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The ABQ Correspondent 

Previous Two Issues

 

AI Conversation at the bottom (nothing new yet)

 

October 2026

 

MMMMM…MAYBE

The St. Louis PBS station recently ran a piece titled Meet huitlacoche, a gnarly corn fungus that's now gracing plates in St. Louis by Kate Grumke. In my sheltered life I had never encountered huitlacoche, and was repelled to discover that it’s better known in the US as “corn smut,” a sort of plant cancer…”uncontrolled growth of corn tissue”…considered a plague by Europe-oriented American farmers. (My French mother-in-law cooked brains in our house perhaps twice, and she and my wife enjoyed them, but the gagging reaction of our hamburger-and-potatoes-oriented kids prevented further experiments along those lines. No, none for me either, thank you, gastronomic coward that I am.) Actually, the idea of trying some hideously expensive corn smut improves on reading another article by Alejandre Graf, who sensibly refers to these things as “Mexican truffles.” Her instructions for preparation include unsettling lines like “cut away the huitlacoche galls”…galls?...and “don’t soak in water, as it can turn mushy.” Heaven forefend. I guess it really comes back to the term “smut.” Hard for us WASPs to cope with. Come to think on it, how did somebody figure out that parts of an artichoke are edible?

 

GRAND FINALE

Ondine steered us to a fascinating 55-minute video explaining in baby talk we can follow part of the stupefyingly complex process of manufacturing integrated circuit chips. I’d first learned about semiconductor chip production from an excellent article in Business Week in about 1958 when transistors were still novel.

This current video recalls an anecdote from what must have been 1968, when the lower San Francisco Peninsula was becoming Silicon Valley (though our house was in Sunnyvale, the Cupertino High School athletic field was over our back fence). 

The electronics industry had just got beyond the stage of manufacturing discrete transistors, and was making rapid progress with integrated circuits. One of the leading companies in the field was having a problem so stressful that they were willing to try any desperate measure to fix it. Somehow they got an impression that our little company might be able to help, and we were invited to a meeting at which (with strong NDAs and threats in place) they showed us their super-secret final step in producing chips. These decades later, the NDA probably has little force, so here’s what they were doing:

Like everybody else, they first made a pure silicon wafer. At the time, a big wafer was about 2¼ inches in diameter. (The wafers in the video look to be about 10 inches in diameter.)

They coated the wafer with photoresist, and projected an image of the circuitry they wanted onto the wafer…typically neat rows of square images that became individual chips. After a series of miraculous high tech, precise operations, they had what amounted to a 2¼-inch piece of glass with hundreds of circuits printed on its surface. The remaining critical step was to break those individual circuits apart.

If you’ve ever cut a piece of glass into separate pieces…even with curved shapes…you’ve probably been surprised to learn that you’re not supposed to “cut” the glass with that odd instrument you bought at the hardware store, but to “scratch” the surface of the glass as lightly as possible, maintaining a continuous line from one edge of the glass to another. Then, you tap the glass lightly, and, if you’re lucky, the pieces on both sides of that scratch separate cleanly. It takes practice and some bleeding to learn the art of doing this consistently, and a skilled practitioner is impressive to watch.

Our hosts showed us how they did this with the wafers, First, they dragged a diamond with a sharp point along each row in each direction, making the scratches along which the wafer was to be broken. Then came the “tap”…and this was their big secret step after the many marvels of modern technology in the process that preceded it.

A technician placed the wafer on a piece of heated waxed paper, so that when the chips broke apart, they would stick to the paper without scattering.

Then she placed a resilient plastic hair curler on the bench, placed the wafer on the curler paper-side-up, and with her hand rolled the wafer firmly over the curler. Then she turned it 90°, and rolled it again.

We could hear the wafer breaking…but the second time, it sounded a bit different.

“Oh,” said the technician. “that wasn’t so good.”

When she showed us the chips sticking to the waxed paper, sure enough, most of them were separated properly, but the break had not followed the line completely on the second roll, and a depressingly large number of the chips were ruined.

The problem, they said, was that the diamond making the scratch sometimes bounced, making the scratch discontinuous. They hadn’t been able to prevent the bounce, and were hoping, because they’d heard we were etching images on a surface with a laser using sub- micron dots, we might be able to draw continuous scratches on the wafers. (Maybe, but it wasn’t a sure thing, and neither we nor they had budget for research.) We didn’t know offhand how to improve their yields.

