Love, fashion, artificial intelligence, famous quips, and a poem
By Chuck Wiser, I write the words to share what my eyes see and my heart feels
My wife is the consummate home holiday decorator. Our house morphs and changes with every single holiday, and Valentines Day was no exception. The most joyous of the holidays, or at least those typically prone to an abundance of decorations like Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter and Halloween feature our house filled with “seasonal” trimmings. Later “day of” or for sure the next day, the decorations come down. As I made my morning coffee today I noticed the Valentines Day decorations in a neat pile awaiting their storage and Easter decorations have already been uncloseted.
Last week I posted an amorous poem as my “closer” with the promise to follow up with another poem co-inspired by the holiday which would have come and gone, albeit only by a day, and by the individual that inspires most of my poetic writings. I will close todays Wramblings with that poem.
I have been in the throes of a medical issue lately, so I haven’t been “out and about” much nor doing a lot of philosophical ponderings; so todays Wrambling may not be as long as others. Who knows though, once I start rumbling with my Wramblings, the ideas sometimes just continue generating. I skipped some last week given the time spent on a topic that popped up, so I will pickup on the left overs.
Growing up financially challenged early on with my single parent mom struggling a little, I was sometimes sensitive to the appearance of my clothing. I was embarrassed to go into public with frayed or torn clothing. As a humorous, perhaps puzzling side note, which word in that last sentence could be broken into phonetic syllables to explain the condition of my clothing? Hint…it’s the one in bold print
Back on point, despite, or maybe because of, my early childhood concerns about my attire, my first case of admiration goes back to the early 70’s when one of my co-workers, whose dad was also my boss, occasionally would unabashedly wear a tee shirt under his dress shirt with an obvious tear separating the collar trim from the rest of the fabric. I was also ashamed to wear a pair of socks with holes in the heel, that may have also been visible to others. In this day and age, hole-ey is wholly holy. Clothes are intentionally made and sold as “designer items” with torn knees, frayed collars, and with holes patched and stitched prominently displayed.
AI or Artificial Intelligence, is now becoming much more commonplace and is taking over many aspects of day to day living, obvious to the average person in social media platforms and media presentations. AI is not new. I was teaching the early aspects of Artificial Intelligence in my Automation in Manufacturing bachelor degree level courses in the very early 2000’s. AI uses vast amounts of stored informational data to predict or produce statistically probable results. The simplest or easiest common day example of this might be obvious to those who use a word processor, or any type of text inputting device, that will show examples or suggestions of the next text to follow, or corrections as you type along.
I call this auto-correct feature “auto-defect” as it doesn’t know what I want to say, or how I typically say it. I do use this feature to double check my “punctuation” however as the placement of commas is an art in and of itself. Autocorrect assumes that anything being typed must be as precise as if it was done “robotically,” and did not use conversational communication in the reading text environment. When speaking you might start a comment with “Actually, what I meant to say was…” Autodefect flags the word “Actually” suggesting that you start the sentence as; “What I meant to say was…”. Lately I’ve noticed that the autosuggest feature also adds suggestions to the last few letters of a word as you type along. I still haven’t figured out what to do to accept the suggested letters to end the word.
In the generation of Art or presentation graphics, caricature in cartoons and commercials, and even writing, to me, AI can be an affront to the artists and craftsman who creatively produce such “artwork.” If all artwork was artificially produced from this day forward, one major component that an artist gives to their creations is that of human feelings. AI can predict, but it cannot feel. It has no emotion, heart, or soul, and that is what makes the artists’ works so special and valuable either in terms of currency or in human value.
I may be mentioning something as a repeat, but my age excuses that. I have often expressed that I wanted to be a writer. People have suggested that perhaps I should write a book. I admit to having considered that, but I would fail. I marvel at a fiction writer who can think and plot through several different scenarios to tell a complete story. I have dreams that last longer than what my mind would allow me to expand into a story. My explanation of a fiction writer is that it is someone that can “dream out loud.” I do have a book of poems available in both the Wellsville and Friendship libraries.
I often wonder about the sayings, and slang words that have evolved over centuries. If you think about them, most of them make perfect sense. But, how did they get recorded? They are now available via various search engine queries. Are they so intuitive that they just get passed along verbally from generation to generation. Here are a few that I didn’t mention the last time I addressed this issue. Apologies for any repeats or to those who’ve never heard these!
- A stitch in time saves nine.
- Cutting through the red tape…
- Like pulling strings (Could this be from unraveling a ball or scooping spaghetti out of a bowl?
- One can’t see the forest for the trees.
- Tearing at your heart strings…
- Don’t be a Wiesenheimer (Given my name this was commonly heard)
- I’ll be hornswoggled.
- You’ll end up in the Hoosegow.
- At the drop of a hat…
- You’re barking up the wrong tree.
- Burning the midnight oil
- Caught red handed.
- In the nick of time
- Paint the town red
Following is the poem I promised last week, and which was presented to my wife yesterday as my Valentines Day gift.
Feel free to contact me at IM.Wiserdad@gmail.com with any questions, suggestions, comments, or concerns.
