Fog. After driving twelve hundred miles from the Wet Mountain Valley of Colorado to the White River Marsh Wildlife Area in Wisconsin, we looked out at the grey cotton wool of the fog and felt distinctly uneasy. We’d come to…
Yearly Archives: 2014
OPERATION MIGRATION
Posted in Chat Tagged with: Brooke Pennypacker, Eastern Flyway, extinction, Joe Duff, Operation Migration, Princeton Wisconsin, Sandhill Cranes, Tom Schultz, Whooping Crane Festival, Whooping Cranes
THE NESTING DOLL
Years ago at a yard sale I found a nesting doll that was on sale because the smaller nesting dolls that went inside her were gone. Only the largest one of the set remained, a cheerful looking figure in a…
Posted in Chat Tagged with: equal pay, gender issues, matriarchal societies, men, patriarchal societies, women, yard sales
SPINNING STRAW INTO GOLD AND OTHER IMPOSSIBILITIES
In the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale, after the miller boasts to the king about his daughter’s many amazing talents, he ends his proud statements by saying, “She can even spin straw into gold.” Well, this of course caught the king’s attention…
Posted in Chat Tagged with: Alexander the Great, condominiums, gold, Gordian knot, renovation, Rumpelstiltskin, space problems
THE MACHINES AREN’T COMING; THEY’RE ALREADY HERE
I watched my granddaughter graduate from high school yesterday. I was in my robe and slippers with my morning cup of sweet coffee still in hand. She and I were physically separated by about one hundred twenty miles but streaming…
Posted in Chat Tagged with: AI, Artificial Intelligence, automation, Charles T. Rubin, customer service, drones, e-commerce, Joseph Weizenbaum, retail therapy, smartphone, streaming video
CATCH-22 FOR NO REASON
Sometimes the simplest effort to interact with a large company to solve a minor problem turns into an ordeal that tests the concept of free enterprise. Such was my encounter with AT&T. The story begins in November when we went…