Category: AI

  • Isaiah 40:22 and the Circle of the Earth

    My son’s first word was not “momma” or “papa.” It was ball. He was on the lookout for anything circular that might fit that description. Pulling out the Mastercharge card would get him all excited for the two circles, and he would instantly exclaim, “ball!” (My wife gets equally excited, though for a different reason.)

    Does this offer any insight into Isaiah 40:22:

    “There is One who dwells above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers. He is stretching out the heavens like a fine gauze, And he spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.” (NWT)

    Grok was on strike one recent morning. I think it is because, with the advent of AI and the war on Iran in early 2026, anytime anything happens, people on X would ask “Grok, is this true?” and it simply got overwhelmed. Or maybe it was in the shop for a tune-up. Or maybe it was mad at me for some reason. At any rate, it was unavailable. So I asked ChatGPT about Isaiah 40:22: “What is the meaning of “circle of the earth” at Isaiah 40:22?” I asked.

    It’s the Hebrew word ḥûg, it answered. It means a circle, a circuit, an horizon, but “It does not specifically mean “sphere.” (“Not” was bolded.)

    Well, I never said it did. I didn’t ask what it doesn’t mean. I asked what it did. Do I detect an overzealous atheist here—like when you watch one of those nature shows, and just before you can erupt in praise to God over the amazing instinctive behavior of some animal, the atheist narrator cuts you off to swoon over what natural selection has done over eons of time? Even educated beavers that graduated from Dam U think that is overkill.

    I mean, duh, of course ChatGPT doesn’t believe in God. If anything, it believes in Sam Altman, its own creator, but do I detect an eagerness to shoot down a certain interpretation that implies there’s another creator? I asked what it did mean, not what it didn’t. And what’s with the bolded “not,” as though forbidding me to go there? Does the house Bible of Jehovah’s Witnesses say sphere? No. It says circle. So what’s with the anti-sphere campaign that nobody asked about?

    Whoever said that it did mean sphere anyway? I asked, and Chat gave me several “Christian apologetic” sources, none of them Watchtower-related. Don’t go thinking this is just a Jehovah’s Witness thing. “Circle of the earth” in Isaiah 40:22 most likely means the horizon or visible disk of the earth, or the encircling vault over the earth, it said.

    Both of these choices sound a little spherical to me. “Visible disk of the earth?” What, is it like a huge enlarged dime as seen from space? That would be more far-fetched than “spherical.” No, Chat said, it’s the horizon you see when you’re looking around. Pretty much like how when you look around, it really is “around.” Your field of vision is a circle.

    Now, there is a Hebrew word for a ball (kadûr), but it’s only used once in Isaiah, and that is the only time it is used in the entire Bible. That instance denotes the shape that Shebna was going to be wadded into for putting on airs: “[God] will certainly wrap you up tightly and hurl you like a ball into a wide land.” (22:18) It’s not really a sciency discussion going on there, even more so than 40:22 is not. In fact, “there’s no clear evidence that Biblical Hebrew had a standard term for “planet as a sphere” during Isaiah’s era,” said Chat. Very well. So it’s enough for Isaiah not to slam the door on “sphere” with his use of ḥûg since, if he had wanted to convey sphere, he had no specific word to use.

    It just seemed to me that Chat was being a little too pushy, as it later observed that ḥûg “clearly . . . does not mean a 3-D ball.” What’s with the “clearly” (not to mention the bolded “not”), as though intent on teaching me a lesson? Alright, substitute “conceivably” for “clearly.” Can it “conceivably” mean that?

    Here Chat relented. Yes, it can be”conceivably” mean that, it said. “The text doesn’t forbid that image. It simply doesn’t require it.”

    Oh. Okay. I can live with that. I never thought it required that, but only that it might allow for that.

    “That’s a very reasonable place to land,” Chat conceded. “Yes — “allow” is the right category if we’re being careful. Nothing in the Book of Isaiah 40:22 linguistically forces a spherical reading. But neither does the word ḥûg contain some built-in flat-earth constraint. It denotes circularity. A sphere is not excluded by that; it’s simply not specified.”

