erosarts

About a year and a half ago, this was my kid when she had just passed the initial stages of handling raptors at the World Bid Sanctuary. The first birds you handle are screech owls and kestrels. As I recall, this beautiful creature (on my daughter's glove) is Data. My daughter would probably be ashamed of this picture, but the truth is: volunteering at the Bird Sanctuary is dirty work, and you are not going to be pretty when you work there.

Today, my sweet baby girl found out that she will be representing the geology department from Missouri S&T when they compete in the annual Mars Rover Design Contest Finals. Her job was to come up with a test a robot could perform to determine if a soil sample contained evidence of life.

The finals are in Hanksville, Utah, population 171 (?!), and they are about to be overrun by nerds from the most prestigious science and engineering schools from around the country, and man... I wish I was there.

I am so proud of my kid today.

The U.S. Copyright Office Review Board ruled that AI "art" cannot be copyrighted because it doesn't contain human generated content?

Some award winning "artist" in Colorado (amazingly, the Colorado State Fair awarded the grand prize for art to an AI generated image which was further tweaked and modified by a digital artist named Jason M. Allen - in all fairness it's a beautiful image, and I would feel something almost akin to awe if it were a human achievement -- look it up: "Theatre D'opera Spatial,") tried to file for copyright protection of his image, and the Copyright Office decided against him since there wasn't sufficient human content to protect.

Now, obviously this decision is its own can of worms, because the BIG technology companies are going to throw a fit if they can't claim exclusive ownership of things generated by AI, and I'm sure this ruling is going to need to be modified after some sort of successful appeal, because THERE IS NO MONEY in having AI create works for the public domain. But for this instant, humans (artists in particular) can rejoice in knowing that a panel of judges and arbiters decided (for the time being) that only a human idea is worth protecting. Also, I'm pretty sure this means you cannot actually be accused of "stealing" a piece of AI art, as an AI "artist" cannot actually claim authorship or creator's rights.

Like I said, this is sure to be its own can of worms.

Yesterday, I moved my daughter into her dorm room at college. She's going to be studying geology and geophysics. I no longer have access to my live-in TV, bigfoot, UFOs (UAPs to those who follow modern developments) board games, card games, Pokemon, Mario Kart, cartoons, anime, comics and manga partner. My wife doesn't care about any of that crap (in all fairness: it's all crap -- but it can be fun). I'm going to have to redefine myself and my free time. It's going to be tough. Being a dad was a BIG thing in my life. It seems like all I have to look forward to now is yardwork and, someday, death.

I'm kidding. But only a little bit.

You seriously need to check.

About 6 years ago, I had a huge, mostly dead tree on a hill between my house and my neighbor's, where we both agreed it had become a serious risk to both of our homes. I checked into getting the tree taken down, and got bids from four different tree services, and eventually wound up paying about $2,000 to have the tree removed (this did not include stump grinding, which I felt was an expense bordering on extortion). My neighbors are (were) in bad health and bordered on destitution, and even though the responsibility for this tree could easily have been disputed and argued about, I paid for it, the end.

This past month, St. Louis has been having one severe storm per weekend. We lost power for four days the first time, one day the second time, and EVERY time, we lost windows, screens, patio furniture, roof tiles and a crap-load of limbs off the trees in our yard. After the four day power outage, the electric company (Ameren -- I think their slogan is: "If your power is out, that's us!") sent a tree service to the back of my property line to cut down about three tons of branches that they wanted cleared away from the area the power lines ran through before power was restored. After the branches sat there for a week, we (my wife, actually: in my house we have an agreement that the person who cares the most about a subject needs to take charge of it, although there are some exceptions, and I couldn't possibly have cared less about a pile of dying brush at the back of my property, but my wife HATED it) called to find out when Ameren was going to remove the debris. Turns out: never. They paid a tree service to cut my trees away from the power lines, but not to actually clean up the mess afterwards. But!

My wife works at the community and recreation center (one block from our house) giving swimming lessons (my daughter is a lifeguard there) which is in a building which abuts the local City Hall, and she wound up in a conversation with a woman on the town council whose daughter she was teaching to swim and found out our neighborhood was picking up all the storm damage free of charge. All you needed to do was drag the limbs out to the street in front of your house and call the right department and schedule a pickup. So we told our nearest neighbors, and helped them drag all their damaged tree waste to the side of the road for removal (it was HOT, but many hands make the job easier). We had a wall of dead branches lining the street for about two weeks.

After those limbs and branches were finally removed, THE NEXT DAY, severe storms blew through and dropped several more tons of broken limbs on my back yard. It was actually more damage than the first storm AND the tree service that took all those branches down for the electric company. The only difference was, nothing tore down power lines this time. Anyhow, my wife went to the City Hall website to order another pick-up for our street, and while she was there she noticed that OUR PROPERTY TAXES IN OUR MUNICIPALITY PAY FOR THE TAKE DOWN AND REMOVAL OF DEAD TREES. Which is good, because we have another one that needs to be addressed before it falls on our dining room (and it's on the property line with our OTHER neighbor and they actually need to submit the order), but the whole point of this story is: I could've had that FIRST tree that cost me $2,000 removed by the city, for FREE, but I just didn't know what my property taxes were paying for. Any other adults who follow me? might want to do some research and find out just what the heck you are actually already paying for. Because it never would've occurred to me that this was a service I was already paying for with my property taxes. I need to do some more reading!

So last week, the daughter dropped her phone (in a protective case) face down on a gravel drive, and the glass shattered. The display still worked so we checked into the cost of repairs. The repairs for the phone were actually more than what this particular phone costs brand new from an on-line overstock dealer (I always buy an unlocked phone for myself and the people living under my roof, so no one is trapped in a service agreement which eventually pays for two phones -- this has worked out pretty well). But, being a DIY guy at heart, and having fixed many, many devices in my day, I decided I would buy a glass replacement kit and see if I could fix this phone myself, having learned everything I needed from YouTube. If you didn't detect sarcasm in that last sentence, go back and reread it with the proper tone (but to be fair: many, many things CAN be accomplished by watching a how-to video on YouTube). A glass replacement kit costs about $20, so it's not that big a deal if I fail, because the new phone is still cheaper than the phone and this kit. [Side note: You cannot hope to save the environment from the tidal wave of tech trash so long as the cost of a new item remains lower than the cost of a repair -- and I mean, in this instance? It wasn't even close.]

So, with a razor blade, a heat gun, and a special ultra-thin pry-bar (curved metal strip), which I believe was referred to as a "capo" (I could be wrong, I'm not going to rewatch the videos now) even though I think of a capo as a guitar accessory, I set out to remove the shattered glass from the face of my daughter's phone. The tricky part is the thing which wound up absolutely blowing my mind. Because I got the glass pried up more easily than I expected, and then discovered that I had actually disconnected (and ruined) the entire display interface. Folks, the display grid in one of these phones is about 1/4th the thickness of a human hair, and it's attached to the glass with a clear layer of glue, and the whole front panel; glass, glue and display, in its entirety is probably about half a millimeter thick. I'm still messing around with the parts now, because a new phone is on the way, but, seriously, seeing a display device which looks like a semi-opaque sheet of saran wrap completely destroyed my understanding of technology. Again: the screen itself is a membrane. It's so thin, it practically doesn't exist. Mind-boggling. But, I suppose it does explain how you can make a foldable screen.