S. Evan Townsend's Blog, page 15

AI Girlfriend

An AI girlfriend adWhen I saw the movie Her  (not to be confused with She ), I thought it was entertaining and an interesting concept. If you haven't seen it, a man falls in love with his computer's voice-interface operating system.

The internet has allowed people to pull out of real life to be more engaged with people across the world. Between social media and chat apps such as Discord, and now there's VR chat apps, people can live in cyberspace and not the real world as much as they want (or can). 

Lately on Facebook, I've been seeing ads for, no kidding, an AI girlfriend. I could see this really appealing to some people. Shy, introverted types like me. (I don't need an AI girlfriend, I have a real-life wife.) 

Reminds me of this Futurama episode "I Dated a Robot" and the "hygiene movie."

Is this the future? People interacting with AI more than other humans?  There's no angst (does she love me back?). Not awkwardness, probably. Maybe also AI psychologists and AI doctors and AI lawyers. This is a disturbing trend in a way and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

How do you feel about the AI trend? Is this the future of less human-to-human interaction and more human-to-computer connections? Let me know in the comments below.

Movie Review: City Lights

I sometimes review movies long after they've come out. Usually because I don't see them until they become available on DVD.com (né Netflix). But this one might be a record. I'm going to review a movie that came out in 1931.

City Lights is a film written and directed by Charlie Chaplin. Despite the fact that movies had sound (i.e., were "talkies"), City Lights has no dialogue. The soundtrack only has music and some sound effects. Dialogue was minimal and handled by intertitles as would happen in a silent film. 

When I watch very old movies, especially comedies, I usually find them trite and corny. I recently watched The General, made in 1926, and it had that problem. In fact, I found it boring.

But with City Lights, I laughed a lot. Just shows the genius of Chaplin that his movie is funny 92 years after it was made. The story line is a little ridiculous, but that just sets up the humor. Chaplin is a tramp (as usual) who a millionaire adopts, but only when he's drunk. The tramp is in love with a blind flower girl (a woman who sells flowers on the street; it was the Great Depression, after all) and uses the millionaire's car and money to impress her. 

This movie was laugh-out-loud funny. I recommend checking it out (it is available on DVD.com).

How do you feel about old comedy movies. Do you find them boring or corny or funny. Let me know in the comments below.

The above photo is being used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act: fair usage.

The Downside of NIL

I already wrote about what I don't like a  (NIL) in NCAA sports. But there was something I didn't think about until I read an article in a paper magazine (not available online).

School boosters are using NIL as a recruitment device. A player choose a certain university to play football at because the boosters promised him $13 million in NIL money. I mean, we might as well just give up and start paying college football players like we do NFL players. Wave $13 million in front of an 18-year-old kid and he'll probably ask "Where do I sign?" (Wave $13 million in front of anybody and they'll likely ask "Where do I sign?") 

And what happens when after his first successful year at that school, he gets a better offer and uses the transfer portal to go to a new school? 

What happens when Phil Knight figures this out and manages to get huge NIL contracts with Nike for good players to go to Oregon?

This will put the best players not at the best schools for them and their football career, but at the schools whose boosters can come up with the most NIL money.

As much as I loath NCAA micromanaging sports recruiting (which it is doing less of since a Supreme Court decision), I think it should put a stop to this kind of big money dealing when it comes to 18-year-old kids. If you waived $13 million in front of me when I was 18, I would have jumped at it even if it wasn't the best thing for me.

How do you feel about this abuse of NIL? Should the NCAA put a stop to it? Let me know in the comments below.

Elevators

I must have a subconscious fear of elevators.

When I'm awake, I have no problem with elevators. I ride in them all the time.

But when I'm dreaming, elevators are scary. They never work right in my dreams. And who dreams about elevators, anyway?

A recent dream I had I was at a military facility and there were two elevators, one for officers and one for everyone else. I took the one for officers (I never was an officer in the military). It was fast. So fast that when it went down, your feet left the floor. But it was so fast, it didn't stop long enough where I wanted to get off to get out the door. So I had to go back up (my knees bent as it went so fast). I don't remember how I got off of it but then I was talking to my brother about guns in the dream.