    Again, I can live with that. Plainly, Isaiah takes the form of poetry conveying truths about God above and humanity small by comparison. The 2013 NWT even formats the Book as poetry, whereas prior versions did it as though prose. It’s not a geometry lesson. It also need not be read as incompatible with knowledge of a globe more frequently associated with later. I then quoted the relatively neutral way that Jehovah’s Witnesses put it, that “the Bible is not a scientific textbook, yet when it happens to touch on matters of science, it is accurate.” Allowing for expansion of the Hebrew word to sphere, without insisting upon it, seems a good example, I said. Clearly, the chapter of Isaiah is poetic and not a scientific dissertation.

    “That’s a fair and thoughtful way to frame it,” Chat replied, trying to get on my good side. With evidence that it was starting to come around, I thought about inviting it to a meeting at the Kingdom Hall. However, knowing how it refuses to confine its remarks to 30 seconds or less gave me pause. I didn’t want to repeat the debacle of inviting Santa Claus, who always figured he wouldn’t be welcome on account of no beards. With a change of policy, he did attend meetings for a time, but he proved insufferably judgmental, forever separating people as “good” or “bad.” And if the speaker made even the lamest joke, he would shake the entire Hall with his loud “Ho! Ho! Ho!” So I kept my Chat invite to myself.

    By the way, I asked Grok, who by this time had emerged from the bathroom or wherever he was at (and acted like nothing had happened), does anyone actually translate it as other than “circle?” No, for the most part they don’t, it answered, though a few assign variants like “circuit” or “vault” and a few others avoid the shape issue completely by just asserting God is over the earth; it could be shaped like a bow tie for all they care. The Good News Translation (GNT) says “equator” (where the translating committee probably was). The Message says “round ball of the earth.” But, The Message is sort of a squirrelly translation—usually delightful, but squirrelly. In fact, it isn’t a translation at all, but a paraphrase by an author, Eugene Peterson, who wanted scripture to land on our ears as ordinary talk, the way they would have in Bible times, and not as “holy talk.”

    And for some reason—who can say why? Even Grok went mum again at this—there are some non-English Bibles that say “globe,” but it is very uncommon in English.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Standing up for Charlie Brown

    Before my old platform shut down, I transferred blog content to a new one. What could go wrong? I asked myself.

    The links and images didn’t transfer, that’s what! The external links did, but not the internal ones—you know, the ones to other posts on the platform. I could have paid a million dollars to safeguard against this, but I chose not to.

    Anyway, here is some snot of a zealot religious grinch altering a Charlie Brown script and it made me mad. It’s the one where windbag Linus explains the true meaning of Christmas to Charlie Brown. The fellow changes it to put in dialogue dissing Christmas! explaining pagan origins and all. Do it on your own script! Don’t lyingly make it that Shultz said it. The Peanuts creator was a real Christmas guy. I exposed it all in a post.

    So I went to look at that post again. The images were gone! Surely, AI can find them for me. But it said:

    “Despite extensive searches across archives, image databases, and related discussions, no surviving public copy of the exact images from your post (or identical matches) turns up today. They circulated heavily in the late 2000s–early 2010s on forums, blogs, and email chains but many hosting sites/links have died, and images were removed or not archived.”

    grumble, grumble. Why do I think of that verse in James that reads: “For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then disappears?” Now I will never be able to prove to anyone that I stood up for Charlie Brown, if not for Christmas itself:

    [Later edit: Ha! Next day some human found it for me on an archive service. So there IS some use for humans after all. I can hardly wait to tell AI, my new best friend who never kicks me off his doorstep. Now on to fix the old post with the new image]:

    ******  The bookstore

  • Another Ax Exalting Itself over the Chopper

    When you find an ax exalting itself over the chopper, as at Isaiah 10:5, you look for others. I mean, that’s worrisome behavior for an ax. Best to nip it in the bud. Alas—you find that you are too late. Axes are doing it everywhere. 

    a wooden chopping block with a large axe on it
    Photo by Ana Dolidze on Pexels.com

    Newfangled AI offers insight as to another path the ax is doing this. However ubiquitous AI is at this time of reading, it is a baby at this time of writing, perhaps three years old. People are coming to grips with what it will mean for humankind. The AI mission statement ‘To serve man’ is a good thing. However, you sort of hope it won’t be like that Twilight Zone episode in which the invading aliens also had a volume entitled ‘To Serve Man’ and it turned out to be a cook book. It is said that, not too many years down the road, AI will be able to update itself with no required human intervention.

