“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” is one of the many things Shakespeare made up as part of a story, and that we now regard as gospel. Of course not everyone follows his advice, and that’s a good thing for libraries which would otherwise have been a non-starter. There are people who consider lending and borrowing to be immoral,…
When they were purely mechanical, without logic chips and firmware and all those added controls and options, fruit machines were great. One-arm bandits that you knew would take your money but you got a little entertainment in return. You thought that the way the reels were lined up before you played, or the way you pulled the handle, or even…
Knobs are our fundamental interface with the world of gadgets, aren’t they? When the very first gadget was invented — let’s say it was some sort of a knife or a club — it was surely given a handle as a means to make it available to a human user. Now we have more sophisticated gadgets; washing machines, televisions, computers…
Tech visionaries the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Gates tell us their biggest fear for the future is not going broke, it’s robots. We laugh. Those geeks are so consumed by the white heat of technology, what do they know? But robots are here among us already, quietly preparing for that same apocalypse the Gates’s and the Musks foretell. These…
When it comes to Christmas cake, I always follow the habit of the late composer Richard Wagner and make my own. A nicely wrapped slice of Christmas cake, as the noted composer well knew, is sure to please and now it’s become my own gift of choice. As the giver it means I have gained the efficiencies of standardization – I can…
I freely admit it surprised me how quickly I succumbed to a condition common among cat owners: softening of the brain. It must be a year ago I adopted my cat, because here I am reading an e-mail from the government listing the penalties for not renewing his license. Well not so much reading the e-mail, as reading it to…
When it comes to voting, most of us aren’t really too interested until after the election when it’s all had time to go to hell. “Well, you voted for it” we remember hearing, which is hardly encouraging. Or an elected official claims that some decision or other requires a vote of the people, the equivalent of Pontius Pilate washing his hands…