Serendipity35

I was able to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West home-studio complex a few years ago. It was started back in the early 1940s, but evolved over many decades.

The version you see in the Architectural Digest video below probably won't change very much now. It is quite different from the original design Wright and his apprentices initially built over their first six years of life and work in the Arizona desert. It went through a good number of changes after Wright himself stopped visiting in his final year, 1959.

Tour guides point out that Wright may not have "approved" of all the expansions, modifications, and renovations made by Wright's "disciples," though they say they were made in keeping with his vision.

Taliesin West may be "purer Wright" than some other more famous Wright buildings because it was not created for a client. No one was telling Wright what they wanted or creating deadlines. It was built with apprentice labor.

It's not the first Taliesin. The original was in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Taliesin West was a home, a studio, and most importantly, an educational institution. Wright and his students spent the winters there every year from 1935 on, though it was a completely undeveloped site at first.

The Wrights stayed at an inn, but the apprentices camped out on-site. They were building straight from plans that their teacher could have drawn up the day before. Eventually, it had plumbing and electricity, but it was still a communal architecture school.

There is also a 360 Virtual Visit online that lets you walk through and hear what you might hear on an official tour. Schools sometimes use this as a virtual field trip. There is even a bit more in this virtual visit than the tour I took in person. For example, visitors aren't allowed in the Blue Loggia because foot traffic would damage the irreplaceable Chinese rug, so they never see the balcony above or the rug up close.

Recently, my laptop crashed, and I had to return to an old one that had been sitting on a shelf for a few years. It had Windows 8 from back in 2012. No updates available, and lots of websites and tools did not work. The laptop that crashed has Windows 10 and that will fade away from support in October 2025.

It got me thinking about the now 50-year history of Microsoft.

The company was at the top early on, then went through some tough years and is again near the top. It has been the first or second most valuable business on Earth for the better part of five years.

Microsoft is betting on AI to carry it into the next generation of computing. However, Microsoft's most enduring legacies may be the marks it left on society long ago via Windows. It's not a point of pride for the company or many of its users that much of our world still relies on aged, sometimes obsolete Windows software and computers. This ghost software is still being used, though it is somewhat crippled.

Here are all the versions of Windows so far:
Windows 1.0: November 20, 1985.
Windows 2.0: December 9, 1987.
Windows 3.0: May 22, 1990.
Windows 95: August 24, 1995.
Windows 98: June 25, 1998.
Windows ME (Millennium Edition): September 14, 2000.
Windows 2000: February 17, 2000.
Windows XP: October 25, 2001.
Windows Vista: January 30, 2007.
Windows 7: July 22, 2009 (released to manufacturing), October 22, 2009 (generally available).
Windows 8: October 26, 2012.
Windows 8.1: February 13, 2013.
What happened to Windows 9? (see below)
Windows 10: July 29, 2015.
Windows 11: October 5, 2021.

According to an article on bbc.com, many people and services still use outdated Windows versions.

"Many ATMs still operate on legacy Windows systems, including Windows XP and even Windows NT," which launched in 1993, says Elvis Montiero, an ATM field technician based in Newark, New Jersey. "The challenge with upgrading these machines lies in the high costs associated with hardware compatibility, regulatory compliance, and the need to rewrite proprietary ATM software."

What happened to Windows 9? 

120 years ago, divers discovered a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera in Greece. What they found changed our understanding of human history, and the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism has captured the imagination of archaeologists, mathematicians, and scientists ever since.

The Antikythera Mechanism (c. 50 BCE) was found in a shipwreck off the coast of the island of Antikythera and is now in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

It even inspired the plot for the 2023 film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The ancient Greek device was used to track celestial movements. In the fictionalized film version, it is called the Archimedes Dial and is said to locate fissures in time. The real Antikythera Mechanism was more of an early astronomical calculator. Not surprisingly, the movie takes creative liberties, turning the artifact into a tool for time travel rather than its historical function of predicting eclipses and tracking planetary positions

Using the latest 3D x-ray and modelling technology, experts are still unravelling the secrets of what else this machine may have been capable of calculating.

Could it be considered an early computer? Yes, it is sometimes regarded as the world’s first analog computer. Designed to predict astronomical positions, eclipses, and even track the cycle of athletic games similar to the Olympic Games. It uses a complex system of gears to model celestial movements, functioning much like a mechanical calculator.

Its sophistication was unmatched in its time, and nothing as advanced appeared again for over a thousand years.

Take a glimpse of the mechanism as it appears in this Hollywood version.

 

Originally posted at Kenneth Ronkowitz – poet, teacher, designer

Some newspapers around the country, including the Chicago Sun-Times and at least one edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer, have published a syndicated summer book list that includes made-up books. Only five of the 15 titles on the list are real. 

Of the books named on this reading list, Brit Bennet, Isabel Allende, Andy Weir, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Min Jin Lee, Rumaan Alam, Rebecca Makkai, Maggie O'Farrell, Percival Everett, and Delia Owens' titles are all books that do not exist. That doesn't mean the authors don't exist. For example, Percival Everett is a well-known author, and his novel, James, just won the Pulitzer Prize, but he never wrote a book called The Rainmakers, supposedly set in a "near-future American West where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity." Chilean American novelist Isabel Allende never wrote a book called Tidewater Dreams, which was described as the author's "first climate fiction novel."

Ray Bradbury wrote the wonder-filled summer novel, Dandelion Wine and Jess Walter wrote Beautiful Ruins, and Françoise Sagan wrote Bonjour Tristesse.

The list was part of licensed content provided by King Features, a unit of the publisher Hearst Newspapers, but the Sun-Times did not check it before publishing. So, who is most accountable for the error? Writer Marco Buscaglia has claimed responsibility for it. He says it was partly generated by AI. and told NPR, "Huge mistake on my part and has nothing to do with the Sun-Times. They trust that the content they purchase is accurate, and I betrayed that trust. It's on me 100 percent."

The fake summer reading list is dated May 18, two months after the Chicago Sun-Times announced that 20% of its staff had accepted buyouts "as the paper's nonprofit owner, Chicago Public Media, deals with fiscal hardship."

Another education question is how, where, and why AI created this list? Where was it getting its information? How did it come up with detailed descriptions, such as on set in a "near-future American West where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity" for books that are not out there?  How and why did it think these were real books?

Sounds like a good AI lesson to have students investigate and learn how AI operates and why it often creates "hallucinations" (errors and factual mistakes).