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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. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright © 2026 by ABQ Communications Corporation All Rights Reserved |
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