This age. Bizarre. Part of the bizarreness rests in how much we actually know about it. We swim in a deepening sea of information. How to cope? We compartmentalize. So, though, do those providing us the information, and therein lies another problem, which is a question of integration. Recently at…
Dragon, for those who are not seen it in action, is a speech recognition software. You talk into a microphone connected to your computer and the program transcribes your words into written text. For those of you who haven’t seen the process of speech recognition before (or those who have only seen earlier versions of voice recognition software), the current version works like magic.
Who could make good use of speech recognition software? Anyone who writes. That probably includes you. All of you bloggers, take note. Same for all of you professionals. For instance, I work as a lawyer and I spend an hour or two each day using Dragon.
I have worked with Dragon ever since Version 6. It is now up to Version 9. I use the “Preferred” version of Dragon 9, which costs about $160. The software comes with a microphone in the box. The software is loaded with a vast vocabulary of legal and medical terms, something to keep in mind for those of you who might otherwise be tempted to jump to the vastly more expensive Legal or Medical versions of Dragon. For most people, there’s no need to make that jump, in my opinion.
There are millions of people out there who could make good use of voice recognition software. Dragon allows you to give your hands a break, even if you are a proficient typist. Dragon works so well that it seems like magic. No, I do not own any stock in Nuance …
We’re right in the middle of massively expensive Christmas displays. No, not just the light displays. I’m referring to the numerous expenditures of time, energy and money that, because they are expensive, serve as reliable messages to others that we are interested in bonding with them . . . or not. Christmas is as good a time as any to let the truth hang out.
These displays take many forms. To whom do we send Christmas cards (and from whom do we receive them?)? To whose parties will we be invited? Who are those select people with whom we will end up exchaning gifts? It doesn’t matter if we don’t really enjoy cards, parties and gifts. It doesn’t really matter whether we believe in virgin birth. It doesn’t matter whether there were three kings or whether there was an especially bright star. As with oh-so-many things, Christmas is really about relationships. At bottom, Christmas is about rubbing elbows and bonding, no matter what the conventional wisdom.
The conventional wisdom says that Christmas is about a particular set of alleged historical truths. We need to keep in mind, though, that there are many cultures that give no credibility to the Jesus story who engage in similar gatherings and similar gift exchanges based on their own lore, much of if as unlikely as the story of a virgin giving birth to a God. They have their own gift exchanges and parties and songs and decorations framed by lore that makes no …
As regular readers know, I take an interest not only in science, but in the evolution of science. Back before Newton proposed the bold theory that the force holding us to the ground was the same thing that guided the heavenly bodies, everyone knew that the grave matter of original…
"Build a Solar System" is a great site for helping to visualize the size of the solar System and (as the author writes) the "REAL definition of 'space.'" You start by filling in the size of your sun (in inches or mm). The site then calculates the relative sizes and distances…