way to nuke the Reels feature entirely.

But there are unofficial ways.  I'm looking at a browser extension that will let me get rid of Reels and other dreck on Facebook.  FB is understandably not happy about this sort of software and the odds are fair that it would in response become poutingly become less functional overall.

So here's the deal.  I'm standing pat until after the spring archaeology jaunt.  After that I'm going to tame Facebook, and if the Algorithms strike back I will ditch it entirely.

For those reading my regular writings (Detritus of Empire) that I cross post here, well, I'm looking at Substack as an alternative.  I'd keep it free of course.  

OK Facebook, that there's your shot across the bow.  I'd like to think its close enough to splash a little water up on the bridge and leave a few muddy, unhappy fish flopping at the feet of Admiral Zuckerberg.

------------------------------------------

Ever wonder how much the internet is keeping an eye on you?  We all have our anecdotes.  Here's another.  A few days after composing the above, and while it was still in Draft, Facebook Reels went away.  Coincidence?  Or Admiral Zuckerberg staring at the dead fish all around his bridge and telling his first mate (probably the flatulent little girl shown above) to stand down.....

"Skillsville" Uh, did you think this through PBS?

I don't watch much TV.  Not even much of the streaming variety and almost nothing of the traditional broadcast variety.  So when I peruse the monthly update from Twin Cities Public TV its mostly out of curiosity.  How long can they keep "Call the Midwife" and "All Creatures Great and Small" going.  Clear into the modern era?

But I have a soft spot for their children's programming arm, PBS Kids.  Hey, once long ago my son and I were featured on a TPT show called Dragonfly TV!  Check it out!  Ah, good times.  And did the adventures of a precocious kid and his then cool dad launch any engineering careers?  Maybe.  I mean, yes, I actually know of several.

So I was at first interested then dismayed to read about the latest kids program over there, Skillsville. 

Here's the premise: 

Welcome to “Skillsville,” an animated series that encourages kids ages 4-8 to “power up” the skills they need for future success in careers and everyday life! In each episode, friends Cora, Dev, and Rae solve real life problems by using the strategies they’ve learned in "Skillsville,” a video game where the players get to manage their own virtual city. By trying out various jobs, the gamers help keep the city running smoothly, and when things go wrong, it’s up to the three friends to find a creative solution

What an absolutely horrible concept!  I watched the "Air Traffic Controller" episode.  Three admittedly cute kids, who appear to be left untended and on their computers all day, ask a sort of omniscient AI to put them into a virtual reality to play pilots and controllers.  The immersion is instantaneous and total.  It's way better than their real lives.

And of course they screw up.  A batch of beach balls magically appears and the kid directing the airplanes gets distracted.  Two planes are about to crash!  But then implausibly they stop just short.  The kids pause the game, at least the portion of it that was about to consign cute video Beeples to a fiery death, and cheerfully jump about zapping the balls just like in the games with which modern kids corrode their brains. 

Now, I have nothing against computers generally or even video games.  But they do very little to prepare kids for life.  

Dragonfly TV, which I linked to above, was "Real kids doing real science".  Ideas were created, tools deployed.  Things were built and tested.  By real people.  Things went right.  Or they went wrong.  You learned the consequences.

Given the bleak state of education post Covid, made worse by the intrusion of AI that increasingly "thinks" for people, pushing the idea that kids will prepare for the real world by consequence free actions on a video screen is at best a cheap and lazy concept for a show.  And if the tykes actually buy into it, a further decline in our abilities to do the things humans should be good at.  Using a screw driver.  Actual in person interactions.  And yes, getting the occasional skinned knee from trying something that was really not the best idea.

Can anyone who has never skinned a knee ever evaluate even day to day risks?  I don't want them directing the take off of any airplane I'm on.

FIRST Robotics 2025 - Report Seven

And so we find ourselves between our two competitions.  For reasons unknown - although possibly just to torment the coaches - the kids always insist on going to the earliest possible event.  It does tend to make them work harder early on, but we are not a big enough team to always work the bugs out in just six weeks of work.

2022 - Well, a rebuild year, not much could be done

2023 - Very solid design that almost qualified us for Worlds.  If only we'd know a few things about limiting the current to motors so they don't turn into small, expensive space heaters.

2024 - Many design issues that we mostly fixed by our second event.  

And 2025 - a design that was so very ambitious and came oh so close to meeting its objectives.  In a game of inches, close don't count.  (By the way, none of the kids had every heard the adage about Horseshoes and Hand Grenades, but those are not part of their modern world).

So its another year of heavy duty prototyping and software wizardry.  Honestly, the core group of this team seems to enjoy this process and works right on through Spring Break.

One of the things being worked on is more accurate targeting.  The game involves placing sections of PVC pipe onto these weird purple things:

We have the ability to set the robot's cameras to look for certain combinations of shapes and colors, and to drive to them with precision.  So, why not just "target" upright purple pipes?  First effort: Promising!  Note the green targeting dot inside the red rectangle.

Second attempt: Concerning!

We've all seen that movie.....

punctuation-space-space-capital

I learned something recently.  As part of the robotics team's tournament prep we are doing a reference book to keep in the pit.  It's for judges coming around who want to see what we did and how we did it.  We've done something along these lines in the past, but this year we are making it more comprehensive, better illustrated, and hopefully loaded with material that will get the judgey types intrigued and coming back to learn more.

We are a fairly small team this year, so the student power available to do this is limited.  Actually building the robot takes priority after all.  So part of what I'm doing is interviewing the students working on various aspects of the project, taking notes, and hammering them into something readable.  Hey, you try to get busy kids to sit down at a keyboard.  Now try it with software types...

I'm the humble scribe, it is the students doing all the real work, which includes the photos and layout for the "pit book".  And our layout person asked me something interesting the other day.  "Did you know that you put double spaces between sentences?"

I said yes.....and then asked "Doesn't everyone?"  And the answer is no.  No they do not.  In fact in English class they now are taught to use single spaces.   Huh.  Never a good day unless you learn something.  Of course wanting it to be an even better day, I had to learn more.

Evidently using double spaces this way is a relic of the days of manual typewriters and I think, manual type setting for old style printing presses.  Since about 1950 there has been a trend to prefer the single space format.  So how did I miss this?

Well, I'm sure I heard about the new fangled way at some point.  But when?

Not at Lowell Elementary School.  Good grief, the beginning reader texts there were "Dick, Jane and Sally" books.  I even remember a notoriously inappropriate book involving a young person of color and some tigers.  Modern writing?  Nothing of the sort.  They were still trying to teach us elegant cursive.

So how about middle school?  It was called Junior High back then and I remember it being a modern day Bedlam in which I learned very little.  I did, however, spend a little time in Industrial Ed class setting older than old school metal type for printing.....

I did attend a high school that took academics more seriously.  So why didn't any English teacher raise this point?  I think its because we wrote our assignments by hand.  Ah, but I took typing class.  Yes, surely it would have been mentioned then?  Nope.  The teacher was both old and old school.  I remember her having a beehive hairdo.  I might have been a bit of a teacher's pet, being the only guy in the class.  What I learned there has served me well.  The fingers know what to do, and I can generally think and type simultaneously.*

Although the single spaced mandate has gone out, it seems to be inconsistent.  Plenty of books written in recent years still double space.  And since I'm now paying close attention to this, I note several of my colleagues, who are younger and have less excuse, do also.

While I have to concede that the single space rule is considered modern and correct, I also maintain that it is modern and foolish.  It may be part of why reading comprehension is atrocious these days.  Lets go through what writing structure used to be, and why.

Words.  They give you context.  I say "orangutan" and you start thinking of a big ol' orange monkey.

Sentences. They convey an idea.  Hopefully with clarity. "The orangutan threw a bowling ball at me."

Paragraphs.  This is where the actual story begins.  Ideas linked to other ideas.  "I was seriously hung over that Tuesday morning.  So when I stepped out the door into the blistering Moroccan sun I was unwary.  And it happened again.  The orangutan threw a bowling ball at me."

Each sentence is like flipping over another card.  It shows you something new which relates to what came before and what might come after.  Slurring these together even by a single space damages the timing of the entire sequence.  Think of this next time you hear a young person reading anything aloud.

Ah well.  Maybe it matters not.  What written communication I see in the younger generation is largely electronic.  Most texts are a single sentence.  Or a word.  Or a few letters and an emoji.  To actually care about how written narratives work you'd have to be old and eccentric.

Which I remain, and proudly.

* I'm finding that it is getting easier to simultaneously think of what to write and to type it at the same time.  Either my keyboarding abilities are improving with practice or my brain is slowing down with age.  

FIRST Robotics 2025 Kicks Off!

A bit of a retro experience for me.  After roughly five years of either great luck or iron constitution I finally got Covid.  Nothing worse than a mid level cold and higher level boredom, but I was not able to help out in the week preceding the big game reveal.  Perhaps for the best, I'm handing off the day to day stuff anyway.  

So, what do we get to build this year?  In roughly five weeks?  By the official Kickoff I was back to full strength.  So here's the Reveal:

So it will be once again a "pick and place" game.  We do relatively well at these.  But yikes, it is complex.  This is not the year to attempt a "Swiss Army Bot".  Decisions will be Necessary.

We had a fun day, hosting basically all the other area teams at our HQ.  We had the auditorium and the Big Screen ready.

After a bit of lunch the students were split up into groups.  I rounded up every white board on the premises so each could use one to brainstorm.

