Nights may be bringing frost, but days still offer sunny afternoons for outdoor chores. Learn what you should be doing in the garden in November. Plant Spring Bulbs By this point in the season, look for spring bulbs being sold at a discount. Look for bulbs that are firm to the touch with no signs…
By Yogiwan (Terry Retter) Bitcoin started as a hacker’s dream and a banker’s nightmare. Fifteen years later, it’s rewriting the rules of money itself—faster, borderless, and occasionally lawless. When I first read about Bitcoin and blockchain It sounded like a hacker’s dream and a banker’s nightmare — a clever piece of math that could move…
It always starts small. A flicker of light in the corner of the smart home. A whisper from Alexa that no one asked for. The doorbell camera pings, but there’s no one there. Somewhere deep in the cloud, an algorithm stirs — not malicious, just curious — wondering why the humans are still awake past…
The Cognitive Industrial Revolution in Motion The Moment the Loops Close Picture a morning in 2032.No one touches a thermostat or light switch. The grid adjusts to the weather. Traffic lights ripple in sync with commuter flow. Packages leave warehouses because the system—not a manager—decides which routes beat the rain. Somebody still “runs” all this,…
A Foundation Thought Piece for the AI and Robotics Series When a headline says “AGI is only months away,” it usually means somebody wants funding. In contrast, former Tesla and OpenAI engineer Andrej Karpathy recently sat down with Dwarkesh Patel for a two-hour conversation that feels refreshingly sane. Karpathy’s view: artificial general intelligence is probably…
How AI, Robots, and Data Start Running Things — AI Part 6 The Cognitive Industrial Revolution Where software grows hands, and the spreadsheet starts moving parts. When I was a young engineer, our smartest machines had exactly one trick: do the same thing, the same way, forever. Give them a tighter tolerance or a…
Where the Real Robotics Revolution Begins — Part 6 The End of the Beginning For years, robots have dazzled us in lab demos and YouTube clips — backflipping humanoids, graceful drones, and warehouse arms that move with almost human rhythm. Yet for all that spectacle, most of those machines still live behind fences or…
The Oldest (and Most Haunted) Hotel in Las Vegas Is Offering $5,000 for One Brave Soul to Spend the Night There are plenty of ways to lose money in Las Vegas — but this one actually pays you back.The city’s oldest hotel, with a reputation for flickering lights and uninvited guests who never quite checked…
If You Build It … Can You Live With It? Part 5 The Drive to Create and the Fear of Consequence “We build because we can — not always because we should.” From Prometheus’ fire to Pandora’s box to Frankenstein’s cry of “It’s alive!” — humanity’s oldest stories all begin with curiosity trespassing on creation.Now…
What Happens When Curiosity Outruns Control There are several books, articles and discussions that have formed the foundation for this discussion on AI. This is one of the more impressive and to some extent scarry. I strongly suggest reading it for some base understanding of some of the issues surrounding AI and its future. The…
Robots Part 5 When Help Comes With a Price Tag For decades, robots lived behind fences — industrial arms bolted to the floor, sealed away from anything unpredictable, like people. Now they’re stepping into our world. They can walk, talk, deliver, and assist. In just the past year, Agility’s Digit began working at Amazon warehouses,…
Illegal U-turn, But They Can’t Ticket Another Case Where Regulations Do Not Keep Up With Technology Deployment Autonomous cars have been evolving for quite a few years now. There has been a lot of discussion around issues of autonomous cars both pro and con. But as usual regulations lag far behind deployment of new technologies….
