The Fax (time) Machine
2026-01-14
For me, email has never been improved upon as a means of communications. It's clean, quick, (reasonably) private and easy to manage. Whether I'm firing off the latest in my ongoing series of abusive missives directed at my local MP, or contacting my landlord, as I often do, to complain about "that" smell. I just hit send and I forget about it. The benevolent deities of SMTP and POP3 take over.
Years ago, I adopted an older man, we'll call him Walter, who lives/ed in my small town. I figure Walter and the wider world stopped making sense of each other around 1983. He was frozen in a era where the fax machine was the pinnacle of technological achievement. Walter wrote maybe a dozen letters a week. It mattered not if he were sending an addendum to an earlier memo addressed to the CEO of Haliburton impugning the character of Stockwell Day, or attempting (yet again) convey his tender feelings to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, each was carefully crafted in long-hand showcasing his signature tight hieroglyphic script. And each was written on a "fax cover page". He would spend his dimes making dozens of copies of this cover page, carefully preserving the original in plastic casing. This blank document was the seminal text of the last time and place where he understood things and when he still had some agency in this world.
I lost track of Walter during the pandemic. But sometimes I see myself in him and his fax cover pages; I cling to email while the remainder of the 8.2 billion inhabitants of planet Earth are partying on Instagram. I catch myself boring people with whingeing tales of how "for every ten emails I send, I maybe get three replies." And I can see the pity in their eyes. I have become "that" man, the one stumbling around at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century gripping two dimes and a nickle in my fist, convinced that if I turn down just one more street, I will find a pay phone.
On Logic and Argument
2026-01-10
While making your daily tour of the AI slop and spurious pronouncements on your social media feed, keep the following summary in your back pocket.
For a collection of statements to constitute a proper argument, it must meet the following criteria:
1) Multiple statements: An argument requires at least two statements: one or more premises, followed by a conclusion. A single statement by itself isn’t an argument.
2) The statements must move from Premise to Conclusion: the statements must be organized such that one or more statements (the premises) are intended to support or provide evidence for another statement (the conclusion).
3) Inferential intent: There must be a claim that the premises logically support or lead to the conclusion.
4) The statements must be propositional: The premises must be presented such that they can be evaluated as true or false
** The preceding is an edited version of a response from the Anthropic AI chatbot “Claude” who was prompted to define an argument.
New Peril 