This left time for the coaches - technically called Mentors in FIRST - to kick back and chat.  We've been working towards a more cooperative regional group.  What the kids are doing is Not Easy, and in some cases one team may have ideas, supplies or just encouragement that their neighbors might greatly appreciate.  

Our kids think they have it figured out, at least to the extent of what they want to accomplish.  In some ways this is a difficult phase, they want to grab the wrenches and start building.  But we've seen on previous occasions that the initial impression of how the game is played can be deceiving.

More, much more, in the weeks ahead.

Takin' the day off.

 Merry Christmas.  No need for the internet this one day of the year.

A. I. gets all chatty....

I've been tapping the keyboard here for many years.  Mostly of course just me sending thoughts out into the cluttered void that is the internet.  But I do get the occasional message back.  I have a link where people can send an email.  Usually of course it's just spam, but every few weeks somebody with similar interests drops a line.  Sometimes it is to say one of their relatives was involved in some local history topic I cover.  Back when I started deer hunting there was a vigorous discussion on what I should purchase for a rifle.  That sort of thing.

Mostly you can separate the wheat from the chaff with a quick look before either approving for publication or deep sixing it off into the spam folder.  But lately I've started to see far sneakier things.  Below is an example.  In part it is stealthy because the second line is "below the fold".  It sure seems like somebody with a similar interest in medicine, travel and ancient Egypt.....

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"It's interesting how the Waiting Room experience has evolved over time. From my days in the clinic, I remember the efforts to keep things neutral and avoid the clutter of biased pharmaceutical ads. The idea was to provide a calm and distraction-free environment, but even in places as historic as the Egyptian temple of Kom Ombo, where patients awaited healing, there are traces of this waiting culture. It's a reminder of how medical spaces, whether ancient or modern, share a common purpose: to offer healing, albeit with different approaches."

"########## offers a great opportunity, while those looking to optimize space can consider a ############ to make the most of their area."

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I of course have defaced and disabled the link, which was for some sort of office storage cabinets.  Or really, for Osiris only knows what.....

Clearly this and similar offerings are generated by an AI program that can analyze text, connect the dots regards context, and cook up a response that is clear, concise and well reasoned.  I have to study a few more specimens, but I suspect it is even copying some of my writing quirks.  It is synthesizing the perspective of a slightly nostalgic retired physician who was never fond of pharmaceutical company propaganda.  

If that is what AI can do today, what can it do in a few years?  I already know some smart people - OK, they are engineers - who advocate using this technology for business and other formal communications.

I disapprove.  

I've worked pretty hard to become adept at short form communication.  I find it carries over from written to spoken formats, as it is all just a matter of organizing ideas.  I'd like to think that I have a few distinctive touches....to compensate for my haphazard punctuation.  I'm not about to let some damned machine take over for me.

In Star Trek Captain Kirk went up against Artificial Intelligences pretty often.  Usually with a good talkin' to, supplemented with a phaser blast when necessary, they were defeated.

Security Patch?

Cleaning out an old cupboard we recently found an artifact of the great Y2K bogey man.

It's a Y2K Band-Aid!   

Maybe this is what was used to "patch" all the software so that the world didn't end.

Kate Potter's Unlikely Employment Agency

As such things are reckoned I was an early adaptor of The Internet.  So I've got decades of experience with Spam email.  In general it is a low level annoyance, the equivalent of a single mosquito humming around your ear.  You swat it and get on with things.

But occasionally I run across a new species, something that holds my interest long enough to study it.  And I'll be honest here, I'm feeling bad for Kate Potter.  Maybe you've seen things like this:

"Housekeeper Quote - Reply to Griggs Griggs is looking for Housekeepers in Miami, Florida."

Ms. Potter's efforts to book talent and household functionaries are confined to a few small areas in Florida.  They can be generic, such as housekeepers, and weirdly specific.....Magicians.  And they are all on the behalf of people with identical first and last names.  

If you hold the emails up at a safe distance, obviously without opening any links, they purport to be related to something called Bark(dot)com out of London, England.

Kate Potter appears to be an actual social media/communications consultant out of Australia.  She is not happy to have her name and reputation sullied in this fashion.

On the other hand, Griggs G. Griggs (I'm just assuming the middle name) is probably very happy.  Various real estate sites claim the median price for homes sold in the zip code indicated are $12.75 million.  Or 8.5 mill, or 1.195 mill.  Hmmmm, I'm almost starting to become suspicious of economic activity in the Miami, FL area.....

Out of curiosity I decided to keep track for the month of May.  

My tally for the month: 18 emails, 15 housekeeper, 3 magician.   

And who is so fruitlessly seeking this help? Griggs Griggs, G G ,Yvette Yvette, Rita Rita, Vs Vs Emilio Emilio, Janet Janet, Guerline Guerline, Elizabeth Elizabeth and so on.  Each and every one with the odd doubled name.  What are the odds?

