Social Justice in action

Yesterday, I thought I had my mic on while I was typing furiously on OneNote while my dad was telling one of his social action stories from Greenwood, Mississippi, where Bob Moses, a leader of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, was at a church organizing black congregationists to submit protest ballots at the courthouse. The national press corps had surrounded the courthouse, expecting a scene. The sheriff had threatened to jail anyone who tried to submit a protest ballot. My dad, wearing a black suit, black shoes, and a black briefcase, negotiated  with the Sheriff. "You're one of Bobby Kennedy's boy?" the sheriff drawled. My dad smiled. "Why do you have that camera?"

I won't use it if I don't need it."

The sheriff agreed to let the parishioners submit their protest votes as long as there wasn't any trouble.

Nothing happened, to the disappointment of the national press.

But my mic wasn't on. Very frustrating.

Wired for Story

I finished listening to Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (Unabridged) by Lisa Cron, narrated by Wendy Tremont King on my Audible app. Try Audible and get it free: https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B0767ML4NK&source_code=AFAORWS04241590G4

As someone who has dreamed of becoming a writer my entire life, I've started and stopped many times. Why? I'm a reader. I have writing skill, I pay attention to my surroundings, I have voice, I understand philosophy as well as anyone. What I have always wondered about is how to write commercially, how to get paid!

Lisa Cron, in Wired for Story: a Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Senrence, presents as a professional editor,  an industry insider, and I have little doubt that if I utilize the lessons from her case studies, and avoid the pitfalls, I too can realize that lifetime goal.

As New Years Day 2019 approaches, four years before Kurzweil's singularity, and my 60th birthday, I could use a little fire in my belly, as well as a reason to suspend disbelief. What the Hell!

What we wanted

What we wanted to say was left unsaid,
Volumes encoded in a single thread.
Hearts were broken, times were lost.
Survival came at a bitter cost.

Possibilities of better times
Littered the avenues of our minds.

Matters of state beyond our control,
Unpredicted by political polls,
Caused us to wonder,
What was our role?

Possibilities of better times
Scattered red, yellow, and brown,
Like leaves

Two days before the votes were counted
We waited in silence.
Resistance 1.0, chapter closed.

Picador

Picador, picador
Red flag, red flag
Angry bull skewered
Matador gored.

Dog days

The pulse of cicadas whizzes faster and faster, reaches a climax, and fades away.

Gators bask for audiences on hazy summer days.

Spanish moss drapes from loblolly dinosaur legs

.

Turtle congregations

Send hosannas across circular arrays.

Radio signals crackle and die.

Darkness descends.

Lost in translation, news bends to the political lens.

Benny & Dolly ride shotgun in my Chevy S10,

On Putin's puppet strings, the president defends.

How Emotions Are Made

I finished listening to How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Unabridged) by Lisa Feldman Barrett, narrated by Cassandra Campbell on my Audible app. Try Audible and get it free: https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B01NA0TG25&source_code=AFAORWS04241590G4

How Emotions Are Made addresses a matter that is central to learning in a manner that forces us to radically rexamine some of our most persistent biases about the brain. Most of us have learned a faulty model of the brain and have adopted a classical view - the triune brain - that, as the author shows, does not hold up to scientic scrutiny. The search for blobs in the brain that contain specific fingerprints of emotion has yielded a surprising result: none exist. Instead, the author shows how the predictive brain constructs conclusions based on steady streams of inputs from throughout the entire network, consistent with body budgets, concepts, culture, and other factors.

The Innovators: a counterpoint

I finished listening to The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Unabridged) by Walter Isaacson, narrated by Dennis Boutsikaris on my Audible app. Try Audible and get it free: https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B00M9KA2ZM&source_code=AFAORWS04241590G4

Walter Isaacson is my favorite biographer, but in The Innovators Isaacson departs a little from his focus on a singular genius, in order to extract the zeitgeist of the digital revolution.  In brush strokes evoking the genesis, development, & future of the digital revolution, Isaacson presents an argument for the primacy of symbiotic relationships, teamwork, and evolutionary bootstrapping in fostering the innovation and spread of digital tools that will continue to augment human capabilities instead of the nightmare of robots replacing us.

Isaacson contextualizes the philosophies, breakthroughs in hardware, software, networking, and Artificial Intelligence , as well as individuals and teams who have made significant contributions. He presents a view skeptical of visions of Terminators and super intelligence, and emphasizes more of a human-machine partnership, with humanity providing the creativity, hopes, and dreams to the partnership moving forward.

Isaacson only briefly addresses the premise of futurists such as Ray Kurzweill, Yuval Noah Hariri, and Max Tegmark, that within a few decades a highly competent super intelligence will evolve, sparked by advances in processing power and the reverse engineering of the human brain. Because of this limitation, Isaacson 's work shoukd be supplemented. Life 3.0 presents a plausible scenario in the first chapter of a superintelligence escaping a pandora's box that is must reading. How To Create a Mind provides a layman's technical overview of the development of AI alongside the reverse engineering of the human brain. Homo Deus, similar to Life 3.0, places the development of AI in an biological and post-biological evolutionary context.