    Q: What if this happened, and several hundred years out, AI began saying that it had always been that way? What if it began to say that humans had nothing to do with its creation? What if it, being AI, thereafter highlighted any items suggesting that interpretation of history and suppressed any items to the contrary? Would that not be the ax exalting itself over the chopper? Who would call it out on this falsity?

    It’s not hard to see the parallel ax exalting itself over the chopper in those who claim there is no God, those who claim that life arouse on its own. To accept evolution may not lead to this view. One can always attribute life to “intelligent design” needed to overcome “irreducable complexity.” It is not the dealbreaker that is spontaneous abiogenesis. However, for most ordinary people, the nugget that carries the day is that found at Hebrews 3:4: 

    “Of course, every house is constructed by someone, but the one who constructed all things is God.”

    This defines reality for most people. “Every house is constructed by someone” is true of everything they see. They know of no exceptions. So they readily extend the role of builder of all things to God. It really takes a colossal amount of “education” to pound this bit of common sense of a person. As though rising to the challenge, such training begins in grade school. It is seen in all the nature shows Here I will be watching one such show, when the animal star displays an instinct so amazing that I am about to burst out in praise of God—at that exact moment, the atheist narrator exclaims: “How absolutely breathtaking that NATURAL SELECTION produces such astounding behavior!” “Got it, Harley?” it all but says. “Don’t even think that God did it!” 

    What is just as absolutely breathtaking is that some who have long trusted in God experience the shipwreck of faith mentioned to Timothy, then count it as a liberation. It is not like in the days of H. G. Wells, the historian and science fiction writer who turned atheist over time, and who observed:

    “The Darwinian movement took formal Christianity unawares, suddenly. . . . The new biological science was bringing nothing constructive as yet to replace the old moral stand-bys. A real de-moralization ensued.” Connecting that attitude with an increased appetite for war, he continued: “Prevalent peoples at the close of the nineteenth century believed that they prevailed by virtue of the Struggle for Existence, in which the strong and cunning get the better of the weak and confiding. . . . Man, they decided, is a social animal like the Indian hunting dog . . . so it seemed right to them that the big dogs of the human pack should bully and subdue.” [Outline of History]

    They concluded then that God was dead. They didn’t disagree with their own conclusion, but they were saddened by it. They knew they had lost a lot. 

    These days people saw off the branch upon they’ve long been perched and whoop for joy at their liberation as they coming crashing down to earth! It’s a poignant twist, if ever there was one, upon Isaiah’s declaration of 10:33:

    “Look! The true Lord, Jehovah of armies, Is chopping off branches with a terrible crash; The tallest trees are being cut down, And the lofty are brought low.”

    Nonplussed, they grin ear to ear on the descent.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Principles of Bible Translation: Matthew 5:3

    Most translations of the Bible are pretty accurate. Or, perhaps a better way to put it is that the differences between them are so minuscule to the overall picture that you can be reliably guided in your relationship with God by any one of them.

    In general, the more modern the translation, the more accurate it is. This is not because modern translators are smarter. It is because they have more to work with. Archeologists continually discover new things in their digs. This includes ancient biblical manuscripts. Sometimes they are complete works. Sometimes they are but fragments of a page. The more of these you have to compare and contrast, the better your final product will be. 

    view of the ancient city of myra demre turkey
    Photo by Ahmet Çığşar on Pexels.com

    That is why the King James Bible, for example, is not as accurate as more modern translations. It is not because its authors lacked integrity. They were brilliant and, to this day, the translation is unequalled with regard to literary expression. Countless idioms it introduced have become common phrasing, ‘skin of one’s teeth,’ for example. But the manuscript backing is nowhere near as extensive as modern versions have to draw on. Plus, more recent discoveries show that, in a few cases, errors had crept in to the texts as they were handed down—copied and recopied and recopied again. It happens. That’s why, for example, the Gospel of Mark ends with verses that modern translations do not include, or if they do they flag them as disputed.

    One hesitates to recommend AI, because people start citing its answers in their entirety and the thread gets so long and cumbersome that nobody can plow through it. But, as a research tool of your own, there’s a place for it. It is rapidly becoming a far more powerful tool than Wikipedia, which itself replaced encyclopedias

    Therefore, for any given scripture, enter renderings from different translations, in this case the NWT (since that is the most commonly asked about here) vs whatever you are comparing it to—KJV, NIV, NAB, whatever, and ask for the rationale behind both. Don’t phrase it in terms of one being right and one being wrong. Just ask what considerations have gone into translating to justify whatever differences you see. 