And more seriously, what is the point?

Clearly these emails are being machine generated.  It would be the only way to keep churning out this stuff and presumably sending it to millions of potential suckers on a daily basis.  I hope the AI spambots still receive a modicum of input from weaselly humans.  Said weasels have an idea, a concept.  Lets take a job description that is so specific that 99.9% of people will never need it....a Magician.  I've never even considered hiring one.  Oh, add on Housekeepers too.  Locate these hypothetical jobs in a swanky community, and make the potential employers sound totally not fake by botching the names on each of the emails sent out by the millions,  once again,  making them so implausible that 99.99% of people in Miami will not have names anything like that.  Sure....that's the ticket....

To add a final note of weirdness to this saga.....after getting these spam emails every day for a couple of weeks, and sometimes more than once a day, they just stopped.  Did Jose Jose finally step up and hire that Housekeeper?  Or have the AI Spambots just moved on to some other misconception of what will separate the rubes from the rubles?

Magna Dig 2024 - Science n' Stuff

Archaeology has gotten a bit more "scientific" in recent decades.  And the dig at Magna reflects this new focus.

This is Wally, named of course for the nearby Hadrian's Wall.  It is monitoring various aspects of underground chemistry.  Water levels, pH, oxygen levels.  There is a concern that climate change is damaging the anaerobic layers deep under ground.  

The fence is there to keep sheep, especially the new lambs, from getting too frisky around the electronics.

One day we had some University types show up and deploy this equipment:

It looks like something you'd use to shock night crawlers out of the ground.  It actually is some sort of new geophysical imaging gear.  I asked, and was assured that the nightcrawlers are in no way bothered by whatever rays or beams are being sent into the earth.

We do a fair amount of sampling of pits and ditches.  In theory you can figure out what people were doing, what they were eating, what sort of plants were growing on the site in times past.  The samples collected are stirred and sieved.  

Not as exciting as excavating, but when I was assigned to this duty a sudden thunderstorm brought everyone back to the dig HQ looking like drowned rats, so there was that.

Con Men (and women) 2024

There are a few downsides to the advent of spring.  It's an election year and the political nonsense has commenced.  The latest are various online and in the mail "news letters" that combine happy sounding stories - nuns installing solar panels! - with political pitches.

It is of course a con.  And that got me thinking of all the ways the prefix "con" fits our current political environment.  I mean this of course in a bipartisan sense.  I'll listen to anyone's sincerely held, reasoned out political philosophy.  Might not agree with it but will respect it.  OK, let's go:

Conspiracy - the etymology of this one is interesting.  It means to "breathe together".  The implication is of connivers whispering to each other at such close range they are breathing each other's air.  In the age of AI assistance there might be no breathing involved at all....

Connive - This one is curious.  Like everything on this list it comes from Latin, in this case conivere, meaning to wink at in a sort of knowing way.  Somehow the word derives from nicitare, to wink.  This word seems to exist in English only in the sense of nictitating membrane, an extra eyelid seen in a few mammals, but more often birds.....and a lot of reptiles.  Lizard people.  I knew it.

Condescend - A bit obvious when you look at it.  It started out as meaning that a ruler might out of consideration deign to "step down" to the level of his subjects in some small matter.  You know, maybe allow the hunting of squirrels on Royal Lands for one day of Lent or something.  Human nature being what it is - and always has been - it soon acquired the sense of patronizing that it carries today.

Considerate - A derivation of consider, from considerare, "to look closely at, to observe".  This one is rather fun, it literally means star gazing.  Sidereal being a surviving but seldom used word to refer to distant stars.  I don't think there are many astronomers working in political campaigns these days.  But of course astronomy and astrology were once the same thing and there are still plenty of hacks and pollsters trying to read tea leaves and entrails.

Confuse and Confound - two words with similar meanings and etymology.  The basic concept is to take different things, mix them together and fuse them into one mass that makes it impossible to tell what went into it in the first place.  Nuns, solar panels and a Senator's re-election campaign just have not been stirred very well.  Sorta like simplistic recipe concocted by unskilled cooks.

Concocted - I had not known until starting this chain of "cons" that this is from concoctare, meaning to cook.  The sense of it being a process lacking transparency and probably honesty survives in the sense of "cooking the books".

This list could go on and on.  Doing things together - "con" - is a basic human function and thus incorporated into all languages.  One does wonder if the more cynical spin on many of these words is a modern thing or if ever has it been thus.  I can't say with Confidence.  That word of course means "to have a common faith", Fides being the Latin for same.  Such faith has so often been abused by those looking to directly make a buck or to slither into office to do so.  Confidence men.  And Women, this being the 21st century.  Shortened to Con Men because so few remember the Latin substructure of our language as it has become increasingly Contorted to mean any darn thing that is Convenient.