Daves Stuff
Every Garden Has a Few Weeds
Sunday, November 10, 2024
Sunset Poem
I never wrote a Poem so I asked ChatPT to write a sunset poem.
Taken Chinook Wa.
The sun dips low in fading light,
A golden glow gives way to night.
The sky in hues of pink and red,
As day bows down, its colors spread.
Soft whispers dance in twilight’s breeze,
Through swaying grass and shadowed trees.
A quiet peace, the world made small—
The sky holds still, the stars recall.
And as the sun slips out of sight,
It leaves a kiss of gentle light.
A promise kept, though darkness grows,
That dawn returns with morning’s rose.
P
A quiet
Saturday, October 9, 2010
100 Years Ago...
A lot of this is applicable to our grandparents, and even some of our parents.
It May Be Hard to Believe That A Scant 100 Years Ago...
- The average life expectancy in the United States was forty-seven.
- Only 14 percent of the homes in the United States had a bathtub.
- Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone. A three minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.
- There were only 8,000 cars in the US and only 144 miles of paved roads.
- The maximum speed limit in most cities was ten mph.
- Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California. With a mere 1.4 million residents, California was only the twenty-first most populous state in the Union.
- The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower.
- The average wage in the U.S. was twenty-two cents an hour. The average U.S. worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
- A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2500 per year, a veterinarian between $1500 and $4000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5000 per year.
- More than 95 percent of all births in the United States took place at home.
Author Unknown
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
The Owl & the Pussy-Cat
The Owl & the Pussy-Cat
Edward Lear
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat.
They took some honey and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
'O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!'
Pussy said to Owl, 'You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?'
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-Tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood,
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose!
With a ring at the end of his nose.
'Dear Pig, are you willing to selling for one shilling
Your ring?' Said the Piggy, 'I will.'
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Swarm of locusts
Interesting article from The Writer's Almanac
It was on this day in 1875 that the largest recorded swarm of locusts in American history descended upon the Great Plains. An estimated 3.5 trillion locusts made up the swarm. It was about 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide, ranging from Canada down to Texas.
Swarms would occur once every seven to 12 years, emerging from river valleys in the Rocky Mountains and sweeping east across much of the country. The size of the swarms tended to grow when there was less rain, and in 1873, the American West began to go through one of its driest periods on record.
The land was still relatively dry on this day in 1875 when farmers just east of the Rocky Mountains began to see a cloud approaching from the west. Some farmers noticed the distinctive color of the cloud, glinting around the edges where the locust wings caught the light of the sun.
People there that day said that the locusts descended like a driving snow in winter, covering everything in their path. Some people described the sound of the swarm landing as like thunder or a train. The locusts blanketed the ground, nearly a foot deep. Trees bent over with the weight of the insects, and large tree limbs broke off under the pressure.
They ate nearly every living piece of vegetation in their path, as well as harnesses on horses, the bark of trees, curtains, and clothing hung on laundry lines. They gnawed on fence posts and railings, and they especially loved the handles of farm tools, which were left behind polished, as if by fine sandpaper. Some farmers tried to scare away the locusts by running into the swarm, and they had their clothes eaten right off their bodies.
In the wake of the swarm, settlers on half a million square miles of the West faced starvation. Similar locust swarms occurred in the following years, and farmers became desperate. But by the mid-1880s, the rains had returned, and the swarms died down. Most scientists predicted that the locusts would return with the next drought. Mysteriously, they did not. Within a few decades they were believed to be extinct. For most of the 20th century, no one knew what had happened to the locusts, but recent evidence suggests that the cultivation of the land on the Great Plains changed the geography so much so quickly that the Rocky Mountain locust was unable to adapt. The last two live specimens of the Rocky Mountain locust were collected in 1902, and those specimens are now stored at the Smithsonian Institution.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
"Can machines think?"
"Can machines think?" The problem can be described in terms of the "imitation game", with a man, a woman, and an interrogator. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two and tries, by sending questions (perhaps by teleprinter) to the others, to determine which is the man and which the woman. Could a digital computer convince the interrogator that it was a man?
Digital computers work by following written-down rules, called 'programmes', and can even change their own rules in response to other rules. I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible to programme computers to make them play the imitation game.
It could be argued that machines cannot have souls, but, if this matters at all, why could not God give a soul to whatever He wants. We cannot know if computers could have consciousness, because we cannot really know if other people have consciousness. Computers can still surprise us with their answers. It might be best to try and build a computer like a human infant, and then programme it to learn.
Alan Turing, 1905
Computing Machinery and Intelligence read more