PicoBlog

Welcome to Part 4 in my 6-week series focusing on protein! If you’d like to catch up, here’s what’s been going on: I’ve spent about three weeks mulling over what a savory protein bar would be like. What are the flavors? What binds it together? How can it have a meaningful amount of protein using whole-food ingredients, and also feel light enough to count as a (fortifying) snack? Certainly there are granola bars and nut butter bars I love (like these Big Spoon Roasters or Roxana Jullapat’s pro-baker’s power bars).

Outdoor maintenance is a $1 trillion market that has a huge impact on our environment and community spaces. Today, a large percentage of this labor is done using a wide variety of highly pollutant gas power tools; string trimmers, leaf blowers, weed sprayers, etc.. At Electric Sheep our goal is to transition this work to be safe and sustainable with emission-free automation. To move toward this goal we created an embodied AI agent, Verdie, capable of learning how to use power tools and generalizing to work sites we service across the country.

The war is over and the jukebox musicals have won. At least, for the time being. Whatever dream I had of a Broadway season featuring exclusively original scores now feels hopelessly naive. As the theater industry continues to recover from the pandemic, the producers willing to take chances on wholly new material are fewer and farther between. And while there are still exciting and innovative musicals on Broadway (I love you Kimberly Akimbo), theater has become increasingly reliant on IP.

I work at home alone, but lately, especially after learning how vital it is to mental health and successful aging (I'm 63), I've become vigilant about reuniting with people I consider old friends.  Today I had scheduled a coffee date with an old friend. We have been in touch. For example, she reached out for help on something and thanked me profusely—so we have a relationship. But she forgot to come. When I texted, she said she was going through a hard time.

Bill Bradley was born in Crystal City, Missouri, on July 28, 1943. At the age of eighty he has decided to share his illustrious life story. A documentary version of his autobiographical stage production, Rolling Along: An American Story, is streaming now on Max. He plans an active social media presence and has a website at billbradley.com. Why? For reasons he explains in his play, and I understand. You may have read that this is a big year for people who are more less in the range of eighty years of age.

In the nascent years of artificial intelligence, the field was characterized by open-source models and collaborative efforts that fueled rapid innovation and democratized access to cutting-edge technology. However, a significant shift is underway as the industry gravitates towards more closed AI systems. This transition marks a pivotal moment with profound implications for innovation, competition, and the future trajectory of AI development. Open AI is a term that refers to the availability and accessibility of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, data, and knowledge for anyone who wants to use them.

Recently I was drinking bourbon with a close friend who conceded he now harbored suspicions about the JFK assassination, stating he believes Lee Harvey Oswald was merely a patsy. We discussed some of the stranger parts of the case: the failures of the Warren Commission, Harry Truman’s salvo against the CIA following the assassination, and the fact that other world leaders seem to have suspicions that there was more foul play at work than the commission wanted Americans to believe.

There aren’t really any pictures on Unsplash of real “catch-wrestling”, so I used the picture of pro-wrestling above because, as it turns out, pro-wrestling actually has a lot more in common with catch-wrestling than I thought. I’ve been really interested in Catch-Wrestling for the last few days now, so I decided to do some exploration on the history of the sport. What I found is incredibly interesting. In addition to its unique brutality, joint manipulation, and grit, catch wrestling also has a history that’s deeply interesting.

Right now, there’s an enormous ongoing controversy linked to Wizards of the Coast, the Open Gaming License, and copyright. To understand this controversy, and to understand why Wizards of the Coast has been threatened with legal action by other game developers and a fan boycott as a consequence of trying to revoke the Open Gaming License, it helps to understand the history of the game. This isn’t my usual topic, and I probably shouldn’t have taken the time out from promoting my newly-published book on the Electoral College in order to write this article, but D&D is one of my oldest hobbies.