LTSD

Later, that same day --

I've been sitting here in the living room, alternately reading and musing.

The reading has been mostly Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, with a little Artisan Baking Across America. I'm a little stunned by the AIM book - it's very good, but it's also very dense. I have to slow waaaaay down to read things, even just to 'get the sense' of what they're talking about. This is a characteristic of books like this -- they're not light reading. Back when I would routinely read things from the Computer Measurement Group, I'd see papers like this -- you had to stop and actively think about what they were presenting to you. This is a good thing, at least to me, because it means that I'm learning something. It istn't just 'oh, yeah, I've seen this before, blah blah blah' types of things. Many of the topics, I'm not interested in -- creation of ontologies, applications of case based reasoning, some applications -- but even that is goodness because it forces me to think about what, exactly, I'm looking for in reading this material. What problem am I trying to solve? For the longest time, I thought of AI as a monolith, but over the last six months or so I've started thinking of it more as tools rather than one size fites all. I came across a quote the other day, don't recall exactly what it was, but the gist was 'every time we thought we had artificial intelligence, it turned out to just be some more code', and thats how I'm starting to view it. Its not magic, its just code. Okay, very, very slick code, but still: code. And code, you pick and choose according to the problem you're trying to solve.

The musing has been about the idea of getting the big screen TV -- big screen being a relative term. We have a picture hanging in our bedroom thats about 39 inches diagonally, and that seems to us to be a good side for a tv that'd be viewed from about ten feet away. Of course, when I 'see' it in my head, it's got the full monty of options, from the DVD player and associated audio, including dispersed speakers to new comfortable chairs and better lighting. Whether we'd actually do all of that is another question. We have some audio equipment down there now, but its old, and I'm willing to replace it if needed -- just, not with some megaboxes with many blinking lights and flat black panels. That limitation does restrict my options, so I tend to think 'okay, just the TV... for now'. Maybe.