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Reading about reading, writing, old computers, and 123456
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How We Read and How We Read
Early readers needed strong arms and nimble fingers. Prior to the Roman invention of the book, or codex, writing was delivered on scrolls. To read a scroll, you had to both unroll and roll the document. After reading, you needed to be kind and rewind, a tiring chore because a scroll could be up to 30 feet long. Books were, for the most part welcomed for their ease of use. Some, though, lamented the loss of the tactile experience of reading when scroll-rolling gave way to page-turning.
Jumping to the 21st century, reading is giving way to listening. A survey by the Pew Research Center shows that nearly twice the percentage of Americans listened to an audiobook in the past year compared to eight years ago. Print books remain the most common form of whatever we're calling reading these days. Overall, however, books in any form are losing popularity. More than a quarter of U.S. adults didn't read a book in the past year.
In an interview on Prospect, Leah Price observes, "If you asked people in Britain or in the US a generation ago what book they had in their house, the most common answers would have been a Bible and a telephone book." Price, whose book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, reminds us that the golden age of reading never existed. Those who read were often distracted by the workaday world. Many read only newspapers and magazines.
The advent of electronic books hasn't changed the basics. Those who read, read; those who don't, don't.
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Whose Words These Are I Think I Know
John Seabrook, writing for The New Yorker, experimented with Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). that predicted what he might write next. The software, GPT-2 (Generative Pretrained Transformer, version 2), was released earlier this year and is now showing up in a number of places.
You can try the service for yourself. Go to the Talk to Transformer site, type some text, and see what happens. In the image above, I typed the text in bold; the service produced the rest.
It took me a few attempts to have the service create text that I'd use in an essay. Sometimes, the text would wander off into uncharted areas, with descriptions of the business model for Google Glass, for example.
Meanwhile, a reviewer of a climate change policy essay wrote, "It is strongly worded and backs up claims with evidence, but the idea is not incredibly original." Having written many, many dull essays in my career, I'd expect to receive much the same commentary. What's interesting is not the content as much as who or, rather, what wrote it.
The essay submitted to the Economist was prepared by a bot using the same GPT-2 software mentioned earlier. None of the six reviewers gave the essay a passing grade, and none knew that essay wasn't written by a human.
It's only a matter of time before A.I. is good enough to be good.
While we're waiting, here's a version of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Frost-Bot.
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Think Different, Comrade
In 1987, the Soviet Union sought to reenergize its people with a dynamic exhibit of Vladimir Lenin in his revolutionary glory. To reanimate the Communist founder, exhibit designer Leonid Pavlov worked with a British company to synchronize lights, tape players, and other machinery. The heart of the new system, reports Atlas Obscura, was an Apple II.
That Apple II is still in operation today.
Apple would have preferred that the Soviet Union use the newly-released Macintosh.
Deals between the USSR and Apple were complicated because of the mutual trade barriers between East and West and because Steve Jobs had made favorable comments about Leon Trotsky. The deals didn't materialize, and the animation Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov chugs along, powered by an antediluvian computer.
We needn't be smug. Many of our nuclear facilities are dependent on computers made by Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1970s. Those systems are expected to continue to operate until 2050.
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Department of Password Health
For those of you who remember what a broken record sounds like, this is a broken record. People use the same, easily-guessed passwords, year after year.
In an effort to save us from ourselves, Google has added a couple of features to its Chrome browser to help us with our passwords. If you've stored your passwords in the Chrome browser, you can use the Password Checker to see if you've reused passwords on multiple sites, if your accounts are on sites that have been compromised, or if you're using weak passwords.
In addition, you can install a Chrome browser extension that will warn you about these potential security issues.
Apple's Safari browser on Mac, iPhone, and iPad can suggest strong passwords and store them, so that you can use them on all of your Apple products. Microsoft Edge, the default browser on Windows 10, can store login information but does not offer to generate strong passwords. Firefox will offer this feature soon.
Many security-minded people recommend a separate password manager. There are many such products, some for free and some for fee. Wired magazine offers seven recommendations as well as good advice for password hygiene.
Look, I know that passwords are the bane of modern existence. They are, however, the keys to our online lives. Of course, anyone who remembers broken records is also likely to have a bag of keys that go to some locks somewhere and more than a few locks without keys. There are many, almost too many, suggestions for ways to manage your online security. Google's is just one.
If I had just one tip to give, it'd be in two parts. Maintain a strong password on your primary email account, and do the best you can with the others.
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Further, the product reviews and commentary reflect the opinion of your correspondent and not necessarily of WISE, the Communications Committee, or others.
Contents may settle during shipping. Prepared in a facility where nuts were consumed. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
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