Imagine that it’s the afternoon again when I’m finally getting to the Morning Dawdler. I do have my Afternoon Tea – Earl Grey in hand though! No cucumber sandwiches and scones though. Here are my responses to Rory’s Morning Dawdler for January 29th.
Should we fear the arrival of more progressive AI [Artificial Intelligence] or embrace it?
Fearing AI itself is pointless, it’s here and it is not going anywhere. We need to embrace it and push our political and business leaders to use the technology ethically. There is great potential for AI to solve many of the problems humans and our planet faces but we have to be the ones to make that happen. If the internet is any indication, we have a lot of work to do. The key technology of the last half of the 20th century should have ushered in a new era of enlightenment. Instead, it has become a vehicle for misinformation, scammers, trolls and some of the vilest pornography. IT has brought out some of the worst in us. Furthermore it has polarized us more than at any time in history. While we squabble over our difference the enemies of freedom (Countries like China, Russia, and Iran, or politicians like Trump or Erdoğan) exploit us and undermine democracies and our way of life.
AI learning algorithms are a large contributor to the problem. The reason the chasm between left and right is so large is because AI has eliminated the middle ground. Everything AI feeds us tries to push us to the fringes. When someone tells you they’ve never heard about issue X there is a good chance they haven’t because the algorithm may have never presented it to them. Meanwhile, your feed is filled with content on issue X leaving you flabbergasted and suspicious that the other person could be unaware. It’s hard to have civil discourse when you find it impossible to trust the other person. Sadly all it takes is a few clicks for the AI’s algorithm to start pushing you one way or the other. Sometimes even innocuously. You watch a comedian do his shtick on gun control then your feed is flooded with gun control posts. You click on a couple of the links and your feed begins to populate with more radical posts, and so on and so on… Before you know it the other point of view becomes too far removed from the algorithm’s parameters to ever show up in your feed. Your personalized feed tells you that those other issues or positions must be on the fringes because you never see them and we end up isolated in our own little boxes.
Even scarier, the Google’s, Apple’s and Meta’s of the world aren’t even sure how the algorithms work. They have taken on a life of their own but none of the AI players care because the algorithms keep lining their pockets with gold. AI will be what we let it become. If there is anyone to fear it is ourselves.
What is your proudest accomplishment?[Having children not included]
Surviving the crazy shit I did in my youth! I look back now and wonder how I’m still alive.
Are/Were you the youngest, middle, oldest or only child?
I was the oldest of three and the only boy. We didn’t always get along but I lucked out. Both my sister are great people. I wonder if they’d say the same about me?
As darkness fell away and the chamber’s light exposed her, it became evident this was no ordinary woman. Hair as red as fire framed her florid face. Green eyes revealing glimpses of anger and sadness as she peered back at the beast. She was adept at shielding those emotions, but It could reach into her soul.
She moved gracefully, despite an underlying fear. Where others burst forth stammering loquaciously, her approach was careful, reserved.
The beast would listen, but it wouldn’t matter. It was already bound to her.
Welcome to Five Word Weekly. Each Monday, I will post five random words to Greg’s Blog at 5:00am Eastern Time (Canada/United States). Your task is to craft prose or poetry using any or all of the word prompts. How you participate is entirely up to you. Your work(s) can be a single piece, a series of stand-alone projects, or an epic serial. Let the words be the inspiration that takes you wherever your imagination leads.
Here are your prompt words for the week of January 23rd, 2023:
Be creative and have fun. I look forward to reading what each of you conjures up. Don’t forget to show your fellow bloggers some love -❤️- take some time to read, like, and comment on their responses.
Earth ֍ Mother ֍ Stick ‘em up! ֍ Gim’me all you got! ֍ Take, take, take, without a thought. ֍ Hands off the entire lot, it’s bloody well mine! ֍ I don’t care, leave it scorched, barren and beyond repair. ֍ In my rocketship, I’ll climb, leaving Mother Earth behind — Ciao suckas!!!
You are bang on the money Cyranny, who would ever consider using a vending machine for such things…
Who me? What? Come on, you don’t think I’d lower myself to vending machine eyelashes. Don’t be ridiculous, these babies are all natural darling!!!
I hate to say it Cyranny but the world has gotten so shallow there ain’t nobody drowning no more!
To check out Cyranny’s original WTF? post click here or on the vending machine image above. If you are wondering, this response post does include my sexy eyes and a lot of work on Photoshop to get my vending machine lashes to fit just perfect!
Lilith fretted. She was comfortable skirting the periphery. Biding her time and studying the beast. Plotting how to best secure its loyalty. She needed it to support her primary mission.
Years had faded since she last saw him but not her memories. His captivating charm, the lost hours and waking up disoriented. His voice mocking as she stumbled dazed and half-naked into the corridor.
He was the real predator, worse than this unholy beast. Still, she clung to her script, leaving the dark recesses unprepared could prove severely disastrous.
“Show yourself,” the beast snarled. Slowly the shadow woman emerged.
I read an interesting article about those meddlesome Ukrainians spoiling Putin’s plans for world domination. It was titled ‘Ukrainians anger Putin by learning to shoot down Russian missiles and drones.’