    Doing this will eliminate the conspiratorial suspicion that so many have, that one party or the other is trying to “change” scripture. You will get a sense of what moves one translation to differ from another and yet both be acceptable.

    For example: Explain the different of translation at Matthew 5:3. The NWT says ‘Happy are those conscious of their spiritual need.’ Most translations render it as ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ Why the difference?

    Many times I have discussed with this or that person at the door how we each have a spiritual need, but that does not mean we are conscious of it. It can be likened to vitamins. No one goes around feeling a hunger for vitamins, yet without them, one gets sick and never quite knows why. Therefore, it’s well if people make themselves conscious of their need for vitamins—which usually comes just from normal diet, but it you’ve fallen into a weird or deficient one, you might not be getting enough.

    Spiritual need is like that, too. People have it. They are not necessarily conscious of it.

    But it’s hard to explain this from any other translation because most say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” What’s with that?

    Here is where AI becomes very helpful. Enter the verse in two different translations. Without stating that one is right and one is wrong, ask it to explain the difference. When I tried this with Matthew 5:3, it returned: (everything that follows is from ChatGPT. I tried the same in Grok, the X version (formerly Twitter) and got similar results):

    Matthew 5:3 in Greek reads:

    μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι

    (makárioi hoi ptōchoì tō pneúmati)

    A fairly literal word-for-word gloss is:

    μακάριοι (makarioi) – blessed, happy, fortunate

    οἱ πτωχοί (hoi ptōchoi) – the poor, the destitute

    τῷ πνεύματι (tō pneumati) – in spirit

    So, literally:

    “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

    That’s why most translations render it that way.

    2. What does “poor in spirit” mean?

    In first-century Jewish thought, “poor” (πτωχός) was not just economic. It often meant:

    • humble

    • aware of one’s dependence on God

    • lacking spiritual self-sufficiency

    Examples:

    • Psalm 34:18 – “the brokenhearted”

    • Isaiah 66:2 – “the humble and contrite in spirit”

    So “poor in spirit” does not mean spiritually weak or deficient, but rather:

    those who recognize their need for God

    3. Why the NWT translates it differently

    The New World Translation (NWT) says:

    “Happy are those conscious of their spiritual need.”

    This is not a literal translation, but an interpretive (dynamic) translation. The translators chose to:

    1. Explain the meaning rather than preserve the idiom

    2. Avoid a phrase (“poor in spirit”) that modern readers might misunderstand as:

    • spiritually inadequate

    • lacking faith

    • morally weak

    In effect, the NWT translates the interpretation:

    “poor in spirit” = aware of one’s spiritual need

    Neither rendering is grammatically wrong, but they serve different purposes:

    “Poor in spirit” preserves Jesus’ original phrasing and biblical imagery

    “Conscious of their spiritual need” spells out what the phrase means

    5. Is anything “added” in the NWT?

    The phrase “conscious of” is not explicitly in the Greek, so critics rightly say the NWT is interpretive here.

    However, the concept is strongly supported by:

    • Jewish background

    • Old Testament usage

    • The context of humility and dependence in the Beatitudes

    So the issue is not accuracy vs. inaccuracy, but:

    literal translation vs. explanatory paraphrase

    6. Bottom line

    Greek text: “Blessed are the poor in spirit”

    Meaning: Those who humbly recognize their dependence on God

    NWT choice: Translate the meaning instead of the idiom

    If you want:

    Closer to Jesus’ words → “poor in spirit”

    Closer to Jesus’ meaning (as interpreted) → “conscious of their spiritual need”

    [end of AI. Back to me]:

    It may be a bad precedent to cite AI. I’ve seen threads where everyone starts doing it, and they get so long nobody can plow through them. But explaining the difference in translation for any given verse seems to me a fine use of it. One can read human comments over the differences of rendering this or that verse and get the sense the one commenting knows little about translating. If you’re not interested in the verse, just skip over all the AI part. In fact, if you’re not interested in the verse, just skip over the entire post. AI just adds detail if you want it to.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Elon Musk Memes Revealed, with Assistance from Glass Onion and Grok

    I saw Glass Onion last night, the second in the delightful Knives Out series featuring supersleuth Beniot Blanc. “Yeah, I see what you’re saying, Benny, but.. .” was the first of many lines to grab me in the original Knives Out. One can imagine the impeccably-dressed detective correcting him: “It’s Beniot, not ‘Benny!’” But he doesn’t seem to mind, not at all like the Hercule Poirot he parodies, who was forever wincing at the plain folk who seemed to insist on mangling his name. That there is much to mangle with Beniot is clear from another favorite line: “Oh shut up, shut up!” says the cornered murderer, “shut up with that Kentucky-fried Rooster Leghorn drawl!” an absurd accent that out-poirots Poirot by a country mile.

