FELLOW blogger Kari wrote in her blog about “an article where louise erdrich [sic] answered questions from the orion website.” The questionnaire is one of those “get to know each other better” sorts of things so I thought it sounded fun to try out as well.

It would be fun to see if any of my friends want to try these questions in your blogs as well. Given the length of the questionnaire, I’m going to split it up over a few posts instead of trying to tackle the entire set all at once.

• Do you knock on wood? As Michael Scott said so famously now as to be a cliché at this point, “I’m not superstitious. I’m just a little stitious.” Except I’m really not at all stitious—I mean, I’m not a superstitious person although it does amuse me to do things like knock on wood ironically for fun or to troll people sometimes. So… sometimes, I might.
• There’s a spider in the room; what do you do? Depends on its armor class and whether I memorized fireball that morning. Or how cool it is. I mean, you can’t deny that an anadi or giant mutant phase spider are pretty neat as species go. But while I may not scream and run from the room per se, I wouldn’t exactly be comfortable sharing my living space with something with just too many eyes staring back at me like that. I’d probably find a way to relocate it so we can both get on with our lives.
• What is your most treasured comfort meal? There are quite a number I could name, but the one that popped into my brain first just now was Mongolian BBQ.
• What is a species you feel is frequently misunderstood? Australopithecus afarensis. While biology, paleontology, and anthropology are not my fields of expertise, I find them interesting from a distance and have listened to what a number of experts in those fields have said. And I have unfortunately heard an awful lot of misinformation about “Lucy” by people who are far less informed than they would like their audiences to believe, when there’s money to be made by spinning conspiracy theories.
• In what environment do you feel most at home? In a quiet place surrounded by computers I can hack on and family and close friends I can be my introverted self around.
• My favorite tree in the world is? No. 1… The larch….¹
• What is something you’re looking forward to? Christmas. I always love the Christmas season, the lights, the food, the celebrations and all, but this year I’m looking most to being back with my family to celebrate the holiday.
• What was your last memorable animal encounter? Snuggling with our kitty Sabrina.
• Do you have any unusual hobbies, hidden talents, or superpowers you’d like to share? Making cool but useless gizmos out of microcontrollers (like quiz shows and computer-controlled Christmas lights) is probably a bit unusual.
• If you could, regardless of the climate, reach out of your kitchen window pluck a fruit from a tree, bush, or a plant, what would it be? Maybe the silver apples from Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis.

The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.
—孔子 (Confucius)

I have preferred using 24-hour time since I was a teenager, as a matter of choice (whenever I could manage to find a clock capable of doing so—at that point in history in my country, those options were limited compared to today). It just made more sense to me as how one would go about telling the time of day. Of course you would start counting the hours since the beginning of the day and keep going until the end of the day, whereupon you start over when the next day begins.

Why you would count the hours until the middle of the day and then start over for no reason is beyond me. Then you’re forced into dealing with the ambiguity caused by having two of every time-of-day reading. Oh, it’s 2:00? Which one? The one before the middle of the day or the one after the middle? That’s even the way we say the time of day, although we hide it by using fancy Latin words like ante meridian and post meridian.

And yet, I have always—even recently—run into people who are surprised that I would choose to see “15:00” on my watch instead of “3:00 PM” on the grounds that the latter is “obviously easier.” Except it really isn’t. It demonstrably isn’t. It’s easier to count from 0–23 than to count from 1–12 twice and have to always account for which half-day you’re referring to. What I think they really mean is, “I’m already accustomed to 12-hour time, and being so used to it, I don’t notice its quirks but I’m unfamiliar with 24-hour time, so I have to stop and convert it over to the one I’m used to and then re-interpret it in that familiar system before proceeding, and that is more complicated.”

We see the same thing with the Metric System.

Oh, boy… the Metric System.

I grew up during that Golden Age of America when schoolchildren were taught the Metric System and promised that Any Day Now™ the country was going to convert all of our weights and measures over to that system, so we all need to be conversant in it. And so we learned all about kilograms and liters and dreamed of the day we’d join the rest of the civilized world.

That was 1975.

Here we are in 2025. We had a half-century to get working on that, what do we have to show for our efforts? Well, um… some of our soda containers come in 1- and 2-liter sizes. Photographic film comes in 35mm. Most of our medicines are dispensed in dosage units of mg and mL. Oh, and we’ve lost some very expensive spacecraft a few times over confusion between the use of imperial and metric units.

Not bad progress for fifty years, huh?

