Stop For Horses In Underpants
Seen on the morning bike ride.
Archive of posts filed under the mind category.
The White Trains
Out on my bike exploring this morning, I climbed a hill to find these old abandoned railroad tracks built for what they called the “White Trains,” which carried nuclear weapons to and from Kirtland Air Force Base outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. It wasn’t a surprise. I knew roughly where they were, having stumbled on a …
The Mystery of the Chinese Junk
With the book manuscript handed off to University of New Mexico Press, and fall semester (and grading) done, I’m taking some time off. CRWUA, or not I’m skipping CRWUA this year. Y’all seem to be doing fine right now on Colorado River stuff, and to the extent you’re not, I don’t feel like I’ve got …
Weirdness on the edge of town
Where no one asks any questions Or looks too long in your face In the darkness on the edge of town. – Bruce Springsteen Do you believe in ghosts? Or crows? Do you at least believe in crows? Three of them. Possibly four. Crows, or possibly ravens. But I’d rather they be crows, so let’s …
Consulting the Birds
Sunup bike ride to consult with The Birds. They advised us, if we can, to stay indoors to beat the heat, said they’d keep an eye on things for us.
Deadpool Diaries: The Law of Shipwrecks
That boat is totally fixable. – Inkstain reader Greg This raises a fascinating legal question: whose boat is it? 43 U.S. Code § 2101 The Congress finds that— (a) States have the responsibility for management of a broad range of living and nonliving resources in State waters and submerged lands; and (b) included in the …
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Thick places, infrastructural inversions, and the gift of ideas
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 …
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It’s good to always keep your headlight charged.
Inkstain at Twenty
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 …
Large language models, Homer (Simpson) and my writer’s brain
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 …
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