Allyson Johnson

Pieces of my Mind

Archive for the category “Events”

18 Feb 2025
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Artificial Intelligence – a Cosmic Joke?

The media is full of information and speculation about AI – Artificial Intelligence.  Will it supplant human intelligence?  Will robots become sentient?  Will humans become obsolete, or at best slaves to their robot superiors?

Most of this speculation is poppycock, fueled by a misnomer.  AI as we see it in operation does not involve intelligence at all.  AI is a form of search technology that, in response to a request, can search through gazillions of online data points, accumulate the ones which seem relevant, and serve them up either as an undigested mass of trivial and not-so trivial information or a digested mass of pablum which reflects only the most common points made about the subject. 

At best, AI is a tool which can facilitate research by searching online texts, posts, and scanned media for keywords.  But it cannot judge which of the texts, posts or other media are most relevant to the question.  It cannot judge whether a given text is fact or fantasy.  For that you need a human interpreter.

“Generative” AI can take the results of its research and, based on its scans of human writings, deliver it in the form of an essay or article.  But in aping human writing, it may slide over gaps in its story by inventing plausible-sounding text to fill in the gap.  Even AI experts can be taken in, as was Stanford professor Jeff Hancock, who was called as an expert witness in a case involving AI-generated “deep fake” photos.  Hancock used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to find and summarize articles on how AI can generate misinformation, and failed to notice that the software had inserted non-existent sources in spots where Hancock had noted “needs citation” in his request. [San Jose Mercury News, Dec 4 2024]  His testimony was thrown out.

I’ve begun to see generative AI’s pre-digested paragraphs popping up in unwelcome places.  Google search now often delivers an AI-generated paragraph in answer to such questions as “How often should I water my orchids?” and Microsoft’s CoPilot offers to summarize my incoming emails. But these paragraphs have no flavor or nuance, no detail or  backup or discussion of possible exceptions. 

Google has realized that the more web content is generated by AI rather than humans, the less reliable and interesting that content is going to be.  Further, the more people rely on these AI-generated summaries, the less they will scroll down to the sponsored links which generate Google’s revenue.  Melissa Schilling, professor of management at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has said “AI is to search what e-commerce was to Walmart.”

If the degradation of the Internet were the only adverse side effect of AI’s rise, we would have enough to worry about.  But AI is not just an attention-getting device.  It is a terribly hungry and expensive device.  According to Deepa Seetharaman writing in the Wall Street Journal [Dec 21, 2024, p. B1],” a six-month training run for a new AI product can cost around half a billion dollars in computing costs alone.”  The data centers which provide the computing power that AI needs to run require hefty amounts of energy, water for cooling, and land to build on.  Already some cities such as Atlanta are pushing back against the takeover of greenspace in its suburbs by proliferating data centers.   [WSJ Dec 28, 2024]

Our civilization is already struggling with climate change. We are trying desperately to cut back on the use of fossil fuels.  We urge water conservation to stop the desertification of open land due to the deterioration of underground aquifers and diversion of surface water for agriculture and industry.  But the energy requirements of the expanding AI industry will gobble up all the gains we have made in this area and demand still more energy to fuel its growth.  Already the energy requirements of AI are equal to the energy used by the Netherlands. [CITE?]

Is AI a kind of cosmic joke?  Just at the time when we need most to conserve water and energy, the Universe dangles this glittering toy in front of our innovation-hungry eyes. Humanity has a poor record of resisting temptation.  Will we be able to resist this time? 

Posted in Events and tagged
17 Sep 2024
1 Comment

Word Gets Around

I was attending a Women’s Camp on the west side of the Rockies in Colorado. My sister-in-law was at the camp also, along with one of her besties. One evening one of the other campers (DH) drove me and my friend DB to dinner and a theatre in Grand Lake, while my SIL and her friend spent the day touring nearby Rocky Mountain National Park.

Dinner was lively, with sixteen campers chattering away, and afterward we hurried to get to the theatre as it was beginning to rain. I pulled out my phone to check the location of the theatre, and when we parked I hurried around to help DB extricate herself from the seat belt. Only after we were in the theatre and I reached to put my phone on silent mode did I realize that it was not in my purse where it belonged.

Had it fallen out in the car? Or in the parking lot where we had stopped? I rushed from the theatre – the car was locked, and there was no sign of my phone anywhere along the walkway to the theatre. I figured that best case, when the show was over I could ask DH to call my number; if the phone was in the car we would hear it, and if someone had picked it up maybe they might answer a call.