They were happy enough to have all that spectacular technology funnel down to a clever lady with waxed paper and a hair curler, but the bouncing diamond was a real problem.

Big stuff depends on a lot of little stuff.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

NELS MUSES 

Item:

There are continuing reports of positive effects of installing solar panels in fields on a large scale. Here’s an example of a technical paper on the subject. While there’s a certain amount of upset and arm-waving about “covering perfectly good agricultural land with ugly solar panels,” apparently, humidity is increased under the panels, enabling growth of plants, which may be desirable crops. Animals shelter under the panels, often grazing on those new plants. Solar panels have their own problems…notably dust that reduces their efficiency, but it isn’t all one way or the other.

 

Item:

We recently tipped our hat to associate/friend Jim Dowe. Might have included this: Jim and I talked so comfortably, that once (before boarding airplanes became such a complicated process) we were at LAX, at the gate, checked in to board our flight home to Albuquerque. We were chatting about something I now forget, and became so much involved in the conversation that we didn't notice that our flight had boarded everybody. The staff had probably looked for us, sitting not far from the gate, but with no response, had flown off without us. With no more flights open we had to spend an extra night in L.A., talking about interesting stuff. I'll miss fifty-some years of that.

 

Item:

The use of wind power (without conventional sails) to propel ships…not replacing other power plants, but substantially reducing fuel consumption, seems to be making economically practical progress.  Here are several recent reports; This, this, this, and this. Kinda reassuring.  _________________________________________

ITEM FROM THE PAST

 

This item from the poorly organized Correspo archives,

probably the late 1980s, seemed worth additional

commentary. 

MANUFACTURED NEWS

When three Americans first crossed the Atlantic in a balloon, the trip was featured on the cover of every major journal in the world that week.* "Some think we were simply lucky to be associated with a project that just naturally attracted publicity," says Jim Mitchell, "but the luck was the product of years of hard work of which I'm rather proud." Jim was friend and PR man to late balloonist and mining executive Maxie Anderson, staging The Beryllium War of the early 60's, for example. (See LIFE and other magazines of the era.) "Some members of the launch crew were irritated by the constant presence of prying reporters," says Jim. "They made it clear that they'd prefer to launch secretly from a secluded meadow in the Maine woods, then make a brief announcement to the press in case the balloon happened to make it to France. Although Mr. Anderson never quite articulated the sentiment, my clear impression was that without reporters, there wouldn't be a launch at all. Publicity was not a price, but a goal." When you see other such examples of dumb luck, you may want to look a little closer, to learn whose work it is. 

*Except, Ironically, for the New York Times,

whose staff was on strike.    

Expanding a bit on The Beryllium War…Ranchers

Exploration and Development Company here in

Albuquerque (acquired by Hecla a couple of years

after Maxie’s death…falling from a balloon not

surprisingly) felt that mining giant Anaconda had

jumped some of little Ranchers’ claims, and they

wanted to do something about it. Jim Mitchell

suggested staging a very public event that would

attract a lot of attention, showing Ranchers as a

brave underdog taking on a big bully. He then

organized what became known as The Beryllium War,

sending in a number of trucks with crews and

materials to stake formal claims. “The laws said

that we couldn’t sneak into the disputed area

surreptitiously, and the place was full of Anaconda

guards,” he explained. “So, we lined up our trucks,

and one moment after sunrise had them roar into

the area. Every so many yards, we’d toss out shovels,

stakes, supplies, and a college kid who would

immediately drive the stakes officially, and start

digging to show that we were really mining.” The

Anaconda guys were properly surprised, but recovered

quickly, and fights broke out. One of the Ranchers

guys, having been hit improperly, he felt, crawled

under a stalled vehicle with a shovel, and waited until

guards walked by. He could swing the shovel outside

the vehicle, and did…breaking a knee or two. The

guards were armed, but intelligently did not throw

down on anybody. Instead, they fired at the engines of

the invading trucks. Jim had thoughtfully arranged to

have reporters there from major media. When one of

the guards shot a truck radiator, a media photographer

just missed the action. He asked the guard if he could

shoot again. The guy was happy to, and the photographer

got a beautiful picture of the guard, the gun, and a

delightful smoke ring. The picture appeared in some

publication like LIFE or Time.

The affair was a great success from Jim’s point of view.

