“Don’t Drink and Drive: You might hit a bump and spill your beer.” This bumper sticker is a perfect microcosm of our ape brain absurdity. The same absurdity of using phones while driving. When a friend first told me about a new law banning texting while driving, I thought it was a joke. “Are they […]
With ChatGPT Funny, I always thought of myself as having artificial intelligence. Maybe it’s because people often say to me: “Come on, man. Get real!” But I needed a quick column, and I heard great things about ChatGPT, a bot that processes language to create human-like dialog, so I signed up and typed into ChatGPT: […]
Recently Trending
More from Montecito
Our lives are largely determined by encounters, whether in arranged meetings, or by the whims of chance. I wrote this little poem many years ago, when I was still unhappily single: All my life I’ll cherishSo much I can’t forget –The things that didn’t happen,And the girls I never met. There have, of course, been […]
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” This quote by George Bernard Shaw provided the title of a wonderful film about the heroic life of Ralph Nader, An Unreasonable Man. How do you respond when you […]
One of the many wise old sayings which my father was fond of quoting was itself about age and wisdom, and indeed reeks of both of them. It says: Experience keeps a dear school – but fools will learn in no other. And what exactly does keeping a dear school mean? Here, “dear” means the […]
Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be the greatest innovation since the invention of fire or the wheel, according to recent talk. It may also be our last invention. I first became aware of the amazing potential of Artificial Intelligence as a teen, ironically, when I read a book by Berkeley philosophy professor Hubert Dreyfus called What […]
How big is it? Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Sometimes it matters a lot more than it should. I’m sorry to say that in most cases, bigger means better. That’s why bigger houses, cars, and diamonds generally cost more. But there has lately been a trend in the opposite direction. Now that so many devices are […]
“Everyone is basically the same” is how many of us were raised. The intention was to see our commonality, rather than our differences. But, what if we truly see the world in very different ways? It’s as if we are alien species, trying to live together. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has tried to help us […]
One of the ways we celebrate important occasions is by eating. Festivals, whether religious or secular, are times for joyful observance of something worth remembering, and tend to be annual, since the regular solar cycle makes a good periodic reminder. I grew up in a Jewish family, but also in a Christian community, and each […]
Read more...
It finally arrived! Freighter delays, they said. Lack of experienced labor. Cost overruns. Sound familiar? But a giant truck pulled up in front of our condo today and delivered my IKEA easy-to-assemble, all-parts-included, fully-illustrated-plans-provided… ark. That’s right! I’m going to save the world from the great flood! Or, at least a few hundred people from […]
The recent failures, negotiated bailouts, and buyouts of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, First Republic Bank, and Credit Suisse are a reminder of how life is different for different classes of people. “Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor” is how Michael Harrington described it in his 1962 book, The Other America. Detroit […]
In our universe, things that are up are generally positive, and the reverse is true of the downs. Heaven is somewhere above, together with everything that’s at the top of the charts (except your temperature and blood pressure). But I’m sorry to say that “our universe” reaches no farther than our little planet and its […]
Communities all over California are struggling to meet a mandate to build more housing. This dates back to a 1969 “Housing Element” law, now in its sixth round. The current mandate is for 3.5 million new units by the year 2025. The state is far short of meeting that goal and local governments face penalties […]
Judging from the number of words in our language containing “press” in some form (at least 545), it appears that we’re all, very often, experiencing some form of pressure, from the air pressure in our tires to the blood being pressed through our circulatory systems. To start at the bottom, there’s “Depression,” which nearly always […]
