From my recent trip to Mt. Rushmore Luray Caverns in Virginia We also saw Wind Cave National Park caverns on the Rushmore trip but the handing stalagmites in Virginia, close by, were more spectacular
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Joel Osteen, The Power of Favor, Short Book Review
Joel Osteen, The Power of Favor . 2019. New York: Hachette Book Company This is a book by a fundamentalist preacher who emphasizes that G-d’s grace is the main thing in life. There are no accidents, as Freud and Einstein would say. The most important thing is that G-d is smiling on us and protecting us. This gives us the armor to go out in the world. When a favorable coincidence happens, we can think it is a fluke, but Osteen says think no. Our creator is merciful and holding us in His hands.
Book review, Who's Afraid of AI? by Thomas Ramge
Who's Afraid of AI?: Fear and Promise in the Age of Thinking Machines (New York: The Experiment, 2018) by Thomas Ramg e Reviewed by Myna German Imagine a day when two machines conduct surgery by talking to each other. The machines conduct the entire operation by robotic arms, artificial intelligence, sans doctors. It’s called the Internet of things, communicating machines that imitate human consciousness and collaborate in doing things together. Good luck. Thomas Ramge, the author of this book, gives us a glimpse of that life. Can AI make humans obsolete? That is the focus of this book. Without taking an ideological stance, the author sub rosa contemplates this issue. The book talks about a machine like Alexa or Echo studying ski conditions in Switzerland and arranging 3-day tours, including airlines. Sounds less stressful? Right. It could even locate the right skiing companions. But would you want a machine to do this for you? The author concludes it may be h
Book Review, Michael Finkel's The Stranger in the Woods
Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods , 2017. New York: Alfred P. Knopf. Book Review by Myna german “Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition,” wrote the Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. (p. 190, Finkel) All the time alone is feeling like solitude to me, a retreat being cut off from the world. Not being able to have my normal routines and see friends and colleagues feels like a form of torture. In “The Stranger in the Woods,” a 20-year-old from Massachusetts drives up to where his family summered in Maine, stakes out a hidden property and pitches his tent. What he thought would be an adolescent stunt of defiance and withdrawal turns out to be his life for thirty years. It is a Thoreau-type experiment, but as the author points out, even Thoreau held dinner parties and was seen strolling around Concord downtown now and then. Finkel, the author himself, lives in sparsely-settled western Montana, but once the hermit is caught (he supported