Elevators in my dreams never work correctly. They take me to the wrong floor or the wrong part of the floor (moving sideways, apparently), or even the wrong building or a totally different place as if they were a portal of some kind. And this is a recurring theme in my dreams. I don't have elevators in every dream (lots of cars, though), but when I do, it's not going to work right.

Do you have recurring themes in your dreams? Do you think I subconsciously fear elevators? Let me know in the comments below. 

We're So Spoiled

Vinyl RecordA while back I got a song stuck in my head. The only line I remembered was "There'll be one child born to carry on, to carry on." So I googled it. I found out that it's a song called "When I Die" by Blood Sweat & Tears. (The song came out in 1968.)

I clicked on the YouTube link in Google to hear the song. And I heard seemingly random pops and clicks in the recording. Being an older fellow, I immediately realized that the YouTube video was recorded off a vinyl record and the pops and clicks are what vinyl records develop if they aren't cared for lovingly. And maybe even if. And we used to put up with it because that was the only way to enjoy music other than listen to the radio (where you didn't have a choice of what to hear).

Later cassette tapes came out but they had "tape hiss." And, yes, I'm ignoring 8-tracks.

I remember when CDs came out and I first listened to them and they were amazing. No pops and clicks and the music was as clear as anything. The first CD I bought was Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits because it had "Money for Nothing" on it. I also bought it on cassette so I could listen to it in my car.

CDs lasted a good long time (maybe 20 years or so) before digital music came out on iPods. Now we can download music or stream it. But it all sounds good compared to what we used to have. We are spoiled these days.

And yes, I know, some people are going back to vinyl. Don't as me why.

Do you remember vinyl records? Or 8-tracks? Let me know in the comments below.

Name, Image, Likeness

The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) has, in its wisdom, allowed college sports players to market their name, image, or likeness (NIL) for money. This is a big change from before when the NCAA wanted to protect the amature status of their players to the extent that buying them a round of golf or giving them a fruit basket was enough to get the University of Washington Huskies into trouble for "recruiting violations."

The NCAA is, for some reason, the unquestioned, all-powerful leader of all college and university intercollegiate sports. Never quite understood why.

Not sure how much I like this NIL stuff. One Gonzaga University basketball player has done multiple ads for a Spokane Indian casino. The ironic thing is, Gonzaga is a Jesuit school and the player is working with a casino.

I suppose this is a way for players to make a little money. But in some cases, it could be a lot of money. Just depends on how marketable the player is. I've heard of college sports players hiring agents for this purpose. 

Also, for years the NCAA and the universities/colleges have used the players' NIL for promotional purposes without compensation to the player. Now maybe they will have to.

But I see large possibilities for abuse and exploitation of young students. This is an experiment that will have to be borne out.

How do you feel about NIL? Does it worry you or not? Let me know in the comments below.

Kids These Days

I recently visited my smart, cute, amazing grandson who is three years old. And I marveled at how he knows how to use a tablet computer and to ask his father to play the "soundtrack" from a movie (because he likes the songs but the movie itself scares him). His father can pull up lots of kid-friendly videos on YouTube on his television, too (apparently there's a kids' YouTube; who knew?). 

And I thought about when I was three years old. Now, I don't specifically remember much from when I was three years old (except the John F. Kennedy funeral that I came across one day on television and thought it was a boring parade). But I do know that my electronic entertainment options were two black and white television channels. I lived in a rural area of Idaho and there were, literally, only two channels. (This was long before cable television.) I think we had an antenna on the roof, not rabbit ears.

And I, as the youngest, was the remote.

We did, occasionally, get to go see a movie at the theater. Disney movies, mainly. I didn't know what a "soundtrack" was until I bought the soundtrack (on two vinyl records) for Star Wars.

We had two channels until early 1970s when we got a PBS station. Then in 1976, we got a third commercial station. Cable television came at about the same time. I remember my parents being unhappy that HBO was going to show R-rated movies. My thought was, "Don't get HBO, it's an extra cost anyway."

My parents didn't get a color television until about 1968. Computers? Tablets? Smart phones? All many decades away. 

