Saturday, November 17, 2018

Today was great!

Deb and I went for a walk at the LLELA, the Lewisville Lake Environmental Learning Area. It's a great little area that has walking paths, the outlet from the lake and a cool 1850 homestead you can tour.
We got lucky today and there were period characters there to explain the construction of the buildings and other things.
True to form, Debbie knew someone who one of the characters there also knew. What followed was a discussion about bees, water color painting and friends. I stood by and listened. This happens everywhere we go. And it's totally awesome.
Here are some of the pix from the day.
Enjoy.





Thursday, November 8, 2018

Fall is here and winter is coming!

58 degrees and cloudy! Texas Autumn will be short this year and we could slide right into Winter in a few weeks!

Looks like the monsoon season has finally passed North Texas by and is allowing Autumn's cold breath to arrive. We've had over 25 inches of rain over the normal this year and the year's not over! My grass is SOOO green!!

On the writing front:

Now that 'Arlo and Jake: Deep Cover' is finally out I'm starting to explore some short stories to hopefully sell to Analog, Asimov or some other SciFi/Fantasy magazines.

I just started this one, 'Vicimus', which is Latin for 'We Won' or 'We Conquered'. It's an exploration of what happens when AI's are advanced enough to emulate their human builders. Will they behave 'better' than us, will they have the same strengths and flaws or will they behave in a totally unexpected way?

Artificial or Machine Intelligence is a wonderful concept to think about. Can you have 'intelligence' without the human brain? I my opinion is that all these ads for Microsoft and Google 'AI' are false advertising,  just the desire to be first to use the phrase as a marketing gimmick. Whether the systems pass the Turing test or not, to be 'intelligent' to me means the ability to think independently, to learn on your own and to be creative outside the everyday experience.

I have several other short stories I want to write, we'll see if I can focus enough to pick just one to work and get it published! ;-)