Where does the time go? It's been a little over two months since I last posted. Then a week shot by after I drafted this. Not that I haven't been busy. In addition to non-astronomical things, I've been heavily involved in helping to write and edit a paper on the polarization of supernovae that promises new insights into asymmetrical propagation of the thermonuclear burning fronts in Type Ia exploding white dwarf events. I also found myself involved in a rather tense personal intra-group conflict over contributions, credit, presentation, and choice of journal. I think the contretemps is now substantially smoothed over.
I noted in Blog #27 that I had finished a draft of my father's biography about the first hydrogen bomb and other 20th century technology and noted a box of letters from my parents in their retirement years in Colorado Springs. I ended up doing a crude typed transcription of those letters. That gives me a searchable digital base to draw on to sort out the chronology while they built two houses, helped with my sister's business selling Kachina dolls (a long story in itself), and cushioned her through a divorce. That transcription alone took a large part of last two months. I hope it was worth it. I'm now working my way through the draft biography, attempting to streamline it and render it more readable.
On 2/12/26, I was contacted by a representative of OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. They had heard good things about my presentation on the technological future of humanity I'd presented to the Retired Faculty/Staff Association and wondered if I could give a similar presentation based on my book The Path to Singularity. The hooker was that they were looking for a talk in spring, 2027. I warned that with things changing exponentially rapidly, the topic might be rather different than now (witness Moltbook's self-conversing AI agents, Anthropic's Claude Mythos that revealed thousands of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and generic threats to cybersecurity from quantum computing), but I agreed to give a presentation in January 2027. Unless it is canceled by our robot overlords.
I sampled various webinars from the Authors Guild, one way back on 2/2/26 on side gigs for authors. Not sure I learned a lot from that one. Another on 3/12/26 was entitled Amplify Your Story: How Writers Can Build Literary Visibility, and one on 3/16/26 covered Promoting Books Without Social Media. I have mentioned in previous blogs my screenplay for The Krone Experiment and my dream of having it made into a streaming film or series. To that end, I had posted it on Blacklist.com back in 2025. Nothing immediately came of that, but then the Authors Guild did a webinar on 4/14/26 with two of the leaders of Blacklist. They are Black, hence the name, which I presume is an ironic poke at J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy. I picked up some hints I might try to pursue. On 4/16/26, I attended the second annual Authors Guild Austin Meet and Greet. I had a couple of interesting conversations about Amazon ads and the use of Substack.
I attended the local Good Systems and UT Robotics symposium in the Alumni Center on March 3 and 4. Some good talks and a few folks to whom I could flog The Path to Singularity. One was Yi Mao, a pleasant woman who is the CEO and Managing Director of ATSEC, a local information security firm. She was interested in taking a group of her people to McDonald Observatory, and I did a little to catalyze that. They will visit on May 2. In return, I fished for the possibility of giving them a talk on the future of technology, maybe with an honorarium since they are a business. Instead of that, Yi offered a free lunch, and the possibility of a keynote talk at a later time. I agreed and will meet with them on May 13. I'll try to update my spiel. Do we control our technology, especially AI, or succumb to it? Do we flourish in an age of AI-induced abundance or suffer social disruption in an era of hyper-rapid dislocation?
I attended the semi-annual meeting of the department and observatory Board of Visitors on March 6 and 7. It is always good to schmooze and to hear excellent talks from young people. I passed out a few business cards for The Path to Singularity.
Kelsey Piper is a brilliant writer on technology and its social effects. She wrote for the online Future Perfect hosted by Vox. I have been reading her for years and quoted her in The Path to Singularity. I had tried to contact her with no luck when the book came out. In early March, I attended a quickly scheduled lively panel discussion on the dust up between Anthropic and the Pentagon as to whether Anthropic would allow its AI Claude to be used for autonomous weapons and spying on civilians. To my surprise one of the panelists, computer scientist Scott Aaronson, mentioned Piper's name during his presentation. Turns out he knows her personally. I asked for an introduction and contacted her, offering her a signed copy of the book. She is now working for The Argument (a substack publication that tries to make the case for liberalism as distinct from progressivism, populism, and MAGAism). She replied graciously, and I sent her the book on March 11 but have not heard back.
I have been regularly attending the Westbank Writers Group on Monday's at 5 PM, either in person or by Zoom. One of our most interest sessions was on 3/16/26. We examined samples of writing by humans and by AI and then voted on which we preferred and which did we think was AI. The result was basically chaos, with people all over the map. One bit was generic astronomy-for-poets boosterism for the glories of astronomy that any astronomer could have written. I voted for human, but it was AI. Another piece that I liked very much touched on the spiritual aspects of science. I voted for AI, but it was Carl Sagan.
I also regularly attend sessions of the Austin Forum for Science and Society, especially their Zoom book discussions. On 3/25/26, we tackled Enshittification by Cory Doctorow. Yup!