The typical discussion I have with millennials regarding AI usually involves some reference to the fact that they grew up with movies about AI domination run amok. The great films on that theme start with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) when HAL 9000 locks the crew out. Of the spaceship to save the mission. It’s the first real machine over man movie moment. The classic is the whole.Terminator line-up starting with The Terminator (1984), then…
In 1975 when I started in business school, directly following my undergraduate years, I think I owned one blue blazer and a pair of blue/grey/cranberry plaid pants. I recall having to wear those as a senior since I was the President of a large student organization and was called on to speak several times before groups of corporate recruiters and alumni. No one expects an Arts & Sciences student majoring in economics and government to…
I’m in Lake Las Vegas for my first night of our Cinco de Mayo ride from San Diego to Utah. Given my love for the topography of Utah, it has always struck me that the universe wants me to pay a handsome price for getting to and from there. When I lived in New York, that involved a four hour flight back-and-forth. Now that I live in San Diego that price has to do with…
There are funny little scenes in many movies that go largely unnoticed by many, but catch the eye or ear of a few of us discerning aficionados of film and catchy titles. One of those little ditties is in the movie As Good As It Gets starring Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt and Greg Kinnear. At one point Nicholson, who plays an OCD author, is hesitantly driving Kinnear down to Baltimore from New York City for…
The novel by E.L. James, 50 Shades of Grey is a 2011 erotic romance novel that follows Anastasia Steele, a college student, and Christian Grey, a wealthy young businessman, as they enter into a complicated relationship involving a contract he proposes to her. That contract is what is called a BDSM contract standing for Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission and Sadism & Masochism. The core principles of a modern BDSM community operates on the…
A classic! The 2000 Coen Brothers film about channeling the general sentiment of exasperation. The movie is about a Depression-era Odyssey retelling that’s set in Mississippi, with George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson as escaped convicts on a rambling road trip. The Homeric parallels are playful but genuine with the Cyclops, the Sirens, and Tiresias (the blind prophet) all making appearances in transformed form. And the soundtrack, is arguably as important as the…
Life has a way of happening in waves and right now we are in a travel planning wave. Note that I said travel planning, not travel. We are actually having a pretty light travel year due to modest planning and unforeseen changes which have caused us to cancel on two trips. That has left us with one foreign trip in September, one foreign trip in early 2027 and then a whole bunch of conversations which…
The thing about living out here in San Diego is that the weather is, simply perfect. I just asked Claude where the best place to live in the United States is in terms of comfort. Claude went through the preference Q&A needed to answer that sort of question, asking me about what sort of temperature I preferred (mild 60’s-70’s rather than warm 70’s-80’s) and what I wanted to avoid the most (humidity rather than cold/snow)…
As I mentioned before, my favorite painting is one that hangs in our living room directly over the etagere that I bought in Toronto 36 years ago. That etagere is home to all the most interesting and emblematic curios and artifacts that I and we have collected over the last seventy years. To be fair, some of them were really collected by my mother during her travels across Latin America as well, but they have…
As a continuation of my physical trauma of last week, I will start by declaring that after a week of my new thumb reality, I have seen some minor improvement in the strength of my left thumb, but it ain’t back to anywhere near 100%. I am using a very simple test every day to track the situation and since I do not have any strength calipers, I am using my ability to touch each…