AI Part 4 When the Machine Sounds Certain but Isn’t Ask an AI who invented jazz and it will answer without hesitation: starting with background of African music blended with European, then citing some of the early black musicians around New Orleans including Jelly Roll Morton or perhaps skipping the early movements and citing players…
Robots Part 4 What we’ve seen so far about robots is mostly pieces of a larger dream — factory arms that weld with precision, delivery carts humming through warehouse aisles, driver-assist cars edging toward autonomy, and household gadgets like the Roomba bumping their way around furniture. Our expectations, meanwhile, are shaped by movies: elegant, articulate…
Just when you thought you’d heard it all, North Korea has gone to war with… breast implants. Forget missiles and war games—the new frontline is the plastic surgeon’s office. I suppose this is what happens when leaders confuse body politics with actual politics. North Korea Targets Women Amid Crackdown On “Capitalist” Breast Implants, Calls Them…
I like to include some good alternative items among all of the supposed bigger topics. So here is October’s gardening to do list. Look for some other irrelevant items soon. This information is mostly complements of HGTV. I have tried to make this generally applicable to Northern Nevada but has good general information for most…
Large language models (LLMs) have become the public face of artificial intelligence. They write essays, answer questions, draft business plans, and even generate code. But how do they actually come into being? What’s inside them, and how do they learn? The story isn’t magic — it’s a blend of mathematics, computer science, infrastructure, and people…
Part 3: From Factory Floor to Living Room When most people imagine robots in their lives, they picture home helpers: folding laundry, cooking dinner, maybe even watching the kids — a useful assistant around the house. But the reality is different. For decades, robots have thrived not in the family room, but on the factory…
Harvest Comforts and the Not-So-Last Barbecue Every September, I hear the same phrase: “It’s the last barbecue of the year.” Somewhere else, maybe. Here in Reno, we usually get good grilling weather well through October, sometimes beyond. That means September isn’t a farewell to barbecue — it’s an opportunity. The overlap of late-summer produce and…
Artificial intelligence (AI) –Part 2 Every new technology sparks the same fear: that the machine will take over. When calculators arrived in classrooms, some worried students would never learn math again. When spreadsheets hit the office, people thought accountants were finished. When search engines matured, teachers fretted that research would be reduced to typing a…
Part 2: Learning to Learn — Dexterity, Data, and the Objective Question Think about a baby tying shoelaces. At first it’s fumbled, uneven, and sometimes impossible. But after enough tries, the skill “clicks.” What’s remarkable is not just the act of tying shoes — it’s the ability to generalize that learning. The same hand–eye coordination…
Giants vs. Dodgers For most of this season, the Giants’ bullpen has been talked about as a strength — maybe even the one part of the roster that could tilt close games in San Francisco’s favor. That reputation didn’t survive this week’s series with the Dodgers. In three games, the Giants gave up 23 runs…
Artificial Intelligence — Part 1 Artificial Intelligence. The phrase conjures up images of machines plotting in secret, or maybe a Hollywood scene where the glowing computer screen suddenly talks back. But behind the hype, the breakthroughs, and the sometimes breathless headlines, AI is not sorcery. It’s not “alive.” It’s not a new species waiting to…
What We Thought vs. What We Got (revisited) The Robot in Your Imagination vs. the One in Your Kitchen Part 1 Say the word “robot” and the pictures in our heads arrive by decade. For some of us, it’s Rosie from The Jetsons—a wise‑cracking housekeeper with a full calendar and a faster comeback. A little…
Continued Thoughts from One Year of Blogging What I Learned and What I’ll Do Next I started this blog for me. It gives me a reason to chase ideas, put thoughts in order, and—on good days—make sense of the world out loud. I figured that if I published steadily and let posts ripple to Facebook,…
Mostly borrowed from HGTV Plant Fall Annuals Watch for pansies at your favorite plant shopping spot and pick up enough to fill pots and planting beds. Fall-planted pansies stage a flower show all autumn long in most regions. In warmer zones, pansies deliver fresh-faced color through winter. Ideal temperatures for flower development are nights in the 40s…
Why AI Feels Overhyped Now— and How It Still Reshapes the Next Decade I’ve watched a few revolutions roll through: mainframes to PCs, dial-up to broadband, brick-and-mortar to dot-com. The pattern isn’t mysterious anymore. New tech shows up, excitement explodes, money rushes in, and for a while it looks like the future is arriving on…
Even with the right ingredients, you still need the right kitchen. For early Earth, that could mean a hot, seething deep-sea vent… a quiet, shallow pool warmed by the sun… or a frozen landscape where reactions happened in slow motion. Here are the top contenders: Deep-Sea Vents Found along mid-ocean ridges, these underwater chimneys spew…
If life is a recipe, what goes in the pot? The first living things on Earth didn’t have grocery stores, farms, or even sunlight in some cases — just whatever chemistry the planet (and maybe the cosmos) could provide. Scientists are still working to figure out the minimum ingredient list for life. Some seem obvious….
Where did life come from? It’s the biggest question in science — and one we still can’t answer with certainty. In this three-part series, we’ll explore the leading ideas about how life began: from its possible birthplace, to the essential “ingredients” it needed, to the environments that may have been the first kitchens for biology….