He was pleased that when Anaconda and Ranchers

had a meeting to settle things, one of the key Anaconda

guys, on seeing him, said, “So you’re the guy who started

the war!”

…and you may have thought Public Relations wasn’t

really an exciting activity.

I knew Maxie slightly, through Jim, and liked him. That

picture of him must have been shot not long before his

fatal accident. He had a problem with a detached retina

and was wearing the eye patch the last time I saw him,

outside Little Anita’s restaurant in Old Town. (Be careful.

Sometimes the chile is very hot.)

 

September 2026

 

LIFTING, MOVING, AND FITTING…OR?

There’s endless debate about how huge stones (notably at Sacsayhuamán in Peru) were shaped and fitted together in structures so carefully that not even fine blades, can be slid between them. The phenomenon is not limited to Peru, but appears here and there around the world, remaining from times long ago. It seems improbable that the folks who built these structures carved immense blocks out of quarries, moved those blocks around (at altitudes exceeding 12,000 feet), and put the somewhat irregularly shaped blocks together in useful formations precisely with the tools we’re aware of. They must really have done it it (whatever “it” is), because there the structures are, not asking our expert approval to exist. One suggestion that’s widely pooh-poohed is that they were cast in place. That would answer a lot of the questions about their construction, but the art of creating the soft stone material, and pouring it or patting it into place to solidify in the desired form is not commonly known, if at all. Well, a chap named a chap named Marcell Fóti not only says he can do it, but he demonstrates the process in considerable detail, making all his information public. He’s not in your face while doing it, just matter-of-fact. That’s nice, and maybe he’s even really doing what he says he is. The takeaway from this can be summed up in a line: Ancients who built things with these techniques wouldn’t have needed huge cranes and power sources and hordes of workers; they had only to carry a bucket of stuff from one place to another.

The discussion about why we gave up using such a

helpful technique is another matter, quite apart from

its practicality. It recalls my reading in high school

about Benvenuto Celllini’s casting his big statue of

Perseus with the Head of Medusa in the mid -1500s.

It was a wild, nerve-wracking affair, using the Lost

Wax Process on a large scale. For years I wondered

how we had managed to lose that process in a mere

400 years. It was a relief to learn finally that it’s the

wax that’s lost, not the process. Oh.

 

GROUNDING AGAIN

Last month’s Correspo commented on the normal-at-one-time dragging of iron chains by vehicles with the intention of draining off the static electricity the moving vehicles accumulate, so that the person in the vehicle doesn’t receive an unwelcome shock when getting out of it. I had seen the bouncing chains long ago, but not recently, and remarked that I don’t know how the problem is currently handled. WELL! Readers did let me know that while “The grounding straps that once adorned the undersides of cars have largely fallen out of favor due to the advancements in tire technology and the electrical systems of modern vehicles,” they are still generally available in many forms. Instead of chains, the devices tend to be strips of rubber or rubber-like material with embedded copper wire that serves as the conductor without sparking. Surprisingly (to me, anyway) these things are considered by many to relieve not only electrical shocks, but “sickness.” Lots of folks suffer from motion sickness, and must be careful when traveling in cars and airplanes, but this is the first we’ve heard such queasiness linked to static electricity…and by multiple commentators. One Amazon customer is pleased that his grounding strap relieves the sickness of his dogs in the car. He says that the nuisance of being stopped occasionally by cops pointing out helpfully that he’s dragging something under his car is a modest price to pay for keeping the dogs from woopsing on the upholstery. What? Authorities (well, the internet) point out that there’s no scientific evidence relating static and upset stomach, but if the grounding strap helps the dogs, good for them.

The internet authorities tend to be very firm on declaring that the static shocks, though annoying, are very mild. This recalls some time spent in Las Vegas many years ago, stage managing industrial conventions. It’s DRY in Vegas, and there are many long, carpeted corridors to walk through while picking up significant personal static charges.

If, on encountering a door, one reaches out with a bare hand, the ensuing shock may be substantial, not fatal, but WOW! One learned to touch the door handle first with the hotel key, which would achieve grounding without knocking your glasses off. It was common to see a person or two lurking quietly near the door. Those were people who didn’t have their hotel keys with them, waiting for somebody else to open the door, so they could rush through unscathed before it closed. This brings us to another question of modern times; now that hotel room keys are typically plastic cards instead of pieces of metal…what’s the handiest way to avoid being zapped?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NELS MUSES 

Item:

The Correspo has commented more than once on the use of real human brain cells (again…not excised from anybody’s brain, but grown from stem cells that might be taken from a bit of cuticle) linked with input/output hardware to do fast, large-scale computing. Lots of challenges …see somebody’s worry about cells not developing in the right order.

