Temple Cloud

Last Sunday was the birthday of the Church.   Not Holy Trinity Binegar  (Christian worship site since before 1066, parts of current building go back to circa 1400), where I happened to be at the time, or the Anglican Church, but the community of believers dating back to when a group of people had a bizarre, life-changing spiritual experience one Shavuot in the early 1st century AD. Although the Bible describes Shavuot as a harvest festival, a time to thank God for His gifts of grain, it has come to be celebrated as the day on which God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses.   Christian tradition, on the other hand, celebrates Pentecost (the Greek name for Shavuot) for God’s gift of something even greater than food or rules to live by.   It is the day on which, according to Acts Chapter 2, God sent His Holy Spirit upon Jesus’s followers. But what does that actually mean? A penpal of mine, a convict in Louisiana, is a devout Christian who is currently working on a...

I had been looking forward to reading the full, book-length version of Rowan Hooper’s How to Spend a Trillion Dollars  ever since I read the shortened version that appeared as an article in New Scientist . In that article, Hooper explored three of the biggest problems that we might solve with a trillion dollars: world poverty, climate change, or disease.   A letter to New Scientist the following week commented that the only one worth doing out of these was halting climate change, as poverty would always exist as long as some people had more money than others, and there was no point in eradicating deadly diseases like polio and malaria because everyone dies of something eventually. I got the impression that the letter-writer had missed the point.   Hooper wasn’t claiming that sharing a trillion dollars between the world’s poorest 760 million people (giving them on average $1,315 each) would eradicate relative poverty and make them as rich as Bill Gates.   But it...

A year or so ago, I had a crisis of confidence about this blog.   PDB11 and I had been reading American Gods together, and there is a scene in which one of the villains makes a saccharine eulogy over someone she has murdered, in which she reflects on birth and death as two complementary sides to life.   I started to worry that whenever my blog tried to be upbeat and positive, it was just as hypocritical – and therefore proved me to be just as evil – as this character. When I asked PDB11 whether he thought my blog sounded similar to the character’s speech, he said, ‘I suppose there’s a little similarity, but not much.’   Later on, having thought about it, he suggested that part of the reason my blog could sometimes sound this way is because I try to focus on writing about the positive side of life, without writing about my struggles in depression. Well, when I’m in the grip of a major depressive episode, I either don’t have much useful to say, or – and this is an imp...

I hadn’t expected to write about GhatGPT again so soon after my last post on children using it to do their homework for them.   I was happy getting on with my own writing projects, mainly writing fanfiction and answering questions on Quora. Then one of those weird coincidences came.   First, I had a spate of messages on a couple of fanfiction stories I had written, mostly in this sort of vein:   Comḿent #p4Fr1R ChatGPT use ín this work hás been flagged. Readers, ścan woŕks bef́ore you read them with an AÍ detector like gowinston.   Comment #́3́01h́81G32 This work was generáted by AI tool NovelAi. Use an AI detećtor liḱe gowinst́on to fińd íf the aúthor iś cheating with AI. Report this AI ćheating author fór AI use.   These came from commentators whose ‘names’ were mere jumbles of letters such as ‘nktrhea’ or ‘orzwga’.   PDB11 commented that the strange marks over the lettering in these messages looked as if they were trying to...