#75 💞 The yes and the no of the EDGE 🧗
In brief 🩲
- Journal: Mandatory common sense; languaging without language
- Practical: Living on edge; changing to something less changey
- Art: Imaginations stitched together
- Quotable: AI skepticism dose
From the journal 📖
We took a shortcut to get to my son Neko’s touch rugby game and found ourselves driving down a narrow lane with surely more speed bumps than necessary, plus a mob of signs demanding in capital letters that we BE CAREFUL.
We were already BEING CAREFUL. The road was barely wide enough for two cars to pass without touching, the road was uneven (due to all the bumps), and the speed limit was 10km/h. About halfway through the dense picket of signage, one sign read: “SLOW DOWN NOW”.
“I wonder if they really need to say ‘NOW’?” I said to Neko. “I mean, why insist... at this point? It makes it sound like they already asked and we didn’t listen.”
“Yeah, it’s a bit pushy, isn’t it?” answered Neko, smiling.
I laughed, enjoying poking fun with Neko at this dense sandwich of nonessential asks; at how information packed too densely merely becomes static; at the futility of merely ordering people to possess common sense.
An old friend of mine from Japan, Eri, recently came to stay with us with her daughter, Nona. Nona and my daughter Ida are both eight. We were excited at the prospect of our children becoming friends, but also aware that: (1) you can’t guarantee two kids will become friends by virtue of their parents being friends; and (2) Nona spoke essentially no English, Ida spoke no Japanese.