RIP Patrick Stewart

I know that if it were all to end this evening, everything, I would be largely known for my work on Star Trek.  I would be Captain Picard.  Not Macbeth, King Lear, not Shakespeare, not any of those things, but Captain Picard.  And I am absolutely fine with that.

-- Sir Patrick Stewart OBE (13 July 1940 - 28 October 2026), English actor with a career spanning seven decades on stage, television, and film, nominated for Olivier, Tony, Golden Globe, Emmy, and Screen Actors Guild Awards, as quoted in The Captains, a series of interviews conducted by William Shatner, (1 October 2011)

Treacherous

Ideological data -- like personality data -- is treacherous when fed into a computer.  For by its use the loyalty and security board's failure or refusal to clear a person becomes a virtually incontestable ‘fact.'  All one has to do now is to press the ‘subversive' button and all the names of 'dangerous' people come tumbling out.

-- William Orville Douglas (1898 - 1980), Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Points of Rebellion (1970) p. 28

I Voted

I voted.

I parked near the courthouse and went in to vote in person.  It was quick and easy, with no waiting.

Plan your vote today.  You can literally google "How to vote".  Then vote today, if you can and you're ready.

Don't forget to vote.

Never Trust An AI

You can never trust an AI's recommendation.  If you ask an AI to recommend a course of action, and there's any chance that pursuing that course of action could require the expenditure of resources, then that circumstance virtually ensures that the AI will provide a recommendation that results in benefits to the AI owner from the expenditure of those resources.  The recommendation itself is a vector for advertising.  Imagine asking an AI for stock tips, and the intrinsic conflicts of interest for a corporate AI answering the question.

-- Don Appleman (25 October 2026)

The More Sure I Am

The more I know, the more sure I am I know so little. The eternal paradox.

-- James Clavell (1924 - 1994), Australian World War II veteran and POW, who became a novelist, screenwriter, and director, André Delambre in The Fly (1958) screenplay

You Can't Go Home Again

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time -- back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

-- Thomas Clayton Wolfe (1900 - 1938), major American novelist of the early twentieth century, You Can't Go Home Again (1940) Book VI, Ch. 44: The Way of No Return

The Door Opens

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

-- Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (1904 - 1991), English novelist, playwright, short story writer, and critic, The Power and the Glory (1940) Pt. I, ch. 1