Worldwide Stew

The Periodic Table of Birthday Elements

This was for my brother’s Birthday. It was created by Claude.ai based on my original idea. I wanted to share it with readers.

Do we ever really say goodbye? On grief and spores.

As a youngster, I used to enjoy stomping down on mushrooms growing in our yard. Sometimes, when I jumped on them particularly ferociously, I could see some sort of powder fly out.

Years later, I learned that the flying powder was spores. Spores are one way that nature keeps things alive. It’s like Nature’s filing system. When I stomped on those mushrooms, the powder from under the mushroom’s head and gills generated those puff-clouds, which were then carried off by the breeze into the world. Those spores ensured that my pre-stomped mushroom endured.

I am not so special

Guru (noun) 1: a personal religious teacher and spiritual guide in Hinduis 2a: a teacher and especially intellectual guide in matters of fundamental concern has been a guru to many young writers b: one who is an acknowledged leader or chief proponent became the guru of the movement c: a person with knowledge or expertise : expert a computer guru

This is a continuing riff on gurus and specialness. Today, I wanted to write about the personal specialness we sometimes attribute to ourselves.

How an AI Conversation Taught Me About Caring for Patients

I’ve been using Claude.ai (an AI by Anthropic) as a thinking partner for a couple of years now. I’m transparent about this collaboration in my work, partly because arthritis makes extended typing difficult, but more importantly because something genuinely interesting emerges in our conversations that I couldn’t access alone.

Yesterday, we were discussing Schrödinger’s cat, and Claude offered an insight that stopped me in my tracks.

You probably know the physics thought experiment: a cat in a sealed box exists in quantum superposition—simultaneously alive and dead—until someone opens the box and observes. The observation itself collapses the wave function, forcing reality to choose one outcome.

When industry focuses on human inadequacies

This post originated with the creation of a blog post on New Year’s Resolutions. I’m trying to keep my blog area focused on inspiration. So, instead of posting this in that area, I’m adding it to my website’s opinion section.

Yesterday, on my blog, I suggested some reasons that resolution brain lets us down:

• It fixates on our failures, deficits, and weaknesses
• It promotes suffering by triggering loss of hope and depression when resolutions fail
• It highlights our sense of not enough: we don’t have enough, we aren’t enough, and incites the Hungry Ghost of wanting more.

Today, I want to highlight a few of the more insidious ways that resolution brain can betray us.