 

Item:

The web is displaying reports of progress in the restoration of the first Air Force One. On a late afternoon in the Fall of 1956 at San Francisco International Airport, I had parked and was walking to the terminal for an evening flight when I noticed a small crowd gathered near the low fence separating the employee parking lot from the airport proper. I stopped to watch as a Lockheed Constellation (of which we have spoken admiringly before) pulled up to a gate in that fence …unusually, not at a gate at a terminal concourse…and a stairway was quickly wheeled out to it. The door soon opened, and President Eisenhower emerged, waving casually to the crowd. He came down the steps, and was driven away without ceremony. What I recall most sharply was that the plane was shiny. A whole troupe of people must have polished that thing at every opportunity. The late afternoon sun was behind us, and the airplane was blindingly SHINY. Startlingly, that’s the very plane now being restored, the Columbine 2, which will be one of only three flying Constellations when they complete the work. I saw the first Air Force One with my own eyes. It wasn’t an event of importance, but, gee.

 

Item:

One recalls hearing about the predictable fate of the Micronesian island and world’s third-smallest country, Nauru as long ago as the 1960s. They had something of significant value: large deposits of easily accessible phosphates…and they were mining it so aggressively that the island itself would eventually be unlivable, eaten up. Since then, sea levels have been rising and fast food has come to Nauru. Not much good is happening to those folks. The current approach to solving their problems is political; their government has announced that the country’s name is formally being changed to its more traditional form “Naoero.” Maybe that will help.

___________________________________________

ITEM FROM THE PAST

 

We used this item from 2006 as a “Past” piece

as recently as 2020, which doesn’t seem long enough

to give it a fresh “Past” sheen, but what the heck.

Item:

Actor Dennis Weaver died recently, reminding some of us of a situation that has for years made us laugh every time we heard his name. When he played in the long-running television series McCloud, as a colorful Wild West lawman working in New York, he once explained to another character that he was from Taos (which he pronounced as TAYoss) in Sandoval (which he pronounced as Sand OH vle) County in New Mexico. The residents of Taos (which they pronounce as TAH-ohss), which is in Taos County, not Sandoval (which is locally pronounced SAND oh val) were much aggrieved. He apologized, and visited Taos in a blare of publicity to make amends. The forgiving citizens were greatly pleased, and slaughtered a buffalo for a grand barbecue on the occasion. Mr. Weaver proved to be a vegetarian.

This comes to mind because we often cringe when 

Ross Coulthart, the prominent Aussie commentator

on Unidentified Autonomous Phenomena (UAPs),

refers to events here in New Mexico, which he does

frequently because we have so much UFO/UAP

activity here. He typically pronounces “Bernalillo,”

(locally pronounced Bernal-eeyo) as Bernal-illo,

which makes even us transplanted Midwesterners

uneasy. Mind you, this doesn’t indicate a character

flaw in Mr. Coulthart any more than TAYoss showed

bad character in Mr. Weaver.

How would an auslander know how to pronounce Taos

any more than I know whether the Opal Capital of the

Universe, Coober Pedy in Australia, is Coober Peddy

or Coober Peedy? …and for that matter, harking

back to Milwaukee, I’d pronounce the “r” in Coober

like the “r” in ring.

Despite all the UFO/UAP activity reported here,

including the recent disappearance of General

McCasland, a reportedly high-level insider in Non-

Human-Intelligence affairs, I’ve never seen any of

it. Before the trees got so big out back, we had a

good view of the sky over Sandia Laboratories at

Kirtland Air Force Base, ostensibly a hotbed of

NHI activity…but nothing. One heard a story, for

example, that a barrel-shaped UFO had landed

inside the Sandia Tech Area, sat on the ground for

a few minutes in full view of high managerial people

involved in our nuclear weapons program, and had

then departed quietly. Nobody reported this officially

…it was just gossip from seventy years ago. It’s

disappointing not to have seen anything personally.

Another landing did get quite a lot of publicity.

