TouringtheValley

Photo by Mathyas Kurmann on Unsplash As you probably know, the war on voting includes a campaign to eliminate voting by mail. donald has now issued a proclamation instructing the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to people whose names appear on a list approved by the federal government. There are many obvious flaws in this plan. People who oppose it point out that t...

Around the year 64, the Roman emperor Nero commissioned a huge statue depicting himself as a god. The bronze statue, designed and constructed by the Greek architect Zenodorus, was approximately 115 feet high, comparable to our Statue of Liberty. It was so heavy, it took a team of 24 elephants to move it. The statue was not covered with gold. Known as the Colossus of Nero (Colos...

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash Before "no fault divorce," people who wanted to dissolve their marriages faced serious obstacles. Typically, one partner had to go to court and prove that the other partner was at fault. Reasons could include adultery, desertion, extreme cruelty, and habitual drunkenness. The judge would hear the evidence and then decide whether the claim...

A bicycle garage in Amsterdam Photo by Anthony Tilke on Unsplash There are a lot of people who quite adamantly believe that every city's air quality, transportation and parking problems could be solved if we would just ban cars and make everyone ride bicycles everywhere. This would make our streets "pedestrian friendly." What they often fail to consider: Will employers pro...

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash I asked Claude, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to write a blog post on "why it's a bad idea to have AI write a blog post. Here's what I got. Why You Shouldn't Use AI to Write Your Blog Posts There's a certain irony in asking an AI to make the case against AI-written content. But maybe that's exactly why it works — ...