Recent Comments

1. about 20 hours ago on Calvin and Hobbes

   Is a nude allowed to wear a hat?

2. 2 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   I really like that he offers solutions and not just problems, but I felt his solutions were (1) Minimal and barely addressing the essential problems, (2) Too late, and (3) Completely unlikely to be adopted anywhere in the States.

3. 3 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   Another interesting book on the topic is “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt. But I think it may already be too late. The Fermi Paradox looks more and more bleak…

4. 3 days ago on Doonesbury

   Too many Americans have an insane belief in superheroes. Maybe it’s a problem with the English language? Biased in a weird way to the negative? We all know what crime is, so it’s easy to imagine someone who does enough crime becomes a criminal, then a supercriminal, and finally a supervillain. So there must be a superhero to balance it out?

   Why? What’s the opposite of “crime”? No easy word for the opposite concept. It’s easy to think of examples of supervillains who have killed lots of people. Some of them lived to ripe old ages, too. But superheroes? Not so much… Notwithstanding the pictures of the orange buffoon in cape and spandex.

5. 23 days ago on Doonesbury

   Actually along those lines I’m more worried about designer diseases…

6. 23 days ago on JumpStart

   Not sure where you see the AI in it? The only relevance I can think of was something IBM was working on about 20 years ago. It was called Personality Insights and I think many of the dimensions of personality had been detected algorithmically. However what I am suggesting would not be AI evaluations, but basically just tallies of human reactions.

7. 24 days ago on Doonesbury

   And it runs on the road paved with the worst intentions. Not the road to heaven, just in case you thought the opposites worked like that. The suckers who voted for it deserve it, but the rest of us are being dragged along for the ride.

   Remembering what happened last time, I hope we’ll survive four more years.

8. 24 days ago on JumpStart

   I’m guessing you mean Facebook. I am pleased to have been assassinated over there in 2022, but your reply illustrates my point in a different way.

   If I could evaluate your comment with the kind of system I am imagining, I would rate it as something like “pointless” or “irrelevant”. Not evaluating you, but just the comment as it appears to me. (“Dislike the comment, not the commenter.”) If your overall public reputation had become low enough, you might even trigger a preemptive warning when you clicked Reply: “Your reply will not be visible to the intended recipient. Are you sure you want to reply?” In that case, if you insisted your reply would get an annotation about the situation—and maybe if enough other people added positive reactions to your new reply it would become visible (to me) after all.

9. 25 days ago on JumpStart

   I know it’s a silly quest, but I’ll go ahead and ask. Maybe someone has seen such a website? The basic idea would be two icons per identity. One basically like now, where you can say whatever you want about yourself, but next to it would be a second icon that would summarize the public reactions to your posts. Basic idea is to use the reputation icon to filter out people who waste my time. Any leads? Or even questions how it could work?

10. about 1 month ago on Tank McNamara

    Shells, not the seeds.