After the show I relayed my plan to DH, and she pulled out her phone. First thing she saw was an urgent message from my SIL: “Allyson’s lost phone was picked up by an Australian man named Barney. He and his friends are at the One Love Rum Kitchen and Bar for trivia night. If Allyson doesn’t get the message he will leave the phone with the bartender.”

Great! DH and I left DB to guard the car and hustled along to the One Love Rum Kitchen. We walked into the lively, well-lit pub and immediately a gentleman was waving my phone in our direction. ( Barney could not have looked more Australian if he had been sent from Central Casting.) Lots of excitement, thanks, hugs, and my phone was restored to me in perfect order (Nancy and Barney at left above). But how had the message reached DH’s phone?

Chain of circumstances:

  1. I had not gotten around to putting a password to secure access to the phone. (Shame on me, but…)
  2. When Barney and his friend Nancy opened the phone, they were able to see that I had recently called HOME.
  3. But when Nancy called HOME, she caught my husband drowsing over a book. He did not understand what Nancy was saying and, thinking it was a prank call, hung up on her.
  4. Undaunted, they went to the next call on the recent list, my younger brother C, who was trailer camping in Wyoming, but happily with decent Internet coverage.
  5. C got the message, and fortunately remembered that our mutual SIL was in Colorado at the camp with me. But he didn’t have her phone number.
  6. So C called my older brother D in Texas, who relayed the message to his wife, whose roommate happened to have the cell phone number for DH, who relayed it to me.

Happy Ending! thanks to the miracle of modern communication, and as always, thanks to the kindness of strangers.

Posted in Colorado, Events, Freeway Free, Memoir, Travel and tagged ,
23 Jul 2024

Freeway Free in France: The Torch is Passed

We happen to be in Arles as France prepares for the Olympics to take place in Paris later in the year.

This is a really big deal. The Tourist office has an eight-page magazine detailing all the civic celebrations which will precede and follow the actual passing of the torch. (the gladiator combat and bull fight we saw earlier in the week were part of the celebration) and also includes a detailed map of the route the torch will take through Arles, beginning at the Musee d’Arles Antiques and continuing through the center of town past all the major monuments and ending with a “dance spectacle” at the riverside.

The night before the actual running of the torch offers a free fireworks display, so after dinner EJ and I joined the throngs heading to the Roman Amphitheatre. The spectacle, presented in a completely dark Amphitheatre, involved a lot of torches swung in pattterns by people of indeterminate sex wearing costumes made out of what looked like burlap bags, a juggling unicyclist, a lot of kerosene dripped on the ground and lit in patterns, fireworks, and skyrockets. Wow. Happily the lights came on as we descended from our nosebleed seats.

The next day I walk through the city center and next to the Tourist Office is a street fair, with a community band playing, and a number of booths set up to allow children to practice American football, or play ping pong, or show off their karate moves. A lot of dumb fun for parents and kids.

Fortuitously, our hotel is right on the path of the Olympic torch as it passes through the city, and as I leave to meet our friends for dinner the next evening , I come out the door to see the actual passing of the torch from one former French Olympian to another.

The side of the street are packed with smiling on-lookers. At one point, a young man who is apparently on one of the French teams stopped the parade for a quick interview, surrounded by his teammates and applauding fans.

I understand that Parisians are griping about the upset to normalcy required to prepare the City of LIght for a week of Olympic competition. From down here in the provinces, though, it’s hard to feel bad about something which is making so many people happy.

Posted in Events, France, Freeway Free, Travel and tagged , , | Leave a comment
16 Jul 2024
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Freeway Free in France: Gourmet Day

EJ suggested that a Provencale cooking class would be fun, and two of us took up the suggestion. EJ, SF and I meet Erick Vendel at his home, and proceed with him and his assistant Sylvia to the vast Saturday market along George Clemenceau Blvd in central Arles.  I heroically walk past the racks of 5 euro dresses and 7 euro hats but allow myself tastes of wonderful cheese, olive bread, salami,and other bits while odors of paella, falafel, and various exotic spices waft past, while Erick chooses supplies from his favorite vendors

Once back at the well-supplied cooking kitchen, we learn how to make Mille feiulles de legumes (there’s a trick to grating the garlic) pintade  aux olives, (Chef Erick gallantly chopped off the head and feet of the pintade [guinea fowl] for us), torte aux blettes (be sure to wring out the chard), riz au gingembre and tarte tatin (amazingly easy and dramatic upside-down apple pie dessert!)

Everything in the oven or on the rack! Triumphant sous-chefs take a moment.