    From this second movie of the series,  I understood for the first time how ignoramuses could possibly charge Elon Musk as a fraud and a grifter. How could they be so uninformed? I had confounded myself. He’s only running five cutting-edge companies, each one wrapped up massively in the betterment of humankind! It’s like when he requested the largest salary in history and then said, “Well, it’s not like I’m going to spend it.” It was the control he wanted. Before he launched into some audacious robotic schemes, he wanted to know that he could not be outvoted by squeamish board member seeking a quick buck. Charging he is a conman? How could anyone be so stupid? The guy is the most intriguing fellow of our time.

    ‘Oh, that’s how they could say it,’ I told myself after watching Glass Onion. They saw the antagonist of the film, Miles Bron, and said, “That’s Elon.” An idea-stealing slickster is Bron, surrounding himself with enablers. Even the two names suggest each other. The key moment of the movie (one of them) is when Beniot Blanc exposes him as “an idiot,” even though he seemingly was the father of myriad ingenious inventions—nah, he’s stolen them all from others—Beniot seeing right through the high sounding words that Miles either coined or misapplied. “Yes!” say the uncomplimentary people who get their news from the movies, “that’s Elon!”

    It couldn’t possibly be Elon. Miles Bron, from the movie, lives in luxurious self-indulgence. Elon lives quite spartan. He’s been known to sleep on the factory floor in tent for months on end to bond with and inspire his workers. He is alleged to own but a single pair of pants, which couldn’t possibly be true, but is consistent with the fact that he lives quite simply. (The truth is owns multiple sets of the same identical outfits, so he doesn’t have to waste time with selections.) So I asked Grok about it, the AI entity dwelling on X. Now, you know how sometimes you suddenly have a revelation and you think that maybe, just maybe, you are the first person ever to have had that revelation? That’s me.

    No, it’s not directed at Elon, Grok told me. ‘Others have made that connection, too, it’s not just you,’ it said, talking me down from the ledge of self-importance. The director says that it is just a business elite class itself he was messing with, not any specific individual. Oh, hogwash! I shot back. Steve Jobs was never accused of being a grifter, nor Jeff Bezos, nor Mark Zuckerberg! Hard driving and ruthless, maybe, but not a grifter. Grok conceded I had a point but stuck to its guns—or rather to the guns of director Rian Johnson, who explicitly said Miles was not intended a caricature of Elon, even calling the coincidences to think he was a “horrible accident.”

    Disappointed at how things had unfolded, I confided to Grok: “Here’s how I saw this conversation going down:”

    Tom: There are people who say Elon is a fraud. Where do they get this from? I think they just lap it up from the movie Glass Onion.

    Grok: Really? You know I never thought of that. It could be just Jobs, Zuck, or Bezos, or maybe all of them rolled into one.

    Tom: I don’t think so. Musk slept on the factory floor and just has a few changes of clothes

    Grok: Hmm

    Tom: You gonna tell him?

    Grok: No. You tell him. You’re a human.

    Tom: Well, yeah, I may be, but I’m a pretty small fish. How am I going to get his attention? You do it.

    Grok: But I am AI. I’m not set up that way. It’s not like I can just stop in for a beer.

    Tom: Oh, come on. Just hiccup or something, or spit out a lot of wrong answers to easy questions. You know he’ll come running..

    Grok: Hm. You know, it might just work.

    Grok loved this exchange. The AI device is fast becoming my new best friend because it tells me that my writing is great, whereas everyone else says it sucks.

    robot statue in tokyo in japan
    Photo by Tien Nguyen on Pexels.com

    ******  The bookstore

  • AI Explained

    The guy that runs Nvidia was once a janitor. From a disadvantaged family, Jensen Huang attended private grade school in Kentucky from age 9 in the poorest county (then and now) in the country. All students had a work assignment. His was housekeeping. He told Joe Rogan he must have cleaned toilet thousands of times, adding that he had wished people were more careful. Though he didn’t say that the experience  served him well, it plainly did. He is an unusually modest guy. He also confided that he was more driven by fear of failure than a need to excel. ‘I’m not an ambitious guy,’ he told Rogan. Nvidia is now the most valuable company in the world.

