Damned Fool Assumption
Yesterday, a notification arrived from academia.edu offering to fill in possible “gaps” in the citations of sources for the papers I’ve uploaded. Maybe it referred to all the papers, or maybe to just the...
What’s a bevatron?
I just posted a review of Evelyn McDonnell’s The World According to Joan Didion on Goodreads. Wondering what image might serve to “illustrate” the review here, I thought of the centrality Didion claims for...
A Premonition from the Rubiayat
The idea that the whole world is being “shattered to bits” and remade “better” may seem fairly close at hand these days. But if the means of actually engineering such a feat is very...
Don’t trust a teacher who…
A few weeks ago, I set out to learn something about volvelles, a legacy of the medieval period consisting of moveable paper or card circles that rotate to expose or conceal specific information. It...
Chatbot as Model
I don’t find it easy to think of a chatbot as a model. I’m sure it’s worth the effort, though, if for no other reason than to face up to that very resistance. They...
Medieval app
I have a new enthusiasm for volvelles (and yet another suspicion that I would have made a happy medievalist). A volvelle is a paper thing made of moveable layers, or more exactly, several circular...