Recently I had the oddest experience, although on the surface of it you wouldn’t expect to be so: it was simply an interview at a company. What was disturbing was the company and their interview process, the likes of which I’ve heard about, the faintest whisper of a rumor, but like Big Foot or Atlantis, there’s only sketchy, unsubstantiated evidence of existence. Yet I’m here to tell you I was there. Continue Reading
Tag Archives: technology
Uber versus tuk-tuk
Prologue: Dawn in Montpellier It was dark when we left our apartment at five in the morning, a Wednesday in mid-July, this time of year already warm even in the early morning. Daysacks over our shoulders, we walked our rolling luggage across the white tile of the nearly deserted Place Comedie to the taxi stand… Continue Reading
The End of Serendipity
Serendipity: 1. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident. 2. The fact or occurrence of such discoveries. 3. An instance of making such a discovery. – the American Heritage Dictionary May your every wish be immediately granted. – Chinese Curse This is not about the ending of the the movie from 2001, which although flawed, does have… Continue Reading
Elder’s Write-O-Matic
In Roald Dahl’s short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator, Adolphe Knipe is a computer scientist who wants to be a writer. With the reluctant support of his boss, Knipe invents a machine that produces short stories, then is improved to write novels – each novel taking about fifteen minutes to create. In the following scene where the… Continue Reading
On the nature of things
In “The Soul of the Deep”, the final chapter of Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi, the swordsman Sasaki Kojiro is rowed out to Ganryu Island for a duel with Miyamoto Musashi. Both men have devoted their lives to studying sword fighting, but have followed different paths: Sasaki had the support of many lords and was a man… Continue Reading
Grand frère is watching you
Carcasonne Technology continues to mitigate the need for human contact. Recently I was exceeding the speed limit on a highway, but instead of being pulled over the ticket came in the mail, a number of days after the actual event. See the image below. The salient information is that at 3:23 in the afternoon of Wednesday, February… Continue Reading