Author. Thinker. Other things.
What you are about to read is not my writing, not all of it, anyway. It’s been generated by an AI bot with prompts from me. I’m using "frase" technology, because I'm too impatient to wait to be let into the ChatGPT website. So, you get onto frase and scroll down (way down) to the... Continue Reading →
I’ve been reading a lot lately about de-extinction. Quaggas, Passenger Pigeons, the Thylacine (or Tasmanian tiger - in fact neither a tiger, nor specifically Tasmanian). Not remotely smacking of necromancy, smart geneticists are working diligently to bring these and other species back from the afterlife. In doing so, they expect not only to resurrect the... Continue Reading →
Manatees are hard not to love. It's not exactly that they're charismatic - slow and ponderous, their beady little eyes constantly on the prowl for the next snack. But nonetheless, they capture the hearts of many people, for their cuteness, playfulness, and tendency to appear in warm water of places like Florida, which gives people... Continue Reading →
Just a couple of weeks after the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day, which was meant to engage the world in "a billion acts of green," saw us focusing instead on a global Coronavirus pandemic catalyzed, it would seem, by eating wild animals (most likely bats) from so-called "wet markets" in Wuhan (if you follow the... Continue Reading →
I've always loved this painting. Vertumnus looks serenely at the viewer, a slight smile making you think he knows something you'd like to. It's a clever work of Mannerism, seamlessly weaving a complex array of perfectly rendered fruits and other plants into the portrait of a human face full of character. The portrait is of... Continue Reading →
Last September, there was a brief flurry of activity over the idea of a program that can distinguish homosexual versus heterosexual faces, based on their online dating image (see this, for instance, from the BBC). It started shortly before a scientific article was published by Stanford's Yilun Wang Michal Kosinski in the online journal Open... Continue Reading →
When Juan Ponce de León traveled from Spain to the New World in 1513, he was looking for immortality. Legend has it that he was looking for the fabled fountain of youth. During his journey he named the state of Florida and his quest catalyzed the name of the Florida town of Ponce de León,... Continue Reading →
ERIC DORFMAN 