This saddens me so much

Yet I'm guilty of it, too. But I treasure moments like thinking while watching sparrows flitting between branches of bushes when I wait for a bus.  That sort of thinking. It is absolutely useful time.

I need to be off my phone and computer more. Today I've mainly just checked my bank balance, my email, and applied for two jobs at UK so I can put them in for unemployment. But yes, I think my roommate has the right of it. He only has a landline, no cell phone, not just not a smart phone, no cell phone at all. I wouldn't want to be cut off completely, but I need to cut back some.  I was at a grant writing workshop on Thursday after a job interview and we discussed context switching and how much time is wasted with it, and phones are so much a part of that.

I don't want to give into the tech overlords just yet; give me a real person anytime

I recently went into a fast food restaurant [cough, cough, Taco Bell on Harrodsburg Road here in Lexington], waited patiently, was finally told someone would be with me after 5 minutes, then was told by the cashier to use the kiosk. When I said no, I wanted to order in person, she gestured there and made it clear that's where she wanted me to order. I said no, she shrugged and gestured again. I left. As I got into my car, she went out for her smoke break, the apparent reason she didn't want to serve me. I complained through the rewards app with details, but never heard from corporate. I will not step foot in that store. I haven't given up on the company, but I am still not happy with the outcome. And I will not use a kiosk. For one, I don't want to deal with what sort of germs before I eat it. I usually go through the drive-through, so I hadn't encountered this before.

This is so refreshing

I was lucky to have an education in history and classical studies, and I participated in the Honours Program at UK, a Great Books programme, not quite a major, not quite a minor, it's just on my diploma as a separate course of study, which included not just great literature but the gamut of philosophy from ancient to modern times. Add library science into that, and you've got critical thinking, critical analysis of sources, and expertise in finding resources in various media, as well as cataloguing them in ways to make sure they can be found. So...this is really refreshing in a world of AI and short videos where teens challenge each other to eat laundry pods. He's really right. What the world of business needs is not automatons who can do cookie-cutter tasks that can be replaced by technology; they need people who can think outside the box and think better than a computer...and that means they need to analyse things better than artificial intelligence as only a human mind can. That you get from things like, you get it, the humanities, philosophy, all those majors that get no love. Or, for that matter, just reading wonderful books. We have all the knowledge of human history practically available at our fingertips on the internet, and we use it for the stupidest things. Any of us can educate ourselves and become well-read, and it's a shame that so many people take absolutely no advantage of it.

As CEOs predict AI will rival humans in 5 years, Shark Tank’s Daniel Lubetzky tells Gen Z to get off TikTok and study Greek philosophers to get ahead

Years ago I heard about an intiative at my alma mater

To try to read scrolls from Herculaneum that had been chard in the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79 CE. My professor, Ross Scaife, of the Classics department, is the one who mentioned it. He had been working with people from Computer Science to develop a way to read them using technology. Unfortunately, he died a few years ago, of cancer, I believe, but this would have made him very happy, I think.

Breakthrough in Vesuvius Challenge as AI reads 2,000-year-old burned scroll at UK