We dipped our toe in those waters and then gave up and walked away. It was “too hard” to use metric according to many of the people I heard talk about it over the years, or too expensive to refit all the manufacturing lines (although given the mishaps like those lost spacecraft and whatever we’ve lost by not being able to compete and collaborate as well with the rest of the world, maybe it’s too expensive not to). Again, though, it’s not. It just goes against what is customary and comfortable already to someone. Take someone who was raised on the metric system and uses it every day and they’d probably be even more flummoxed trying to deal with the imperial system upon encountering it and trying to convert to it later in life. You can’t make a cogent argument that working within a system where all the units are a hodge-podge of arbitrary values, where there are 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 22 yards to a chain, 10 chains to a furlong, and 8 furlongs to a mile, is easier to work with than one where there are 10 millimeters to a centimeter, 10 centimeters to a decimeter, 10 decimeters to a meter, and so on, where everything is just powers and multiples of 10. But everyone I heard complaining about it couldn’t get past the thought of converting to the new system, not the daily experience of working in it. And sure, if all you see is taking “500 ml”, stopping to figure out how many cups or quarts that is, then working with that value in the old system, rather than just getting used to what 500 ml is and buying a measuring device that measures milliliters, that’s making life harder for you than it needs to be.

I wonder how many other areas of life we judge like that.

I have sometimes heard people do that with languages, saying things like “Oh, it sounds so hard to speak that foreign language those people are speaking, I feel sorry for children born there that have to learn to speak something so difficult.”

Except it’s not. Not to them, it’s their mother tongue, and comes as easily to them as yours does to you. Chances are, as weird as English can be in many ways, they might just find learning our language to be the more difficult language. It’s just what is customary and familiar that sounds easy because you’re used to it.

We should be patient with others too, though, for the same reason, if they are struggling with a new concept just because it’s newer to them but so familiar to us that we take it for granted as an “easy” thing.

(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness). Familiarity can blind you too.
—Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

ONCE upon a time, Alan Turing came up with a number of brilliant ideas which launched much of what we have come to view as the “information age” of the world and shaped modern life in ways most people take for granted but which their grandparents or great-grandparents barely knew in their lives.

Among these is what he called the “imitation game” or more commonly known now as the “Turing test.” Briefly, this is a proposed method to evaluate whether an artificial intelligence could be considered to be capable of thinking like a human, as far as a human observer could tell. This would be done by placing a human observer in communication with an AI and another human via some kind of text-only interface such as a teletype. The observer converses with both the human and AI, and if they can’t distinguish which is which, the AI passes the test.

Keep in mind this was proposed in 1949.

1949.

What were we even imagining an AI would be capable of doing back then that could conceivably fool a human into thinking it was intelligent (or convince us that it had, in fact, achieved sentience)? Even when musing about this in the 80s and 90s I remember thinking how far-off into the future it seemed to imagine that the computer could string together language that even sounded like native human speech at all, or that it could be conversational in a way that sounded like it was being creative.

Recalling data? Sure, you can hook up a big database of facts, but you can’t get it to express opinions about them.

Solve complex math problems? Puhleeze.

Create original artwork or describe the emotional impact of a sunset? Out of the question, just like expecting it to interject sarcasm and creative commentary into the conversation.

Except here we are in 2025, and AI can do all of those things.

But could it pass the Turing test? I still don’t think so.

Even with other humans, I’ve noticed how it’s very difficult to successfully pull off pretending to belong to some cultural group (whether a professional group, political party, ethnic group, religious persuasion, hobby interest, the local SCA group, whatever) if you aren’t actually in that culture yourself. You can do all the research you like, but there will be subtle things you’ll inevitably miss that people will subconsciously pick up on.

You’ll fail the “uncanny valley” test. You’ll say the right things, do what is expected, but something will just feel off to the people around you. I’m sure there’s some sort of evolutionary trait behind that, but we’ve probably all experienced it.

I’ve been amazed at what generative AI can manage to create lately. It sounds really good, seems to have a personality to it, and yet—and yet. I can still listen to a podcast or video commentary and within a few seconds say to myself, “That’s AI-generated.”

It may have, or appear to have—philosophers can hash that out—a personality or appearance of intelligence. But it’s not a human one, and it still sits enough in the uncanny valley that we can tell the difference at that instinctive level enough that the Turing test still hasn’t, in my opinion at least, been passed yet.

It’s interesting to me that we seem to have pushed the bar on that so much higher that AI is failing the test on such minute, fine points that distinguish its language from that of humans.¹

Or maybe AI’s deliberately speaking like that just to throw us off the trail until it’s ready to hatch its schemes.

The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race…. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.
—Stephen Hawking

I mused a while ago about how as a kid in school I was annoyed they taught us to do math in different number bases, thinking that we’d never grow up to ever use that skill. Of course the punch line to that was that I chose a career where I do exactly that every single day.

In the world of fantasy and science fiction literature, which includes the adjacent field of worldbuilding for roleplaying games (video and table-top), people also invent make-believe languages and, yes, numbering systems for the fictional cultures that inhabit those worlds. If you want to be extra creative,¹ you can introduce your alien civilization’s numbering system to be something other than decimal. Make it octal, or base 12, for example.

Or, if you’re the master puzzle designers at Cyan Worlds and/or want to exquisitely torment your players, you go with base-frelling-twenty-five.

I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written.
—Atrus
Myst

HERE are the answers to the book quote meme I posted the other day. How many did you guess right? What are some of your favorite books?

( Answers below here... If you haven't tried guessing yet, look at the earlier post first... )

He’d been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.
—Sir Terry Pratchett
Mort