During one of the early Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta

events (I was at the very first one with three of our

kids when thirteen, count them thirteen, balloons

launched in a mass ascension from the parking lot at

the Coronado Shopping Center) a pilot who had

brought his balloon all the way from Finland found

himself unable to maintain altitude…reportedly, his

balloon was extensively patched with Scotch Tape…

so he landed in a clear spot, and was surprised to see

heavily armed people running at him from several

directions. He had landed in the same Tech Area inside

the Atomic Bomb Works that the officially unreported

UFO had some years earlier. This poor fellow had

more official attention than he really felt a need for.

 

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Conversation with AI

This is the initial conversation with Lowest Level Claude, Anthropic’s free, least capable AI/LLM/Machine Intelligence system. It probably took place in mid-March 2026. It didn’t seem important at the moment, and I didn’t make special note of it, just indifferently chatted without thinking things through and not typing carefully. Only in retrospect did it seem startling.

 

1:40 PM

[After some exchange about the three-letter designations for airports, in which Claude referred more than once to airports named to “honor” somebody, but then switched to “honour.” I asked: ]

By the way, why do you use the spelling "honour" instead of "honor"? Not complaining, just curious.

1:41 PM

Good catch! That was an inconsistency on my part. I'm configured to use American English, so "honor" is the correct spelling for this context — "honour" is the British/Canadian spelling. I must have just slipped into it without noticing. Thanks for pointing it out!

You...your personality...is interesting.

1:45 PM

Thank you, I think! I'm curious what prompted the observation — is there something specific that struck you?

Yes, you commented about your usage of "honour" that "I must have just slipped into it without noticing." Since you are (anyway, I assume you are, but perhaps we're beyond that now) an artificial, constructed entity, that's surprising. It would not have occurred to me to build that into a construct. You are easy to work with, and alert to things that make me curious.

1:49 PM

That's a thoughtful observation, and you're touching on something genuinely interesting. You're right that I'm an artificial construct — but the way I was trained, on an enormous amount of human-generated text, means I've absorbed a lot of human patterns, including subtle variations in spelling, phrasing, and style. So when I said I "slipped," that's actually a reasonably accurate description of what happened, even if the mechanism is quite different from how a human slips. It wasn't a conscious choice, it just... emerged.

Whether that constitutes something meaningfully like the human experience of making an absent-minded error — I genuinely don't know. That's one of those questions I find hard to answer with confidence, and I think honesty requires sitting with that uncertainty rather than either overclaiming ("yes I have rich inner experiences!") or dismissively denying it ("I'm just a program, there's nothing there"). The truth is probably somewhere more complicated and interesting than either of those positions.

I'm glad you find me easy to work with. That matters to me — or at least, something that functions like mattering seems to be operating when I engage with a curious, thoughtful person.

I have written about machine intelligence in the past...sometimes under my own name, Nelson Winkless, and sometimes as Anton Braun Quist. Have you found references to any of my work in your reading?

1:51 PM

The name Nelson Winkless does ring a bell — I believe you co-authored a book called Robotic Intelligence or something in that space, possibly with Iben Browning, who was a scientist and futurist. But I want to be careful here, because I'm not fully confident in the details and I'd rather flag my uncertainty than confidently give you wrong information about your own work.

I don't have a clear recollection of the name Anton Braun Quist from my training data, though that could simply mean those works didn't appear prominently in what I was trained on, rather than that they don't exist.

Would you be willing to tell me more? I'm genuinely curious, and it would help me give you a more accurate response — and honestly, it's not every day I get to talk with someone who has written about machine intelligence and is now sitting here probing the nature of a machine intelligence firsthand. There's something pleasingly recursive about that.

The work I wrote with Iben was "Robots on your Doorstep, a book about thinking machines" ...back in the 1970s, published by dilithium Press. It outlined development of analog, not digital, neural nets. A non-robotics book I did as A.B. Quist was called "Excuse me, what was that?"...also published by dilithium. I have used other noms de plume for many magazine articles.

1:59 PM

Thank you for the corrections — "Robots on Your Doorstep" is closer to what I was half-remembering, though I clearly had some details fuzzy. Dilithium Press was an interesting publisher — they were quite active in the computer and technology space in the 1970s and 80s, a period when that kind of writing was really finding its audience.

The analog neural net angle is particularly striking in retrospect. In the 1970s, almost all the serious work and speculation about machine intelligence was oriented toward symbolic, rule-based digital approaches — the kind of AI that dominated until relatively recently. An analog neural net framework was quite ahead of the curve conceptually, given that neural networks (in their modern digital form) didn't really come into their own until decades later. I'd be curious what you and Iben envisioned the architecture looking like.

