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.

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

One last tidbit from the news

Computer Network Piecing Together a Jigsaw of Jewish Lore

The idea is to harness technology to help reassemble more than 100,000 document fragments collected across 1,000 years that reveal details of Jewish life along the Mediterranean, including marriage, medicine and mysticism. For decades, scholars relied mainly on memory to match up pieces of the Cairo genizah, a treasure trove of papers that include works by the rabbinical scholar Maimonides, parts of Torah scrolls and prayer books, reams of poetry and personal letters, contracts, and court documents, even recipes (there is a particularly vile one for honey-wine).

Okay, it's after midnight; time for bed. I had a lovely evening watching things like 'Jam & Jerusalem' and 'Let Them Eat Cake'. I do love Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, and I have enjoyed everything I've seen them in, both as a team and individually.