Then we sit down and eat it all, together with wine and digestif, which makes conversation lively in English and French. Then, clutching our recipes, we totter back to our hotels for what will probably be naptime.

Posted in Events, France, Freeway Free, Memoir, Travel and tagged ,
11 Jun 2024

Freeway Free in Texas – Eclipse Day

For some people, seeing a total solar eclipse is a bucket list item. For me, it was a lucky accident: I always visit my brother D in Texas in late March or early April, and he happens to live in Georgetown, right in the path of the totality of April 8th. I asked him way back last August if I could stay an extra day for the eclipse and he agreed; then my son and his family asked the same favor a few weeks later, so we end up with a mini-reunion.

D belongs to a golf club, and the club makes an occasion of Eclipse Day, with access offered to the driving range for an unobstructed view. Since the celestial event is scheduled for about 1:30 PM Texas time, the club also sets up an outdoor grill serving hamburgers and hot dogs, with soft drinks on tap and Milky Way bars for dessert. (Cute!)

The eclipse – peekaboo clouds, and then just before totality, they part perfectly to frame the diamond ring, then almost evaporate completely as the aurora flares out and a few red coals glow on the rim of the moon – solar flares, I am told later.  The audience spontaneously applauds – good show, God!  Amazing that if the moon were just a bit smaller, or the sun just a bit closer, the effect would not occur. Is this Creation at work for us or just lucky coincidence?   

Posted in Events, Freeway Free, Memoir, Texas, Travel and tagged , , , | Leave a comment
15 Apr 2024

New Year for China: Feedback and Blowback

When my previous post “New Year for China” was published in the LATC, I hoped to get a letter or two of appreciation for my positive write-up of the the local celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year and for my regrets about the deterioration of relations between China and the US over the past 20 years.

Here are the letters that came in.

And here was my published response :

Was my original writing really that muddled? Perhaps some readers had earlier bad experiences of Sinophobia, which made them sensitive to possible slights, implications, and innuendoes.

My granddaughter, as a toddler, was knocked over by an unleashed dog, and has been afraid of dogs ever since. Not unreasonable. But, I hope, overcomeable. No one should have to live on the alert for danger.

Posted in Events, Memoir, TOWN CRIER, Travel and tagged | Leave a comment
09 Mar 2024
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A Piece of My Mind: New Year for China (Los Altos Town Crier March 6, 2024

Last weekend I happened by the local community center and saw a queue of parents and children waiting outside, many wearing bright red shirts, ribbons, or hats.  Other families were walking away, many with children waving brightly colored pinwheels or carrying red and gold balloon creations and bright red swag bags.  Of course, it was the community celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year, the Year of the Dragon.

I was reminded of my trip to Hong Kong at the turn of the 21st century. Hong Kong celebrated the Year of the Golden Dragon with fireworks, lanterns, and no apparent fear of the impending handover of the colony from British to Chinese jurisdiction.  

In those years I visited China several times for business and for pleasure. Deng Xiao Ping had opened the Bamboo Curtain in 1979, and twenty years later the Chinese tourist industry was booming, with Americans and other foreigners eager to walk on the Great Wall, stand face to face with the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xian, and shop on Shanghai’s Bund.  

Foreign investors  also lined up to enter the untapped market of Chinese consumers.  Jiang Zemin, General Secretary of the Communist Party as well as President of China during these years, promised that “the Chinese people will firmly and unswervingly follow the path of reform and opening up.” Lia Mingkang, a prominent financier of the time, foretold that “as economic freedoms expand, we are inevitably securing more social freedom and the ability to exchange the information and ideas we need to grow.”

Twenty years later, I have to wonder what went wrong. 

Tourism in China was completely shut down during the Covid-19 pandemic. Only in January of 2023, after nearly three years of closed borders, did China cancel all COVID-19 quarantine requirements and reopen the country for international travel. But visitors complain of the high degree of surveillance which prevails not only for tourists, but for ordinary citizens. 

The U.S. Department of State currently warns travelers to “reconsider travel” to mainland China “due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions.” The State Department classifies Hong Kong under a lesser warning, telling Americans to “avoid demonstrations”, “exercise caution in the vicinity of large gatherings or protests”, and “keep a low profile.”

Foreign direct investment into China shrank for the first time in over a decade in 2023, as Western governments discouraged reliance on Chinese-based supply chains. President Xi Jinping’s increasing focus on national security has also left many foreign companies uncertain about where they might step over the line of the law. Chinese entrepreneurs who have become too successful, particularly in social media, have had their businesses shuttered, their property confiscated, and even been jailed on suspicion of subversion. Foreign companies complain that their trade secrets have been copied by Chinese competitors.

