On Cicadas

The cicadas are loud this year. Quite loud. At least they are where I live in Pudong. Their sound, which is almost indescribable – not a buzz, more a pulsating chatterous skeez – fills the air day and night. The high point came a couple weeks back when they set up a truly deafening, almost three-dimensional roar. They are trailing off now. Day by day the sound thins, like the tide going out leaving small islands here and there. Soon there won’t even be islands – just silence. Now there are are only a few left. You probably won’t even notice they’re gone, just like you barely noticed they were there. How can something so loud be so invisible?

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Computer Kind

Sometime in the early months of 2002, when I was trapped in a Montreal apartment by a wall of snow and lack of money, I wrote a story about artificial intelligence called Computer Kind. After recently reading this interesting–if excitable–blog post which lays a convincing case for real-deal AI coming on the scene in 2040 with a superintelligent form of it right around 2060, I revisited the story. I found that it’s relevant. Very relevant. And so here it is in its entirety.

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Rain Delay: Let’s Talk about the Environment

It’s a good week to think about the environment and talk about the environment. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just a few days ago released a summary of the first part of its big climate report. The contents were not surprising: the earth, the air, the seas, the lakes everything is getting warmer, mainly due to carbon added to the atmosphere and most of that coming from human activities.

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