Disputed by reputable historians, the claim that the infamous calvary charge was due to the horse being spooked by the arrival of a giant purple cat in the Crimea, does explain a lot.

I mentioned briefly episode 8 of season 1 of the original Star Trek when discussing Forbidden Planet. From a plot summary it seemed to fit some of the things I was discussing but it seemed unfamiliar to me. Reading further, it was an episode that hadn't been shown by the BBC in the many re-runs of Star Trek, so I wouldn't have seen it as a child. On a whim, I watched the episode, entitled "Miri" on Netflix last week. This was a very strange experience in many ways. Essentially I got to see a "new" episode of a very old TV series.

Susan's Salon is a weekly post for reader comments on any topic they like. This includes personal news, self-promotion, politics, general interest, knitting patterns or anything else including Vincent "Wario" Price. Nothing hateful and no cranky exchanges please.

This pure gossip – factual, but still gossip. If you aren't interested in bickering then skip it.

By the mid 1950s Isaac Asimov was juggling two career paths. After WWII he had completed his doctorate and had a position as an associate professor of immunochemistry at Boston University. However, his academic career and writing career where dual demands on his time and writing science fiction was proving to be more lucrative. Although his career as a working scientist ended up being relatively short by the end of the 1950s much of his writing would turn toward non-fiction science writing. The market for science fiction, and popular fiction in general, was also beginning to shift in the 1950s.

I caught up with the first two episodes of Apple's latest science-fiction drama, Pluribus (or as it appears in the title PLUR1BUS). A friend I watched it with was unaware of the premises but was sold on the show because it is a Vince Gilligan show (X-Files, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul). I really enjoyed both episodes but my friend who was unaware of the premise really enjoyed the first episode, which is a lot scarier if you don't know what the eventual set-up will be. So, if you see any promotions or trailers for the show, you might be a little bit spoiled going into that first episode.

Critic and writer Elizabeth Sandifer has an excellent new essay about the current era of generative AI, entitled On Incomputable Language: An Essay on AI. I think many of the readers of this blog will find it both thought provoking and well-written. Her essay is built around her analysis of Alan Turing's paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence which I coincidentally wrote about recently and in which I included a quote from Sandifer from a previous essay she had written. To set the scene, here is an early paragraph that lays out the premise of the new essay:

Susan's Salon is a weekly post for reader comments on any topic they like. This includes personal news, self-promotion, politics, general interest, knitting patterns or anything else including vermicelli wagyu pasta. Nothing hateful and no cranky exchanges please.

I don’t know how many Frankenstein films there have been – Wikipedia lists 231 that have articles with “Frankenstein” in the title but beyond those are countless films featuring t…

He’s not the first famous robot in a movie and he’s not the first notable robot called Robby but he is the first one to get star billing in the opening credits. I rewatched Forbidden Pl…

Famously, the "wiki" part in the name "wikipedia" came from a Hawaiian term for "quick", with roots in a 1995 user-editable website called WikiWikiWeb. While Wikipedia's collaborative approach can seem bureaucratic, articles can change quickly and obvious errors on high traffic pages typically are corrected within a few hours or in some cases. minutes. So how about "Grokipedia"? A week ago I wrote about the very obvious errors in the Sad Puppy page Some of the errors were relatively minor but some were substantial errors of basic, undisputed facts.

Enterprise season 4 takes an interesting turn to tell us that fascism comes in many varieties and they are all bad. That was a surprise and it wasn't until close to the end of the series that the recurring theme is circled and underlined and made overt. I've watched all the episodes except the controversial final episode, which I'm saving until next week. However, the penultimate episode is clearly a narrative end to the whole show, it just lacks a clear framing as "the end". I know there were plans for a fifth season but even if the show wasn't already struggling, I think it was running out of things to say.

Susan's Salon is a weekly post for reader comments on any topic they like. This includes personal news, self-promotion, politics, general interest, knitting patterns or anything else including vermin wax poetry. Nothing hateful and no cranky exchanges please.