A portion of the book stack that awaits me next to my bed.
I just finished reading a marvelous book of essays about Chicago and Chicagoans, Neil Steinberg’s You Were Never in Chicago, recommended by a friend. It was educational, engaging, and made me think a lot about what makes Chicago unique and what makes someone a Chicagoan. It also left me further behind in my planned/desired reading than I was when I started it. Continue reading
Machines that think are already among us. They’re also so far out in the future that they might never arrive.
Machines that think give us reason for great hope. They also should cause us great concern.
We might be thinking in entirely the wrong way about machines that think. Continue reading
I’m a fitness tracker. Exercise, weight, the foods I eat, how much water I drink… I track it all. It helps motivate me to get healthier.
The other day, I walked my dog to the library so I could return a book. It’s a moderate-length walk for us, a couple of miles, and was uneventful save for the fact that my phone crashed while I was using it to track my exercise. So when I got home, I had to log the walk manually. My phone still didn’t want to behave, so I fired up my laptop to use the tracking app’s web interface. What greeted me was an object lesson in usability:
