A scene from a summer night study session
in my backyard ...
I'm working on the next post in my series on precarity. Because this series has begun to study the impact of artificial intelligence on the future of work, I've been reading papers on the implementation of multi-objective functions for solving hard AI problems. Don't worry - I'll try my best to break it down into simple pieces in my next posts. The next few posts may come rather slowly, but I'm sure that readers will appreciate quality over hasty quantity.
One rather sad thing lately is that I seem to be down to one cat instead of two. After I returned home from an emergency visit to my family last month, I discovered that my cat Vashka had gone missing. The neighbors who watched my house and cats while I was gone reported that the last time they saw him was the night before I returned home. I haven't seen him in nearly four weeks. That is more than a bit of a drag - Vashka was not exactly the sharpest cat, but he had real personality.
Once I finish my series of posts on economic precarity, I think I might start a series of posts on the sociological and political impacts of religion on American society, and how American religion (particularly white Evangelicalism/Protestantism) is likely to affect or hinder the ability of the United States to adapt to the challenges of the 21st Century. As part of my research for that series, I plan to buy an audiobook copy of One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. The thing that piqued my interest in this topic was my recent discovery of the activities and early 20th century "ministry" of a certain Reverend James W. Fifield, who was one of the architects of the myth of America as a "Christian" nation. It's interesting that he laid the foundation for a "faith" that systematically denies that Christians have any duty to love their neighbors as themselves. Mr. Fifield, it must be hot as hell where you are, no?
