This World and Me

On the evening of May 21, 1925—exactly 100 years ago—a Japanese Akita dog named Hachiko left his home, as he always did, and walked to Shibuya Station in Tokyo to greet his owner, Hidesaburo Ueno, as he came home from work. This was a daily routine for the two of them: every day, Hachiko would meet Ueno at the train station, and every day, they would walk home together. On this day, however, Ueno would not return. He had died after suffering a stroke while at work. For the next nine years, nine months, and fifteen days, Hachiko would return to Shibuya Station every day to wait for Ueno to come home. I thought of Hachiko the moment I first listened to the song "Humansongs" by Porter Robinson. The song tells the story of a robot who, like Hachiko, waits for his human owner to return. Porter Robinson released "Humansongs" in March 2023. He described the song as a "demo", made to promote Po-uta, a Vocaloid voicebank based on the singing voice he used for his ...

A red-winged blackbird I photographed in Canmore, Alberta (near Banff) in 2023 One sunny day during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, my parents and I went on a walk in a nearby park. As we strolled on a boardwalk that went alongside the vernal pools characteristic of the wetland park we were visiting, my mother gasped as she noticed a small bird that landed on a cattail next to us. When I looked as well, I couldn't help but smile. The bird shook his jet-black feathers a bit, then cried out his distinctive call, as if he were saying, "Look at me!" The most striking feature, however, was the color of the feathers along the front edges of his wings, near what you might describe as his shoulders: they were bright red. My mom asked what kind of bird it was. "A red-winged blackbird," I replied. My mother, who was walking in front of me, turned around to smirk at me. She asked if I had just made that up. I laughed. I didn't blame her for asking that. The name ...

  Whenever I play Porter Robinson's song "Everything Goes On", my friends see that the song is a collaboration with League of Legends , and this immediately colors their impression. A piece of me dies every time this happens because you don't have to know anything about League of Legends to enjoy this song. I personally know very little about the gameplay and lore surrounding League of Legends , yet "Everything Goes On" stands among my favorite songs of all time. Despite its sparkly instrumentation and uplifting chords, "Everything Goes On" is a song about grief. The lyrics are from the perspective of someone who does not have much longer to live. The song opens with the chorus, where the singer tries to convince someone to forget about him after he is gone. The song tells a story about a time when the singer actually said the words in the chorus, and the verses flow from the singer attempting to justify those words, to later regretting the...

Six years ago, when I was a freshman in college, I wrote a series of three posts on this blog about a game that I used to play in elementary school music class called "Great Big House in New Orleans". In those posts, I attempted to write a program in Java and Python that would calculate the winning position of the game given the number of players. "Great Big House in New Orleans" (published Monday, November 06, 2017) "Great Big House in New Orleans: Improved Code" (published Thursday, November 09, 2017) "Great Big House in New Orleans: The Special Case" (published Friday, February 02, 2018) At the time, I had less than a year of experience in computer programming and had only recently decided that I would study computer science. Because of my naivete, the posts have many problems, and they are a little embarrassing to look back on. The posts ramble excessively about basic programming principles and assume without proof that a pattern will hold...

I grew up in a city called Dublin, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. If there is one remarkable thing about the topography of Ohio, it is precisely how unremarkable it is. I now live in the Pacific Northwest, and whenever I look out the window as I fly out from Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, I always stare for several minutes at the gorgeous diversity of geographic features, from the expansive Lake Washington to the countless inlets of the Puget Sound, from the Olympic Mountains to of course the towering peak of Mount Rainier. After dozing off for four hours, I arrive back in my home state of Ohio, look out the window and see... flatness. It is like the surface of a marble. No mountains, no lakes, no big forests. Just a seemingly endless array of alternating farmland and tiny woods, with the occasional town or village. If I am lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Columbus from 20,000 feet, I could probably count the number of tall skyscrapers on my hands. One unfortunate consequence of...

Back in 2020, I wrote a post on this blog titled " Objectively good ". That post was a bit of a peeved response to something that someone I knew at the time said. This post is a bit of a sequel to that one. In this post, I want to discuss a phrase which has grown to be another pet peeve of mine. You have probably heard it before. Sometimes, when debating a particular topic, one person will say something along the lines of the following: "I'm entitled to my opinion." What exactly does that mean? My first thought is the freedom of speech. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits Congress from passing any law "abridging the freedom of speech", and the Fourteenth Amendment has been held to extend this prohibition to state governments as well—see Gitlow v. New York ,  268 U.S. 652 (1925). The result is that all persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction have the right to express themselves freely without fear of retaliation from the government. Noti...

In the decade between 1999 and 2009, Walt Disney Animation Studios was in a creative rut. The studio's films often found themselves in the shadow of their younger, sleeker sister studio, Pixar, whose touching stories brought to life by innovative computer-generated imagery cemented themselves within popular culture. The films that Pixar released during this era are instantly recognizable: Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Cars (2006), Ratatouille (2007), WALL-E (2008), Up (2009). Meanwhile, almost all of the films that Disney's original animation studio produced during this era faded into obscurity, forgotten instantly by a fast-changing world: Fantasia 2000 (1999), Dinosaur (2000), The Emperor's New Groove (2000), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), Treasure Planet (2002), Brother Bear (2003), Home on the Range (2004), Chicken Little (2005), Meet the Robinsons (2007). There is, however, one definitive ex...

A notable cultural difference between the United States and Germany—which I had heard about and later confirmed when I visited Germany in the summer of 2016—is in our attitude towards flags. In the United States, flags are everywhere: in our schools, in our government buildings, in our post offices, sometimes displayed across people's houses. The Washington Monument ( pictured ) in Washington, D.C., has no less than 50 U.S. flags surrounding it, one for each U.S. state. In Germany, on the other hand, you will rarely ever see the black, red, and gold of the German flag in your everyday life. The Germans are much warier than Americans of excessive expressions of national pride—particularly because of their dark history with nationalism. Aside from major sporting events (where the Germans will go all out in support of their national team, flags included), I did not encounter in Germany nearly the same level of ubiquity that the American flag seems to enjoy here in the United States. ...

On Thursday, June 8, 2023, a lawyer by the name of Steven A. Schwartz stood with his head hung low— humiliated —before a federal judge in Manhattan. He was there to represent a man named Roberto Mata in his lawsuit against the airline Avianca. Schwartz had asked ChatGPT for past legal cases that could support his client's case against Avianca. ChatGPT cheerfully replied with case names like " Martinez v. Delta Air Lines , Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and Varghese v. China Southern Airlines ," and—perhaps feeling a similar sense of cheerfulness at the sheer convenience of this newfangled online tool—Schwartz went ahead and cited these cases in the final document he submitted to the court. However, any such cheerfulness quickly dissipated, for if Schwartz had done any cursory examination of the cases provided by ChatGPT, he would have soon discovered that none were real. ChatGPT had made them all up. ChatGPT is a form of artificial intelligence. The term "artificial...