My friend Scot and I rode north on yesterday’s bike ride to see the Corrales Siphon pumps. Built in the 1930s, the siphon for nearly a century carried water beneath the Rio Grande to irrigate a thousand acres of land on the west side of the river at the northern end of the Albuquerque …
Continue reading ‘Thick places, infrastructural inversions, and the gift of ideas’ »
tl;dr I started this blog 20 years ago today. I used it to learn to write. Why? This blog started 20 years ago today (March 9, 2003) thus: I have too many blogs already – Advogato, the Nuke Beat, my ABQJournal musings. Starting another seems a bit of overkill. They all have their roots elsewhere …
Like everyone else of a certain sort (on line and writerly), I’ve been playing with ChatGPT. It’s a “large language model”, trained on a monstrous corpus of text, that basically projects (based on stuff people have said before) what might come next given a sequence of text. It doesn’t really “understand” it in a way …
Continue reading ‘Large language models, Homer (Simpson) and my writer’s brain’ »
The game is to ride everywhere, where “everywhere” involves dividing our world into squares ~300 yards on a side and visiting them all, and “riding” sometimes involves what one might call “walk-a-bike”. Sooner or later, you end up in places like this. It’s a pretty fun game.
Welcome new readers! With the current attention on the Colorado River’s crisis, I’ve had a great many people sign up for my blog feed in recent weeks. I’m so happy to have you join our Inkstain community! But an up front apology may be in order, as this might not be what you expected. I’m …
The only thing better than a tailwind on the bike ride home up the hill from the Rio Grande is an air conditioned bus on a hot afternoon. Tailwinds are great, but stories happen on buses. Riding my bike to a meeting with folks trying to figure out how to cope with climate change seemed …
Continue reading ‘The Bird Watches Over a Drying Rio Grande’ »
Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity. Kilgore Trout, in Lingo-Three, as quoted in Vonnegut 1973
Reader Christian Kuehnke writes: Did you know that “fleck” in German means “stain” (like in inkstain) in English and “inkstain” would translate to “Tintenfleck” in German ? 😉