Add to this reports of Chinese industrial pollution, oppression of cultural minorities, economic deflation, collapse of the housing market, population implosion, and the on-going threat to Taiwan. and  that golden time at the turn of the century seems like a fantasy.  Then I think of the bright colors and smiling faces at the LACC last weekend and I wonder – when our Chinese-born immigrants brought all this joy to us, did they leave enough behind?

Posted in Events, TOWN CRIER, Travel and tagged , , , ,
11 Feb 2024

A Piece of My Mind: When Los Altos was Wet and Wild (Los Altos Town Crier, Feb. 7,2024)

When I was a girl in East Texas, I took swim lessons in the public pool from a Red Cross instructor.  I was a good floater and treader of water, due to my persistent baby fat, but flailed desperately to swim across the pool just once in order to earn my Beginner badge. There were plenty of other flailers in the pool, though. Swimming was just something you did to cool off in the summer.

Then we moved to Los Altos, which at that time was a fairly new middle-class suburb.  The lots were no larger than what I had known in East Texas, the houses no more spacious, but there was one key difference.  Of our six closest neighbors, four had swimming pools.  

On my first day at school, I marveled at the tanned students with hair tinged green from chlorine.  New friends casually mentioned how they dove into their pool each morning before breakfast and did a few laps just to wake up.  The school had a swimming pool.  And swimming was a regular part of gym class.

In Texas, football had been the sport which determined who was Campus King.  In Los Altos, it was swimming.  I had not known that swimming could be a competitive event.  I had never heard of water polo.  But here was LIFE magazine coming to campus to do a feature about our student body President, Steve Clark, who for a brief time was known as “the world’s fastest swimmer” due to his record-breaking 100-meter freestyle times.  The president of the LAHS California Scholarship Federation was also the goalie on the US Olympic water polo team. The LAHS swim team under coach Nort Thornton broke 13 national records out of 20.  Thornton went on to coach Cal to two National Championships and is in the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

This all came back to me as I read of the abrupt closure in January of the George Haines International Swim Center in Santa Clara.  The ISC opened during the golden age of Bay Area swimming. Though Los Altos High School ceased its prominence in the swim world when Thornton left for Foothill College and then Cal, the school continued to produce Olympians who swam at the ISC. Steve Clark trained there under George Haines for the 1964 Oympics, and won a gold medal.  I was most recently at the ISC for a benefit for the US Olympic synchronized swimming team, which won a bronze medal in Greece in 2004,captained by LAHS alumna Lauren McFall.  

There are still plenty of swimming pools in my neighborhood, but not as many children.  I see plenty of students walking or biking to and from the campus with unusually colored hair, but none with that tell-tale chlorine green.  A quick scan of Town Crier articles about high school sports turns up dozens of articles on football, soccer, basketball, and volleyball, but nothing about swimming or water polo. Does the demise of the ISC in Santa Clara reflect a general sag in swimming as a path to glory?  Or are there are still students at LAHS who dive into a backyard pool every morning to wake up? I hope that tradition lives on, even if the ISC does not. 

Posted in Events, Memoir, TOWN CRIER and tagged | Leave a comment
29 Aug 2023

Freeway Free in California: Along the River in SLO

 This morning we went to downtown San Luis Obispo, magically stripped of its food stalls, produce, and acrobats from last night’s farmer’s market, and checked out the mission – lovely, quiet, full of apologetic acknowledgement of the mistreatment of Indigenous People’s.  We left W, who had seen plenty of missions, outside on a bench by the creek, and returned to find her having befriended Adrian, a very well-spoken and tidy vagrant who welcomed us all to SLO. 

We wandered along thecreek to the SLO Art museum, a very small but attractive venue with three local artists exhibiting (loved Anila Agha’s India-inspired lanterns), plus a colorful abstract mural which wrapped completely around the outside of the museum.

On our way back to the car we couldn’t pass up the old Carnegie Library, now the home of the SLO History Museum.  The exhibits and the docent who talked about them were unexpectedly fascinating – I had to go out for extra time on our (very expensive) parking meter. The docent was a Viet Nam vet who knew a lot about the Dust Bowl and the Japanese internment, and is doing research on WR Hearst.  He explained and enhanced a lot about the old photos which were displayed, and recommended The Habit for a light hamburger lunch just a block away.

