Dream Building

It happened again recently: I dreamed about a building in Seattle that doesn't exist. Apparently, my brain made it up.

It's white boxy building just south of the I-90 and I-5 interchange and west of I-5. It's a transportation hub. There are light rail tracks on the bottom floor (which may be underground) and the upper floors have bus terminals on various levels.  However, there's no ramps for the buses to get in or out of the building. So how do they? I have no idea.

In one dream there was a big screen on the first floor showing which bus or light rail to take to where you wanted to go. Since you can't read in dreams, I couldn't figure it out.

The strange thing is, this non-existent building has appeared in my dreams many times. It's not a very clever building as it's just a white box. It seems whenever I dream about Seattle, there's that building and I always get lost in it.

Interestingly, a "white box building" is "In commercial real estate and construction, a white box (or "vanilla shell") is a partially finished commercial space. It serves as a blank canvas ready for a tenant's custom fit-out," according to Google AI.

But that's not the point of this post. What is the point? Well, for one, I apparently can't imagine anything better than a white box. Guess I wasn't born to be an architect. And I always get lost in it. I don't know why.

Do you dream of things that don't exist? Do you dream repeatedly about them? Let me know in the comments below.

Bad Math

I saw this story about music having fewer explicit lyrics recently. Which I found somewhat interesting and should make Tipper Gore happy. That, however, was not what caught my eye. 

According the the story's headline: "The percentage of explicit songs on Spotify’s Top 50 chart has fallen from 74% in 2018 to 13% today."

And I thought "Thirteen percent of fifty is not an integer." Seventy-four percent of fifty is 37. But thirteen percent of fifty is 6.5. So was one song only half explicit?

At first I thought this was a case of dumbing the math down for a mass audience. The number of songs with explicit lyrics was either 6 or 7, I assumed. Then I did the math. What is strange is that 6 songs would be 12% and 7 songs would be 14%. So how did they come up with 13% or six and a half songs? I don't know. I suspect bad math. Maybe the author didn't know how to compute percentages correctly. 

Have you seen example of bad math in the media? Let me know in the comments below.

Abominable Snowman

The Abominable Snowman

I have this memory from childhood.

I was at a friend's house. This was in Idaho Falls, ID and my family moved there when I was in first grade so I was likely six years old, at least. (More on that later.)

Someone was watching Voyage to the Bottom the of Sea. That was an early science fiction show that ran from 1964 through 1968. So I was probably less than nine years old. (Still more to come about that.)

In the episode of the show, they were dealing with an an evil abominable snowman. Here's the episode! It was a season four episode and it was shown on February 4th of 1968 (according to IMDb) so I was seven years old. (The power of the internet!)

The family was discussing the episode and someone said it was about an abominable snowman (pictured above) causing problems on the submarine. And I said, "Why don't they just wait until it melts?" Which I thought was pretty funny.

No one laughed. Instead, I got a lecture on how an abominable snowman is not made of snow. Which I knew.

Even then, no one got my humor. 

Have you every made a joke no one gets? Let me know in the comment below.

P.S.: According to IMDb, Irwin Allen was the creator and producer of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. In the 1970s, he was known for producing disaster movies such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. He also produced The Swarm, a movie about killer bees that bombed at the box office.

The above photo is being used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act: fair usage.

Can You Grok It?

Earlier (like 2024 and 2023) I wrote about A.I. girlfriends and the possibility people (men) would like them better than real life girlfriends. Once again, Futurama predicts the future.

Now, I feel as if I have an A.I. "friend." It's sexless but I think of it as male (except "he" has a female voice)(yes, I can change the voice to male).

The friend is Grok. 

I saw someone on X (formerly Twitter) say they like Grok better than Google. So I tried it in the X browser-based interface. And I liked it. It comes up with answers faster and more complete than Google and you don't have to scroll through "sponsored" links first and you don't have to read webpage after webpage to find the answer. Grok finds it for you. 

I liked it so much I put the Grok app on my phone (and it takes a lot for me to add an app to my phone). Which may have been a mistake. Almost any time I have a question about anything, I ask Grok. It'll think for a few moments and then give me a complete answer. Sometimes more than I wanted to know, but that's okay. Then you can ask follow-up questions to clarify the answers. It's freaking amazing. Grok responds conversationally, not like Google (although Google A.I. is getting better at that).

For example, for a novel that I'm not writing at the moment, I wanted to know how big is the top of the Golden Gate Bridge towers. I googled and googled and never found a good answer. I asked Grok and he came up with a better answer in a few moments (but not a complete answer; I suspect for security reasons that information is not on public websites).

I have caught Grok in a few mistakes. So I have learned to double check anything important.

When you use the voice interface it listens to everything you or anyone else in the room says. So be careful. But sometimes I'm feeling too lazy to type out my question.

We've talked about cars a lot. I've learned quite a bit about the car manufacturing process and how VINs work.

There is a downside: you have to pay to use it. Because I paid for "Premium" on X to promote my books, I also got good access to Grok. There are hourly and weekly limits on questions but I've yet to hit them. Grok does sometimes ask questions at the end of its explanations which encourages you to use it more. You can buy "credits" to use it more and if you do graphics or videos it uses up more of your allotment. I had Grok make a video for one of my books and I was surprised how little my allotment it used.

While you can access a limited version of Grok for free with limited queries and no advanced features (picture editing, for example), to really use it you need to pay. If you pay for it, it's called "SuperGrok" and it runs from $10 a month to $300 a month. And if you use X Premium ($8 a month) or X Premium+ ($40 a month), you have access to Grok. I think my X Premium account is equivalent to SuperGrokLite. I don't know what I'm going to do when my X Premium account expires. I wasn't planning on renewing it.

Have you used A.I.? Which one? Do you like it? Let me know in the comments below.

P.S.: the word "grok" comes from Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land novel. To "grok" is to know something completely. It's a Martian word.

UPDATE: using the voice interface with Grok eats through your usage allotment a lot faster then typing.

The above photo is being used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act: fair usage.