Ransen's Blog

Arthur C. Clarke's First law: " When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. " I was reminded of this as I started re-reading Goodbye Descartes by Keith Devlin (a mathematician/philosopher).  To quote from the book: " Toward the end of the 1970s the AI and natural language understanding bubbles began to burst. " Then he mentions a philosopher, Hubert Dreyfus, who wrote a book "What Computers Can't Do," saying that AI programs would never scale up to anything useful. Just a year ago I heard a philosopher on a BBC podcast declare that " there will never be driverless cars. " She did not know what to say when it was pointed out that they already exist. I started playing around with neural networks after 1997 (when Devlin's book was published). It seems I'd forgotten what Devlin and Dreyfus had taugh

"You are not normal," she said. "You make it sound like an insult," he replied.

 I saw Lindsay Kemp's Mime Company production of "Alice" more than 20 years ago in Milano. One scene has remained in my memory all these years:  As usual a still photo (or even a video) cannot convey the atmosphere. But wouldn't it be wonderful to create something as strange and magic as that?   In reality, not on a screen.

    2020-01-27 - 2020   Cowgirl - 2020     Cowgirl , detail - 2020 Veteran - 2020 Veteran , detail 2020 La Sposa - 2020 La Sposa , detail - 2020   September 2020 - 2020 September 2020 , detail - 2020 Untitled - 2020      Jamie at Todi - 2020         La Castellana - 2020 La Castellana , detail - 2020 FC - 2020   ANQHNL - 2020     ANQHNL - 2020     Untitled - 2020      2020-12-01 - 2020 2020-12-01 , detail - 2020  2020-12-10 2020-12-10 , detail EC - 2020  2020-12-13 2020-12-18 2020-12-18 , detail Drawings from 2019 and earlier drawings          

I've always liked fog, it seems magical and mysterious. I went to school through fog, here's Rowan Crescent, Bigglewade, 1975... I was reminded of that photo when I looked out of my window here in Italy and saw... Ah. The Comfort of Fog.

I am reading The Claverings by Anthony Trollope. And a fine good read it is too, sex, money, class, families. Anyway , after a while I noticed the cover... ...which has nothing to do with the contents. The painting is by William Powell Frith and is called At The Opera . I'd noticed and not noticed the binoculars. Suddenly, knowing the title, I imagined the girl looking through them at the lit stage below her, viewing the heaving bosom of the fat heroine, and the heavy makeup around the eyes of the male lead. The title of the painting had done that much. And this coincides with a decision that I've made to no longer title my drawings and "art" works. (Not that I'm in the same league as Frith.) I have an idea that titles can destroy the effect of the image, suddenly it is "understood". The viewer can pass on to the next work. But At The Opera had opened up my brain to what was beyond the painting, suggested by the painting and title. So no hard and fast

I had Covid, in my case nothing serious luckily, Covid-Light really. But the change in my sense of taste was amazing and unpleasant. I didn't lose my sense of taste, it was changed. I could still taste fruit and vegetables OK, but bread, pasta, pizza tasted like chopped up cardboard mixed with chopped up plastic. My wife made a pie for me, and I said "I can't eat that !" Beer and wine tasted odd too. It was as if someone had replaced my normal human tongue with an alien lizard tongue. The alien lizard tongue had been connected to my human brain, but/and clearly the wires did not match. At times it did not even feel like a taste, but some other sensation. Which got me wondering about how fragile our senses are. And what would be the result if a virus could affect our sense of vision or hearing or touch?  How limited is the spectrum of sensation we have, how little we know of the world "out there".