HAL is 50.

Movies

And his prophecies are coming true.

Science fiction is a genre for morons. It makes for bad writing and even worse movies. Plot lagging? No problem, throw in some shape shifting. Longueurs too long? Easy. A spot of time travel and disappearance is called for. SF is the poor writer’s opt out of doing the hard job of producing quality prose. SF is also a leading opiate for the masses with their endless taste for all those cretinous Star Wars movies. Hey, a fool and his money are easily parted.

This month Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ turns fifty. Many who did not pay attention, or who never watched it in the first place, describe it as a science fiction movie. It is nothing of the sort. It is about Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, and shows a world where the machine tries to control man. (It bears adding that the one time ‘2001’ goes seriously sci-fi – as opposed to AI – in the very last chapter, comprises the most frustrating and failed part of an otherwise great movie. Yes, needless to add, time travel is involved).

In the modern era that machine is, of course, Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg is the lunatic Dr. Chandra of yore, the machine’s father. Only this latter day Dr. Chandra is far smarter. He has monetized his theft of your data and over 2 billion check-ins monthly to his odious platform testify to his genius.


HAL and Facebook are watching and listening. HAL lip reads the astronauts, now conspiring against him.

I cottoned on to the evil of Facebook early on. Obviously the revenue model (‘free’ to users) meant that the suckers were being played, their profiles sold to advertisers and politicians. Why does Facebook not adopt a revenue model where users pay and their data is not sold? Because no one would pay. So if you buy Zuckerberg’s promises to fix the security holes you are stunningly naïve. There is nothing to ‘fix’ so long as you, the user, are the product to be sold.

While the inherent evil of Facebook was clear to me from its creation, I also harken back to a sunny spring day in 2012 when I was walking my son home from his intermediate public school in the Bay Area. I noticed through the fence that every child in the playground was staring intently at the cellphone screen in his hand, tapping away with both thumbs. The surrounding basketball nets remained untroubled by balls. “What are they doing, Winnie?” I asked. “Oh! dad, don’t you know? They are all on Facebook sharing rumors and pictures of friends”.

So I flashed back to The Unfair Advantage I have always sought for my son. If these stupid kids were willing to sacrifice quality study or play time for obsessive use of a rumor system, and if their even dumber parents were willing to allow this, then the child opting not to use that system would automatically have an Unfair Advantage. His available time for productive pursuits would skyrocket.

But I decided to bide my time. I knew Winston used Facebook, albeit in moderation, but a catalyst was needed to get him to stop.

That catalyst appeared a couple of weeks ago when it was disclosed that Facebook data likely installed a traitor in the highest office of the land, with subsequent depradations and destruction of America’s international status to follow. Winston was well aware of this scandalous theft of data of fifty million (70 million? 100 million? 200 million? Take your best guess) Facebook-using morons, garnered through trickery and deceit, then resold for political gain.

I pounced.

Here’s the email:

The ‘THIS’ link is here.

Frankly, I did not fancy my chances of success yet, minutes later, this arrived.

HAL’s plaintive complaint “I can’t do that, Dave” has morphed into “Yes, I can” in my son’s courageous decision.

My son’s Unfair Advantage grows daily. As Stanley Kubrick once memorably put it, “Never get into a fair fight”.

Should you have your child delete Facebook? Please, no. I would rather my son had as little competition in life as possible.

Stanley Kubrick and author Arthur C Clarke set forth the evils of AI for all to hear and see fifty years ago. Now they are laid bare and the users are the victims. Just like Mission Commander Dave Bowman on that space mission and his fellow astronauts, all murdered by HAL in the emotionless pursuit of his mission.


Killing HAL. Keir Dullea as astronaut Dave Bowman guts the murderous HAL’s memory banks.

Given the above, my enjoyment of ‘2001’ has never been greater.

Follow-up – just one day later:

HAL must be spinning in his grave:


Duh! What did you thing they did with it, WaPo? Click the image.

Easter visitor

Photographs

A flash of red.

It’s impossible for one’s peripheral vision not be attracted by the Cardinal, a bird of such exotic color that you simply cannot miss him.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology hosts a definitive bird site which shows the Northern Cardinal mostly inhabits the eastern half of the United States but with some migrating as far west as south eastern Arizona, and thank goodness for that.

Panny GX7, 200mm Nikkor with MFT adapter.

Apple. Con.

iPad

Don’t be fooled.

Many have accused Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, of being nothing more than a number cruncher, a man untroubled by original thoughts.

The dearth of inventions since Steve Jobs died certainly adds credence to that opinion, and Cook’s financial engineering skills are testified to by the latest iPad campaign. This campaign, as I will show, is nothing more than a confidence trick in pricing.


$329 gets you very little.

Apple targeted the education market early on with its Apple II and Macintosh computers and did well. With the Mac’s introduction in 1984, students finally saw on the screen what they could print and the desktop computing world would never be the same. Then, around the fall of 2001 when the first iPod was introduced, Apple’s focus on the education market started to blur, to a point where now few in schools use Apple hardware. The iMac is ridiculously overpriced for what it delivers and the iPad is useless.

