Search results for query: *

Professor Emily Bender at the University of Washington is a recognized AI researcher who has much to say about the fearmongering of Artificial Intelligences technologies in the press and on social media. This fearmongering has been popularized for a long time in science fiction and the movie...

My contention here is that the Colorado web designer did not have standing and even included false information in her filing to make her case. IOW, this case was concocted specifically to go right to the Supreme Court and allow the ideological wing of the Court to strike down the Colorado law...

Here is the news story from The Hill: Rudy Giuliani sued for $10 million over sexual assault allegations And here is the official complaint: 650033_2023_Noelle_Dunphy_v_Rudolph_W_Giuliani_et_al_COMPLAINT_10.pdf This is a fairly explosive lawsuit, not just for the charges against Giuliani...

Harvard Emeritus law professor, Lawrence Tribe, has come up with a unique argument on how Biden might resolve the debt limit conundrum. Congress has lawfully ordered the president to spend money that requires him to incur debt. Congress also has a law that requires the president not to pay...

It's fair to say that we all bloviate from time to time in online forums like our own. Our egos get the best of us, and we sometimes like to impress others with our knowledge, cleverness, and importance. This can get really toxic at times as people seek to promote or defend their online...

The Chinese spy balloon scandal is making a lot of people angry. The Biden administration doesn't want to shoot it down, for fear of the damage it could cause when the large array of spy equipment underneath it strikes the ground. Republicans see that as a sign of weakness and are making a lot...

I am currently reading an interesting book by Yale historian, Timothy Snyder, called Bloodlands. This book is about the mass murders that occurred in the Soviet and German empires between WWI and WWII. He defines the bloodlands as encompassing primarily Poland, the Baltic republics, Belarus...

The air quality in Seattle now ranks 5th as the worst in the world. Wildfires in the Cascades have flooded our neighborhood with smoke, and I can't really breath outdoors. Our garage is pretty smoky, too, but the air in the house seems not too bad. People over 65 are advised not to go out...

The CDC recently removed most health safety restrictions on cruise ships, and the cruise industry rushed to take advantage of that. No more masks for passengers, and even vaccination requirements are being dropped where port destinations do not require them. Although my wife and I have never...

Popular media and the press often spread misleading and false information about the state of the art in the field of Artificial Intelligence. To most people, AI is taken as some kind of magical technology that will ultimately scale up to true intelligence in very short order. This has been...

We have seen how incensed Republicans have become over Critical Race Theory, which is seen as a left wing conspiracy that is even taught in our schools. Recently, we have seen the rise of Replacement Theory (aka 'Great Replacement'), which apparently was part of the inspiration for the Buffalo...

Sinn Féin is now the majority party in Northern Ireland. Although it won't happen anytime soon, the question of Northern Ireland doing a reverse Brexit is now becoming serious. Irish nationalist Sinn Fein earns historic Northern Ireland election win

The Elements of Style by Strunk and White is one of the most sacred texts in the canon of prescriptive grammar. For those interested in a flaming review of it, linguist Geoffrey Pullum will be giving a lecture at George Washington University in Washington DC on May 10: Pullum is a great...

Population centers contain the infrastructure that manufactures military hardware and allow a country to conduct warfare. Hence, they are military targets. Nuclear warheads make city-sized holes in the earth cause damage that leads to equal or larger numbers of deaths among those that survive...

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has shaken his staff at Ukrainian Nazis and endorsed Russia's righteous invasion, which will strike a blow against the liberal countries of the West who have been pressuring Ukrainians to allow "gay parades" in Ukraine. He had been staying silent on the subject...

I'm not a big fan of sports or the Olympics, but I recognize the importance that people around the world place on Olympic medals. The games can be seen as helpful in establishing a global human community, but I personally find it difficult to imagine why it matters that one country or another...

In my self-appointed capacity as IIDB's linguistic policy advisor, I feel duty-bound to explain the mangled attempts of US journalists to pronounce the new politically correct spelling and pronunciation for Ukraine's capital city. The old spelling "Kiev" and pronunciation--"kee-yev"--was based...

What is Eliminative Materialism? Most of us infidels are materialists and physicalists. That is, we believe that mental states are a property of physical brain activity and that there is no separate spiritual plane of existence. IOW, immaterial spirits such as gods and ghosts don't really...

The US government and allies have finally managed to hit back at cyberterrorists gangs operating out of Russia (with the apparent blessing of the Russian government). In this case, they focused on REvil, which had attacked a software management company in the summer. Not only did they obtain a...

I voted against electing this Republican, Kim Wyman, for Secretary of State, because I did not want a Republican to run the election machinery in our state. To be fair, she has been a fair election official, and she even defended our all-mail voting system against Trump's lies in 2020. To be...