This is creepy. That is the single sentence in an email to which my Beautiful Mystery Companion attached a New York Times article, titled A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled. She was right. It was deeply creepy and disturbing.
The writer is Kevin Roose, a technology columnist who the previous week had written that the new Bing, a search engine from Microsoft powered by artificial intelligence, had replaced Google as his preferred search engine. I had read that piece and resolved to try Bing when it became widely available. It is still in the testing phase and only a small...
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The farm at last has an official name: Three Geese Farm. In the past few weeks, a trio of Canada geese have taken up residence in Pancho’s Pond. We have named them Moe, Larry and Curly after an iteration of the Three Stooges, one of my favorite shows as a child. When a fourth goose showed up one morning, he was quickly dubbed Shemp by daughter Mere, in for a quick visit from Germany. When a total of seven Canada geese were seen cruising the pond or pecking the ryegrass, I gave up naming them. I can’t tell them apart anyway. If we get too close to them, we are liable to scare them off. So we enjoy...
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I am having to get used to using the Oxford comma while writing. It is not an easy transition for someone reared on the Associated Press Stylebook.
The Oxford, aka the serial comma, is the last comma in a list — as in red, white, and blue. See that last comma? Those of us taught to consider the AP Stylebook as the Bible of writing always leave it out. That is the style dictated in the punctuation guide of the venerable handbook, which turns 70 this year. It is two years older than me.
Now I am enrolled in two online graduate courses in the University of North Texas College of Information,...
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JEFFERSON, TEXAS – This town of about 1,850 residents dates back to the early 1840s. Jefferson, in Marion County, is about 40 miles northeast of Longview, and was named by its founders for Thomas Jefferson. It quickly became an important riverport, sitting on the edge of Big Cypress Bayou and Caddo Lake. The first steamboat to arrive in Jefferson was the Llama, which traveled from what is now Shreveport across Caddo Lake and into Big Cypress, there into town. The steamboats shipped cotton and other products downstream to New Orleans, coming back with visitors and potential settlers.
These...
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