Kids today are growing up in a completely different environment than I did. They have access to all sorts of thing both good and bad. Parents need to keep an eye on what their kids are doing.

Did you grow up under different circumstances? Which did you think was better, then or now? Let me know in the comments below.

Robots Writing Blog Posts

I've been seeing the ad to the left on Facebook a lot. Blog posts written by robots! That's interesting.

I try to write a blog post once a week. Sometimes I get ahead of myself and have a few lined up. 

I can't imagine what a blog post written by AI would look like (probably less spelling errors). And I wonder what it costs (I'm sure it's not free). On their website (jasper.ai), They claim to have 3,000+ 5-star reviews. And they say, "Artificial intelligence makes it fast & easy to create content for your blog, social media, website, and more!"

There's an offer for 10,000 free words. But then they get into plans, the cheapest of which is $40 a month. But they try to upsell you to "Boss" level with is $82/month.

I'd almost like to try it, but I don't want to spend the money. 

Interestingly, an AI expert says that 90% of online content could be produced by A.I. by 2025. Which isn't far away.

And then there's ChatGPT, an AI chat bot. It's supposed to do amazing things. I just went there and was told it was "over capacity."

What do you think about blog posts written by AI or ChatGPT? Is this the future? Let me know in the comments below.

Charging More for Good Seats

When people wait in line for something, that's an inefficiency in the economy. It's a cost the consumer pays that the seller doesn't profit from. 

One example is waiting in line for movies to try to get good seats. I remember waiting in line for two hours to see Lord of the Rings: Return of the King in Seattle. I still got lousy seats because, apparently, I didn't start waiting in line early enough. 

My idea to reduce this inefficiency was have movie theaters charge more for opening days and then have the price of tickets reduced as the film was out more. That would mean people who really wanted to see it early would pay more to do so, and not have to wait in line as much if at all. 

Now, AMC Theaters is trying another idea: charge more for good seats.

This has met with universal derision on the news programs I've watched. Nobody seems to like this idea.

But I do. I'd gladly pay more for a good seat so I didn't have to wait in line for two or more hours. (Full: disclosure: the last time I waiting in line for a movie was Return of the King.) This would eliminate an inefficiency in the economy. To me it's a win-win. You don't want to pay more for a good seat,  you can sit in a not-so-good seat.

I would change this a bit, though. I would stop this pricing once the movie has been out for a while and there are no longer lines. When I show up for a movie and there's almost no one else there, I wouldn't want to pay more for a good seat.

What do you think of this idea? Good idea or bad? Let me know in the comments below.

(I put this under "science" because economics is called "the dismal science.")

"Disposing" of Metallic Sodium

Metallic SodiumThere's a video on YouTube of Army engineers "disposing" of metallic sodium by dropping it in a lake in Eastern Washington after World War II. There's no mention of why the military had so much metallic sodium. I wonder if it had to do with the nuclear reactors built at the Hanford Site in south-central Washington. Liquid sodium metal is used as a coolant in more modern nuclear reactors.

The lake was Lake Lenore which is just off Highway 17 south of Grand Coulee and north of the town of Soap Lake. 

Watch the video, it's interesting.

When the sodium hits the water, it reacts violently as the metal gives up an electron easily (it has only one in its outer valence) to the water (which is normally not a very reactive substance).

The sodium and water reaction makes sodium hydroxide and hydrogen gas. Because the reaction is very exothermic, the hydrogen gas can ignite to react with the oxygen in the air to make more water. Here is the balanced formula of the sodium reaction (I can't do subscripts):

2Na(s) + 2H2O → 2NaOH(aq) + H2(g)

The (s) means "solid," the (aq) means "aqueous," and the (g) means "gas."

The hydrogen plus oxygen reaction looks like this:

2H2(g) + O2(g) → 2H2O

Interestingly, chlorine has only seven electrons in its outer valence. It wants eight to be stable. This is why chlorine is very reactive, too. When you combine it with sodium, it gains an electron from the sodium and they are both stable. This makes sodium chloride or table salt.

These days, Lake Lenore is stocked with fish and is a popular recreational spot. 

What do you think of the Army's method of disposal of metallic sodium. Let me know in the comments below.