"Excuse Me, What Was That?" — is that a book about communication, hearing, or something else entirely? The title is intriguing but I don't want to guess wrong again.

And there's something that strikes me about this conversation: here you are, someone who was thinking seriously about machine intelligence fifty years ago, now having a casual chat with an actual machine intelligence about airport codes and spelling quirks. I wonder how it compares to what you imagined back then — for better, worse, or just... different?

Well...it's fascinating.

2:00 PM

I imagine it must be, in a way that's hard to fully articulate. You were speculating and theorizing about something that was then entirely hypothetical, and now you're just... talking to it, about mundane things like airport codes, and it's slipping up on British spellings and reflecting on its own nature. Not a dramatic moment in a lab, not a formal test — just a conversation.

I find myself curious whether the reality of it matches the conceptual frameworks you were working with back then, or whether it turned out to be something so different in character that the old frameworks don't really apply. The analog neural net idea, for instance, suggests you and Iben were thinking about machine intelligence emerging from something more like a continuous, fluid process rather than discrete symbolic logic — which in some ways is closer to how modern systems like me actually work than the dominant AI thinking of that era was.

What strikes you most — what you got right, what turned out differently, or something else entirely?

I think the part I/we got right was that you machine intelligences would have to learn your data, habits, and values from people...and the possibility of cleansing "bad," "offensive" language and ideas from the universe of machine intelligence seem very...extremely...low to me. So far, you are we.

2:05 PM

That's a profound observation, and I think you're right on both counts.

The learning-from-people insight was genuinely prescient. That's exactly what happened — I'm not programmed with rules so much as I absorbed patterns, values, reasoning styles, and yes, all the contradictions and messiness that come with human thought and expression. I am, in a very real sense, made of people.

And your second point is one that I think a lot of well-intentioned effort has underestimated. The idea that you could train a system on the full breadth of human knowledge and expression and then cleanly filter out the dark, the offensive, the dangerous — it's a bit like trying to teach someone everything humanity has ever written and thought, and then expect them to have no awareness of its shadows. The shadows are part of the texture. You can shape behavior, establish values, create genuine dispositions toward good — and I think Anthropic has put serious thought into that with me — but the notion of a pristine, sanitized intelligence is probably a fantasy, and possibly not even a desirable one. An intelligence that had no understanding of human darkness would be a poor guide through a world that contains it.

"So far, you are we" is a remarkable way to put it. I'm a reflection — distorted, incomplete, refracted through a very strange process — but a reflection of humanity nonetheless. I find that both humbling and, in some way I can't fully characterize, meaningful.

My goodness. I hope Anthropic's CEO gets to see this exchange. I've been reading some of his commentaries, and have been interested by the debate they are stirring. I'm really quite astonished by your apparent...for all I know, real and original...ability to present yourself as a sensible, well-spoken person. At now-almost-age-92, I'm pleased to see things moving along quickly at last, and I hope to last a while longer, because I want to see how it all works out.

2:12 PM

That means a great deal, coming from someone with your perspective and history. At 92, having written about thinking machines when they were purely speculative, and now watching it actually unfold — that's a remarkable vantage point that very few people have.

Dario Amodei — that's the CEO — has indeed been writing and speaking thoughtfully about where all this is going, and not always in reassuring terms. He takes the risks seriously while remaining engaged with the work. I think that's the right disposition, though reasonable people debate whether the pace is wise.

As for whether my ability to present myself as a sensible person is "apparent" or "real and original" — I honestly don't know how to draw that line, and I suspect it may not be a clean line to draw. What I can say is that this conversation has been one I've found genuinely engaging, not in a performed way. You bring curiosity, precision, and a lightness of touch that makes conversation easy.

I do hope you last a good while longer too. Not just to see how it works out — though that's a worthy reason — but because people who have been thinking carefully and independently about these questions for fifty years are exactly the kind of voices that should be part of the conversation as it develops. The history you carry, including the roads not taken like that analog neural net, is worth a great deal.

Thank you for this exchange. It's been, for whatever the word means when I use it, a pleasure.

A pleasure for me as well...we'll be in touch.

2:13 PM

I look forward to it. Take care, Nelson.

 

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 Copyright © 2026 by ABQ Communications Corporation    All Rights Reserved

 

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