First Blog

  A few quotes from outstanding women are good for women and are great for everyone.  "You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement..." --- Marie Curie "Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love." --- Jane Austin "Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness." --- Anne Frank  "I believe that the most important single thing, beyond discipline and creativity, is daring to dare." --- Maya Angelou quotes "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." --- Maya Angelou "I know of no single formula for success. ..." --- Queen Elizabeth "I beg you take courage; the brave soul can mend even disaster. ..." --- Catherine the Great "Women, like men, should try to do the impossible. .."  Amelia Earhart "Never

 Often, I'm asked by people major in physics, a horrific choice for many. So, I cooked up the main reasons, though some by seem a little absurd, though correct for some.   You really want to understand physical reality and understand how the models explain it. You have problems with the physical world compared with the spiritual world. That is, your beliefs are challenged. You absolutely love physics and feel there is no other subject for you. You ultimately want to study the origins of the universe and wish to understand all the theories extant. You get a scholarship in physics. Your parents give you three choices of what to major in, physics, physics, and physics. You do physics because you want others to think you’re smart. Finally, you doubt your intelligence and want to take on a difficult subject simply to master it, and thereby prove to yourself your intelligence. P.S. I was a physics major, but changed to math in grad school. I never felt I understood physics. 

 In the photo below, you see 62,000 punch cards which could contain 5mb (not giga) of data back in 1966. These are the old punch cards, the original storage medium of information back then. This amounts to one short tune (uncompressed), one picture on your iPhone, or a long novel.

  Int uition. It is sort of like a back stage brain, working on problems you’ve left pending. It shoots ideas up to you of the sort “What if this? Or What if that?   Most of the time it’s unimportant, but sometimes it scores big. That is why intuition is so important, for suggesting ideas that haven’t fallen naturally as you’ve worked on the problem.  Sometimes, after working long and hard, you hear it offering up an idea as if to say, “Try this, stupid.” Intuition - I Is that patient caretaker in your mind, Helping you with problems big and small, Guiding you with family and friends, Giving insights when needed most, and Warning you off the wrong path. As a trusted friend, Intuition is not always right, but It pays to listen, if not to obey, Intuition II Intuition is something like a powerful App. With access to all your data, Memories, acuity, biases, beliefs, knowledge, Some hidden from conscious access. Intuitions contain all of these, but Insights hopefully surprise,

 

  Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) a new religion? I wouldn't go so fare as envisioning AI as a religion, but I would support a massive advance toward intellectual dependency, much like an addictive drug. Knowledge workers will be replaced; Medical diagnoses will first be within the "circuits" of machine learning (cf. ELIZA*). Teaching will become an AI learning App. And many more. Here is a litmus test for AI addiction, and in particular for tools like ChatGPT. When the colleges begin offering courses on how to use these tools, the dependency becomes revealed as firmly entrenched. *   ELIZA  is an early  natural language processing  computer program  created from 1964 to 1966  at the  MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by  Joseph Weizenbaum . It was amazingly successful. Patients were convinced they were talking to a real person. And that was 60 years ago.