The Daily Digest
Mr. Putin, do you know what angers Ukrainians?
You and your military invading their sovereign lands, bombing and burning their cities and towns to the ground, levelling entire communities, pillaging agriculture stores and destroying countless families by murdering their loved ones and burying them in mass unmarked graves like livestock.
If your drones and missiles are so precious maybe you should keep them out of Ukraine. Better yet, set a playdate with your generals and the oligarchy. You can play with all your toys together at a big Kremlin milieu. If Ukraine and the rest of the world get lucky it will turn out to be one explosive party!
Welcome to Five Word Weekly. Each Monday, I will post five random words to Greg’s Blog at 5:00am Eastern Time (Canada/United States). Your task is to craft prose or poetry using any or all of the word prompts. How you participate is entirely up to you. Your work(s) can be a single piece, a series of stand-alone projects, or an epic serial. Let the words be the inspiration that takes you wherever your imagination leads.
Here are your prompt words for the week of January 16th, 2023:
Be creative and have fun. I look forward to reading what each of you conjures up. Don’t forget to show your fellow bloggers some love -❤️- take some time to read, like, and comment on their responses.
Barely aware of the universe swirling around me. I am seized in the glow of such exquisitely simple beauty. Forever fixed to her coordinates, attuned to the pull of every movement. Entangled across time and in this space where everything else that ever existed falls away. Strawberry strands set against radiant bands of light, broken only by a wrinkle in the fabric of a warm smile. Every moment catalogued in the dark matter recesses of my mind. Always twenty-seven to the right and six steps behind. Never closer and still light years away.
In the night she waits for me. Playing on hazy celluloid loops projected on the horizons behind my shuttered eyes. Her vibrations bristle against the imaginary strings raised along the surface of my skin. There is no escape from the sickly sweet atmosphere that consumes us. Our bodies pulled by gravity, crashing against each other until we lay shattered in a heap.
Still, I wake alone. Our wavelengths continually overlapping as our lives run parallel to each other. I remain six steps behind, hoping that on a premonition you glance back and notice me but like the particle-wave duality of the sub-atomic, our worlds will never touch.
My dream of a life together with you has faded and I realize my love for you is unrequited. I knew the only thing left to dowas blink from existence.
I am a fat guy. There I said it. Worse yet I store it right up front. I like to think my washboard abs are toasty warm under all that extra insulation. I’m sure it has settled in some other undesirable locations like my chins, legs, and ass, but it doesn’t show there. Seriously if it is important that a guy can fill out the back of his Levi’s then I’m not the guy for you. I have no ass to speak of for a fat guy, it’s flat as a f@ckin’ board.
I am happy in my skin. I carry no emotional or self-conscious baggage around about my weight. What I do know is that carrying all of that visceral fat is unhealthy, especially for a 50-something guy with a stainless steel stent inserted into one of the arteries feeding my aging heart. I know, it could be worse. I could have required them in several arteries or worse been cut open stem to stern for bypass surgery so I am not complaining.
Back to the unhealthy bit. You see, all that visceral fat packed around my organs is worse than if it was hanging out on my arms, thighs, or cankles. I have a friend we call Baconhead because he wears his on the back of his neck like the layer of fat you’d find on a pork belly. Healthwise that’s still better than rolls of whale blubber around the gut. Fat is toxic and having it encasing your vital organs can lead to a plethora of health issues.
I don’t look like a fat guy other than the ‘beerless’ beer belly I’m sporting. I say that because I don’t drink enough beer or any other type of alcohol. For me, heavy drinking can be classified as 6 to 8 drinks per year. And other than the bulge upfront I am a fairly strong and agile dude. The problem is, now that I’ve crossed that half-century mark I can feel the extra weight in my hips, knees and ankles. It has also wreaked havoc on my sleep cycles. I have the Darth Vader mask and tire inflation unit to prove it.
Now is the time to try and set things straight. Actually, the time was some 10, 20, or 30 years ago but unless you know of a time machine that’s not an option. Hell, in my state I might block the wormhole if I tried to pass through it anyway. So now in 2023, shedding 70 pounds would be ideal but the reality I’d be happy with some modest gains. Ummm, that sends the wrong message… rephrasing… modest losses). Every pound I can part with will ease the stress on my joints and improve my health exponentially.
So how does one go about doing that? Eat better — more veggies, less meat, better portion control, and cut out the snacking between meals or at least modify the types of snacks I choose to cram into my pie hole. Ooooops, I did it again… salad hole. I need to stop eating out so much too. My wife and I have this terrible habit of grabbing fast food every time we go shopping or on road trips to visit family or friends who are going to feed us anyway. The countless times rationalized ordering something small only to drive away with a full Big Mac meal. I swear that stuff is laced with crack cocaine. Seriously though that stuff is deadly to the mid-rift but so hard to avoid when she’s less concerned about her weight. Crazy since she is diabetic but at the same time not fat in the same way I am. Will power, self-control, buzz word, buzz word, buzz word.
Intermittent fasting seems popular these days and I could stand to skip a meal or two but who knows if that voodoo really works. I do believe fasting occasionally does help reset the hunger gage in our brains but skipping meals every day is counterintuitive to everything I’ve ever been taught.
What about dieting? Keto, Atkins, South Beach, Paleo or any of the myriad of others out there. Everything they espouse seems completely unresearched hooey. All this talk of prehistoric diets that lean heavily on meat as our main food source does not seem realistic. Yes, we may not have been big farmers but I still believe wild grains and berries played a large role in our diets. I suspect present us put too much emphasis on the hunter part of the hunter/gatherer equation. It seems more realistic that our ancestors were gatherers/hunters. Primitive weaponry and only our legs for transportation would make hunting dependent on the timing of migratory herds and would expend a lot of energy in the hunting process while creating maximum risk for injury and death. Meat was likely a smaller portion of early human food consumption than current diet culture would have you believe. It makes sense that grains and berries played a substantial role in our diets. I suspect there is a linkage between similar hominid species, such as Neanderthals, who relied heavily or exclusively on meat diets and their eventual extinction.
Another option is to look at health plans that consider altering one’s entire lifestyle. We can look at the cultures where people tend to live the longest. These places are known as the blue zone and none are as well documented as the islands of Okinawa, Japan. It is the place on Earth with the greatest concentration of confirmed centenarians. Many of whom still lead full active lives. The region’s centuries old practice of recording births and deaths make it the ideal place to study the long-term effects of nutrition and lifestyle on health. What’s the point of living to 100 if you can’t remember anyone around you or you’re a vegetable locked away in some nursing home. That is not living, it’s surviving as the living dead.
Several books have been written about Okinawa and how their diet and lifestyles differ from our own. I must admit these types of plans have great intrigue. They tend to incorporate balanced and wholesome approaches to health with positive long-term outcomes. You may not take the grand prize on season xx of “The Biggest Loser” but it seems likely that you will be the big winner over the long haul. The only thing I have to question is do I really want to eat miso for breakfast every day?
What about exercise. Surely this is the magic bullet. The problem is many of these plans look to push you harder and harder. High intensity interval training (HIIT) or high volume weight lifting sound great but they lead to a greater risk of injury and burnout. If you can’t work out you end up stopping. The workout you can do consistently benefits you more than the one you can’t. So what if there was a plan you could work into ten minutes each day. Moderate exercise that allows for daily consistency but still provides maximum benefit. Many of these plans exist such as “The Simple Six”, or “The Body Weight” workout. The nice thing about these options is you can do them at home with a minimum of equipment, a small set of dumbbells, two or three sizes of kettlebells and your own body weight.
The last time I lost weight I attribute most of the success to monitoring caloric intake and walking. Never underestimate how healthy walking is for you. If only I really did look like that! On that diet, I got my weight down to 204 lbs (93 kg) and then we went to Disney World on a family vacation. Disney, well actually my own willpower and self-control put 14 lbs back on these bones in 10 days. The portions of ridiculously rich and delicious food were too much to resist. I ate everything in sight. Even walking through seven theme parks for several hours each day over seven days couldn’t compensate for the calorie and sugar-induced overdose. It didn’t help that the vacation broke my routine and the disappointment of gaining so much back so quickly meant I never started again when we got home.
This time I think I have settled on a moderate course of action that will reduce (not eliminate) the amount of meat I eat while increasing vegetable intake and including some moderate exercise options. A program that will include five or six daily exercises and incorporate cycling, rowing and lots of walking. Body Mass Index (BMI) is a simple method of determining optimal body weight. If you are fat like me you’ve probably heard your doctor mention it at some point, My BMI calculation suggests I should weigh between 180 lbs (82 kg) and 190 lbs (86 kg). As I write this post I weigh in at a whopping 270 lbs (122 kg). Yikes!!! Hence the reason it’s time to act.
Unlike last time when it was all diet and walking I am looking to add weights as part of this plan. Any weight will be manageable and in keeping with the sustainably of the program. I won’t be deadlifting hundreds of pounds of weight or running cardio until all that’s left of me is a puddle of sweat. Again think sustainable. I am also not looking to shell out hundreds or even thousands of dollars on home gym equipment. Any equipment needed will be fairly inexpensive, maybe a couple of kettlebells, a set of dumbbells and the least expensive of all, simply my own body weight.
I feel it is important to add some weight-based training this time around because as we get older we lose bone and muscle mass. Weight training is one of the best ways to ensure good bone health. They say a broken hip is pneumonia’s best friend and a death sentence to us old folk. The thought of drowning in my own mucus is terrifying so anything that keeps the bones strong and healthy is an absolute must.
Finally, I am posting this and will endeavour to provide occasional updates (do not worry I do not have any plans to turn my blog into a health nut site) because everything I’ve read says that writing it down and telling people makes you more likely to stick with it and succeed. Something about the fear of failure, blah, blah, embarrassment, blah, blah… I am not a psychologist but I’m certain it can’t hurt. Although it may have hurt you if you chose to read to this bitter end. It is a few minutes you can never get back!!!
Anyway wish me luck, send words of encouragement, or simply breeze past and forget you ever saw it. Either way, I hope the future me is healthier than the current me.
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