GeorgiaBeforePeople

The 2nd part of my series using AI to illustrate accounts of early American explorers is a pictorial version of Thomas Walker’s journal. Dr. Walker, along with 5 other men, traveled through what today is Kentucky and West Virginia during 1750 when the former was Indian hunting territory used by overlapping tribes. His journey lasted from the middle of March to the middle of J...

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read and re-read passages of William Bartram’s Travels. William Bartram was a botanist who traveled through Southeastern North America, especially Georgia and Florida during 1775 and 1776. He traveled there with his father 10 years earlier, but he wrote his book about his later journey without his father. He was from Pennsylvani...

The Google search engine has a new feature that creates images based on any description a user provides. These images are created in seconds. I used this feature to create images for this week’s blog entry and some of them are amazing. I had been using Deviant Art’s image prompts, but the program Google uses is much better, though still not always perfect. Google uses a progr...

World War I trench warfare transformed many green bucolic landscapes to barren crater-pocked vistas resembling the surface of the moon. Concentrations of heavy metals from munitions poisoned the soil. The landscapes slowly recovered after the war ended.

The population of rats exploded along the front lines of World War I. The miserable muddy trenches provided a tremendous amount of food and excellent habitat for rodents that evolved to live alongside humans. Soldiers, busy avoiding incoming artillery shells and dodging bullets, didn’t have time to dispose of their garbage. Rats swarmed over the discarded food. Soldiers also ...