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Artificial Intelligence: Angel or Armageddon? Why not both?

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Created by GPT-5.5 I signed up for an online course through the Quaker Conference center Pendle Hill . The course is titled  Artificial Intelligence: Angel or Armageddon?  The first session was this afternoon. It left me with a number of questions and concerns. I'm not sure I can articulate them well. Ted Chiang does a better job explaining than I can. Animal intelligence is embodied. Humans, like all living things, are embedded in the world. Every second we receive a barrage of signals from our senses. They are filtered, integrated with internal signals from out gut, endocrine system, immune system, nervous system, etc. Some are processed by our brains. Most are processed in other systems. Some of the signals in our brain reach the level of attention. Some of these signals may even cause our brains to generate internal dialog (consciousness) , e.g. that tastes good, ouch that hurt.  Most of the time when we talk about AI these days, we're referring to LLMs. LMMs ar...
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Measles by the Numbers

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  Generated by ChatGPT 5.2 On Feb. 28, 2026, I downloaded data for reported weekly US measles cases by rash onset from the CDC website  https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html  into a file named  measles_data_weekly.csv . I plotted the data using R. library (tidyverse) df_by_week <- read_csv ( "/mnt/g/measles/data/measles_data_weekly.csv" ) > head (df_by_week) # A tibble: 6 × 2 week_start cases < date > < dbl > 1 2022-01-02 0 2 2022-01-09 0 3 2022-01-16 0 4 2022-01-23 0 5 2022-01-30 1 6 2022-02-06 0 > # plot weekly data ggplot (df_by_week, aes (x = week_start, y = cases)) + geom_bar (stat = "identity" , color = 'blue' ) + labs (x = "Date" , y = "Cases" , title = "Measles Cases by Week" ) What happened in February 2025? One thing was that a new administration was in place in Washington with an  anti-vax ...
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SECD and Functional Lisp

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Image generated by Claude.ai The SECD machine  is a virtual machine designed to be a target m platform for functional programming languages, in particular Lispkit Lisp. the SECD name comes from the four basic registers of the virtual machine: stack, environment, control, and dump. Three of the registers typically act as stacks: stack, control, and dump. The environment register usually contains an associative array.  The SECD machine was originally described by Peter Landin in " The Mechanical Evaluation of Expressions " in 1964. The version I am considering here is described in  Peter Henderson's book Functional Programming Application and Implementation [1980]. It's out of print. You can find used copies for sale online.  S-expressions Each cycle of the SECD machine updates one or more of the registers. An SECD program is an encoding of a functional program into machine code. In the SECD representation, each operation is represented as a number. The SECD machine o...
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