The Habit is a fast food place a cut or several above McDonalds – I had a fancy burger with mushrooms and garlic aioli and tempura string beans instead of fries for about $12 including tax.  The most unusual aspect is the ordering, all done at touch-screen kiosks at the front of the store, with a buzz to your cell phone when your order is ready.

When we left the mission in the morning, we had seen people setting up already for the free Friday concert in the Plaza in the evening. (People were already reserving their spaces at 11AM). We thought about attending, but decided instead to reserve a riverside table at Novo just down San Luis Obispo Creek from the mission and the Plaza.

 Our dinner at Novo was a triumph – all participants raised a toast to D for having suggested and reserved the place.  We were outside next to the creek, but far enough down the creek and across so that the noise of “The Molly Ringwald Experience” rock band going in in the Plaza was just incidental background noise.  

We feasted on four appetizer plates:  calamari with 2 kinds of sauce, roasted Brussels sprouts, warm Chèvre (goat cheese) with olives and sourdough toast, and minced chicken in lettuce cups.  We finished off with a shared chocolate decadence fudge thing, all deliciously accompanied by a generous pour of the house Merlot. 

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30 May 2023

Freeway Free in Texas: The Good Life in San Saba

Imagine:

You wake up in the spacious master suite of the home you designed yourself on 140 acres of open land. You make your coffee and stroll out to the spacious veranda which runs across the front of the house, looking out over a pasture with cows and pecan trees, and an occasional herd of deer or feral hogs around the pond. It’s bluebonnet season, and the blossoms are carpeting patches of the pasture.

Next to the white ranch house, but not too close, is the barn/workshop which stores equipment for maintaining the fence that keeps the cows, deer, and feral hogs away from the nearby vegetable garden, green with lettuce beginning to bolt, sugar peas just ready to harvest, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant well along. It’s a bit too early for the strawberries and blackberries. You check the chicken coop for eggs and find enough for breakfast for you, your spouse, and guests who are bedded down in the wing on the other side of the kitchen.

Breakfast includes the eggs, bread you made yourself, and blackberry jam from last year’s berries. After breakfast you see your daughter, son-in-law, and three granddaughters walking over from their house just kitty-corner across the pasture. (You designed their home also, when you and your spouse and your daughter’s family agreed that buying the property together would be a good move.) You leave the guests to entertain themselves while the two families jump into your SUV and off you go for a morning of soccer.

Back in time for lunch, you serve everyone goulash made of home-grown broccoli, ground venison shot and butchered by yourself on your property, and wild rice.

After lunch you take the guests for a tour of the new San Saba County Musuem, assembled and curated by volunteers, very creatively arranged by types of activity (law, business, church, school, home , children , agriculture , ranching, etc). You are a board member of the Museum, and can regale your guests with a fountain of info and anecdotes. including why Queen Victoria named San Saba “the World’s Capital of Pecans”.

Then you take the guests on a tour of the town of San Saba starting with the “Longest continuously used jail in Texas”, the refurbished courthouse (painted in authentic avocado green and harvest gold), lovely old homes in various states of repair, and the Methodist Church, “the only church in Texas built entirely of local marble” with lumpy white pillars like stacks of slightly bubbly marshmallow on a skewer.

Back at the ranch, your spouse prepares the charcoal grill while you take the guests on a tour of the property on your electric golf cart, checking out the wildlife feeders and adjacent hunting blinds, but no feral hogs or deer to be seen, only placid cows.  At 5 pm the family across the pasture arrives preparatory to dinner. You sit on the veranda, the men talking hunting, fishing, trapping, the girls playing hobby horse or doing gymnastics on the lawn, the women exchanging information about cooking, planting, and coping with energy blackouts, (Your houses have solar panels and backup generators, so no worries) while the girls are playing hobby horse or doing cartwheels on the lawn.

Dinner is home-grown broccoli, oven-baked new potatoes, and the grilled chicken. After dinner you all sit on the veranda and watch the stars – the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and a glowing cloud that may be the Milky Way.  It’s not quite a Dark Sky, as the moon is rising over the roof and the horizon is lit by the surrounding towns, but pretty close. “Orion just leaps out of the sky at you,” says one of the guests.

You tell the guests of a visitor from Boston who looked up awestruck and said “I can’t believe this!  how come you have so many more stars in Texas than we have in Boston?”  He couldn’t believe that the stars were there in Boston, but obscured by urban glare.

A fantasy? There are some downsides to being some distance from a grocery store or a doctor or a local school or a library, but overall, the Good Life outside of San Saba looks pretty fine to me. I was one of the guests.

Posted in climate, Events, Freeway Free, hidden treasures, Texas and tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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