Episode 281: My Brother's Experiment

Play Now!

Using computers that can more or (mostly) less function as if they were "intelligent" is all the rage today, especially in business. Why hire a person when a machine can do the job? Others are goofing around with these machines as well, including my own brother. I explore some of his recent goofs in this Episode 281: My Brother's Experiment.

In this episode, I read from: my brother's email correspondence, one of which was created by an ASoL; and a web log digest of my podcast, also ASoL-compiled.

Musically, I play: KMFDM backing both John Herrman in the introduction and Shoshana Zuboff in the show. I think that is the first time I've played the Herrman intro, even though I created it years ago. Neat! Julie & Rolf & The Campfire Gang play us out with "Over the Rainbow".

Episode 280: Sky Father The Uncrumbly

Play Now!

Definitions can be difficult sometimes, especially when the word you are floundering to define doesn't really have a concrete definition, but rather a multitude of different applications and associations. It's best then to define something with double negatives, as I try to demonstrate in this Episode 280: Sky Father The Uncrumbly.

In this episode, I read a definition from my computer's quickie dictionary. I relayed from memory: a detail from a college course on Modern Jewish Philosophy; a Card Catalog article that makes the Searchie Search engine really useful; an Ed Zitron article called "The Man Who Killed [Searchie] Search" outlining how one guy destroyed two different search engines (but only for a good cause—profit!); Charles Stross's book The Family Trade; and an episode of The History of English Podcast.

I played: the voices of David McRaney and Martin Carcasson, both from Episode 331 of McRaney's You Are Not So Smart Podcast. The "great" today came, appropriately enough, from L33tMinion himself. Musically, I played: KMFDM backing a new intro with Martin Carcasson. Julie & Rolf & The Campfire Gang play us out with "Over The Rainbow".