But that does not deter Mr. Green Eyeshades from trying to revitalize what is increasingly a failed product line – the iPad. His teaser offer to schools, a whopping $30 off to students, puts the device in your child’s hands, where it is waiting to be dropped, for $299.

But Wait! There’s More!

The stock memory of 16Gb (sixteen Gb!) is a straight forward cheat for what is a memory hungry device. Evert tried using a 16Gb iPad. I have. Useless once you have an app or two running. Thus you need the upgraded memory model, so add $100. The keyboard in the iPad is useless for extended typing, the sort of thing students have to do when cranking out those pieces on Richard III and his many depredations. So add a wireless keyboard (forget trying to use a wired one) and Apple has your number for a mere $93. Want to use that Apple Pencil to draw on the screen? $90 more. (Wow! $90 for a pencil ….) Then you have to support the tablet at 45 degrees to make it remotely usable at a desk and, hey, there goes another $20 and say hasta la vista to the iPad’s vaunted portability. And you don’t want little Johnny scratching that screen now, do you, so throw in $15 for a wallet/pouch. Let’s see, that’s $617. Plus tax.

Now let’s see what the sensible parent is buying. It’s called a Chromebook, comes with a folding screen like any laptop, no case needed, has a trackpad for drawing and all you need add is a mouse. Maybe not even that. Amazon lists some 500 of these little hummers for under $500. For the most part it’s hard to spend $250. Memory use is smart so you do not need much. Oh! and don’t forget too add $10 for a mouse. The laptop comes with the Google suite of apps (spreadsheet, word processor, calendar) and why, all 650 students and 120 faculty at my son’s prep school use those apps and no one is complaining.

Apple. Con.


A typical Chromebook. Touchscreen and tablet functionality included.

Garden panorama

Photographs

Colors in context.

The previous posting focused on close-ups of the many colorful flowers in my transformed garden.

Here’s a panoramic image, showing the garden set against the McDowell Mountains and with more wild flowers visible just past the fence.


Click the image for a zoomable big version.

Snapped with the Panny GX7 and the Rokinon 7.5mm MFT fisheye at f/11, de-fished in Fisheye Hemi. The lens is quite remarkable in controlling flare, here pointed directly into the sun. Only one flare spot had to be removed from the sky.

The garden now

Photographs

Coming along.

When I moved from the third world overcrowding of the Bay Area, CA to the halcyon open spaces of Scottsdale, AZ in the fall of 2016, I made a couple of pleasant discoveries.

Homes were selling at 80% off Bay Area prices and there were dozens to choose from which met my dictates. Best of all, they invariably came with large patios and gardens.

So choice was abundant and selection easy. I settled on a home some twenty years old where the seller had expanded significant sums in remodeling the most costly areas in any home – the kitchen and master bathroom. And throw in new walnut and travertine floors throughout. I’ll take it! That seller had more money than sense as he made no return on his expenditures, the home selling, as these things do in a perfect market, at market price. The home, however, had one glaring omission. After twenty years the two previous owners had done nothing to enhance the dreary ‘builder standard’ plants when it came to landscaping. The irrigation system had more holes than a Swiss cheese and the handful of sorry looking bushes dotted the yard like so many fallen soldiers.

So after my splendid gardener, Luis, dug the whole place up, running new irrigation lines and replacing the busted solenoids on the water valves, I set to deploying the check book and procured some 75 plants all told. The focus was not just on filling empty expanses of the gravel beloved of Arizona’s developers, it was as importantly to add color. Quite how the previous owners managed to enjoy the southerly view from the covered patio resplendent with dramatic daily sunsets, while gazing over an expanse of unrelieved white gravel, beats me.

Now, some eighteen months later, those missionary efforts are beginning to pay back, and the garden is resplendent with color. My new plant loss rate was 10% – not bad – and some of those were because I had incorrectly specified the heat ranges for the locations chosen. Easily fixed.



Cape Honeysuckle.


Purple Lantana.


Bougainvillea.


Little John – a gorgeous flower of spectacular complexity.


Arizona Lemon tree. This one went into serious transplant shock
but I managed to nurse it back to life and it’s on the growth path now.


Orange Tree blossom.


A Pink Oleander, as tough as they get. They come in white, pink and red.


Fishhook Barrel cactus, a cactus which leans strongly into the sun. You really want to avoid those hooks!


Creosote bush.


Yellow Lantana. One of the only plants left from the previous owners’ depredations,
this one started blooming nicely. It’s called regular watering.


Desert Ruellia.


The technique here is interesting. I used the fine 180mm f/2.8 Nikkor at full aperture with an MFT adapter on the Panny GX7, hand held. Because the depth of field is so shallow, I moved the focus collar on the lens while banging away on the shutter release, some eight snaps per final image. In each case one of these was critically sharp, as you can see. Mild vignette added in Lightroom – the Nikkor does not vignette!