- Still reading that Superintelligence book. It’s still good, although he occasionally strays into some territory that seems oddly speculative, even by AI standards. Right now I think the biggest struggle is simply getting people to have this conversation. It’s like a bus with seven billion people is driving full-throttle toward a cliff and nobody knows it, and whenever you bring it up, everyone’s like “What are you talking about? We’ve never gone over a cliff before so I’m sure it won’t happen now.” (To be fair, there are like eighteen other cliffs on the horizon besides this one, parts of the bus are already on fire, and nobody’s quite sure where the steering wheel is.)
- I’m collaborating with Esteemed Herr Author Benjamin Trube on a project he came up with, a Babylon 5 podcast. My prior podcast experience has been limited to, um, not listening to them, so this is something quite different for me. Basically, we watch a new B5 episode every two weeks or so, then record ourselves talking about it for an hour. We’ve recorded two episodes so far but haven’t inflicted anything on the interwebs yet. More as it develops.
- I’ve started working on a Buffy webcomic. As with the B5 podcast, nothing is online yet, but I’ve created seven strips so far, and a “library” of files to make a bunch more. I need another project like I need a black hole in my head, so I’m not going to self-impose any deadlines right now. If and when I get a decent-sized backlog, I may start posting them once a week. If I lose interest, I’ll just post the ones I’ve created already. So far, though, it’s been a lot of fun to work on.
- Evan is crawling, crawling, crawling everywhere. We babyproofed our kitchen so hard last weekend. Babies can be a pain sometimes, but man, that little guy is friggin’ amazing.
- Betsy, if you’re reading this, I love you! 😀 (If you’re not reading this, I still love you, but you’ll have to hear about it some other way. That can probably be arranged.)
- A lot of stuff in the news — hurricanes, the Las Vegas shooting, Trump’s assorted stupidities, twelve million other things. I follow it all pretty closely and I think about it a lot, but I typically don’t have much to say that hasn’t been said in twelve million other places already. If you’re interested in my take on a particular topic, though, you’re welcome to leave a comment. In the meantime, I support the ACLU, try to figure it all out, and hope for the best.
- Haven’t seen Star Trek: Discovery yet. Kinda burned out on Trek, but who knows?
- New movie called Annihilation coming out next year. Trailer looks pretty sweet. Even sweeter: It stars Natalie Portman (one my favorite actors), and is written and directed by Alex Garland, who also wrote and directed Ex Machina (one of my favorite movies).
- I’m planning to return to Crane Girl once I finish a smaller, family project, which should be done by Christmas.
- A bit of a lull in the editing at the moment. Freelance work tends to be feast-and-famine. Lately the famines have been shorter, which is nice. I’ve been using the break to get some other things done.
- Betsy and I have been going to church more regularly over the past couple months. Although I’m agnostic, attending church is enlightening and useful in a number of ways. I tend to think that nonbelievers should spend at least a little time in church, for the same reason that believers should spend at least a little time listening to atheists.
- We switched to a cheaper trash service, which allowed us to add the savings to our monthly Doctors Without Borders donation. Calling them to increase our auto-payment amount makes me a special kind of happy.
- I have a ton of ideas for other blog posts floating around in my cerebrum, but time always seems to be tight. I’m not sure that time actually is tight, but it always seems that way. I do want to write at some point about what “logical thinking” really means, and why it’s so hard, and what its limits are. Although logic and science are two of humanity’s supreme achievements, I think we “rational” types often get an inflated idea of what logic is capable of, and we sometimes undervalue intuition. But more on that later (hopefully).
- Happy Thursday!
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Brian D. Buckley 
I think what’s sometimes missed in discussions of logic and intuition is what they have in common. People tend to focus on the differences, for good reasons, but the similarity is that they are both ways of determining answers, but they only work (well) if you use them starting with things that are true. Logic, even really good logic, based on untrue information will get you into a mess. That’s one of the limits you refer to, and I think it’s true of intuition, too.
Absolutely. And even when your starting information is true, it’s still easy to misunderstand or oversimplify what you think you know.