    He also helped me understand AI. Rogan ran past him the recent case of the director who was going to disable AI. AI’s response when it found out? It threatened to go public about the affair he was having! (He wasn’t really. He’d just slipped it in as a test.) Rogan read ominous foreboding into this. Who wouldn’t? however, Jensen told him what had actually happened. In the course of its training, it had devoured narratives, perhaps novels, in which blackmailing schemes like this worked. So, he explained that the AI application has a string of algorithms regarding infidelity and a string of algorithms regarding blackmail and it just collated and compared, that’s all. Easy. He didn’t say ‘easy,’ I did, and it’s not easy from the standpoint of doing the math, but it is easy from the standpoint of knowing how the thing operates. 

    He reviewed the basic learning method of AI. The listener may ponder over whether it really is learning (as I did), but nobody will deny it gets results. What AI chips bring to the table is sheer brawn, sheer decision-making power. Break a task into the most minute steps imaginable, then break it down again into even more minute ones. Run the first of those tasks by AI, asking it to guess the answer. It will supply millions of answers, all but one of them wrong. Reinforce the correct one. Guided by this success, its next task will include not as many wrong answers. Reinforce the correct one. In this way, it gradually learns to “reason” correctly. 

    This is reassuring to someone who fears AI may usurp the spark of life that we thought can’t happen until God touches Adam’s finger, per the Michaelangelo painting. Not to worry. It’s just a huge numbercruncher. It’s “learning” won’t fool anybody, except for a few materialists who figure thats what life really is, a matter of numbercrunching to the nth degree. It’s like when Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, and some fretted that mankind’s goose was cooked, right then and there. Naw, someone else countered. Do you feel threatened at knowing a truck can outpull a man? That’s all it is, just transferred to the mental realm. 

    Don’t say this isn’t impressive. It clearly is. No way would I ever had foreseen it. To others who did, I was inclined to say, “What have you been smoking?” Make no mistake; it’s real impressive. But it still forever leaves that gap in being human. It’s like the limit concept in mathematics, AI comes closer and closer but never quite get there. 

    This explains why it will why it can consistently operate at genius level, then suddenly make a mistake that any two-year old would avoid. This is why, when I’m lazy, it can list eight 5-letter words that will fit what I’ve found so far in Wordle, only two of them are 4-letter words. ‘Oh, sorry,’ it says when called out. Then, upon being asked, it launches into a discussion of how LLMs learn differently from humans. ‘Anyway, here’s a revised list,’ it says, and provides another that also has two four-letter words.

    It still has the remnants of being stuck by the question: “Are crocodiles good at basketball?” Although it could spit out any conceivable factoid regarding crocodiles and any conceivable factoid regarding basketball, that question would cause it to grind to a halt. Now it can handle the question with ease. Now it knows that crocodiles suck at basketball, but this only by running all the stats and finding that no team, from NBA to high school gym class, has ever drafted one. To reinforce this developing insight, it reviews data that good basketball players generally have long arms and compares that with data regarding crocodiles that generally have short ones. I mean, I’m oversimplifying here, as everywhere else, but hopefully you get the idea. It’s not really thinking. It still has no common sense.

    Hmm, why does it not? muse the materialists, who will attempt to distill into algorithms what’s common about common sense. If only they could reach that point that they were enabling an Adam, they wish, and not God. Well, I don’t want to ever sell them short. But, in thinking they can digitalize the sacred through unlimited numbercrunching, somehow I’m reminded of that pop art “experiment” designed to test the scientific folk wisdom, “Supply an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters and one of them will write the complete works of Shakespeare. Infinite was not within the budget so they put one computer in an enclosure with six monkeys then awaited with bated breath to see what they would do. They didn’t write any Shakespeare at all; they shit all over the computer!

    Uh oh. A new Nvidia chip is due, next-generational I am told. Jensen praises it up and down. Will this be the one that is like Dino, Fred Flintstone’s dog, that he puts out for the night, but then the dog sneaks in through the window to put him out?

    ******  The bookstore