Woke up yesterday tired. Never could shake it, until late in the evening, oddly enough. Brian hung out with us until the afternoon and then went home to take his sister-in-law shopping. As he got in his car we mentioned there were things we need him to help do, boxes we needed his help to move.
“Tell me about it,” he said. And then he shut his car door in my face for effect.
Just for that I’m putting rocks in those boxes.
Woke up this morning stuffy and with the sniffles. Sudafed, being a modern day miracle drug, knocked that out by late afternoon. Which is good because there was work to do. This lecture is called “Fun with numbers.” It’s official title is “I want to be a journalist so I don’t have to use numbers!”
This requires careful attention, just to make sure I don’t mess up the math.
Here, add this up:
Intellitar, will be releasing Virtual Eternity on Wednesday.
“The whole concept is legacy creation and preservations,” said Don Davidson, the founder and CEO of Intellitar.”The idea is I can use a number of technologies available and create a living legacy.”
Think of it as “a digital clone, if you will,” he said.
A “digital clone” on your computer screen.
Davidson said Virtual Eternity takes genealogy websites, such as ancestry.com, to another level.
I talked to the CEO’s avatar. Right now that particular figure is a bit limited in his responses and, humorously, tries to give you a best guess when it is way off base. But he says that can get better because you can spend as much time improving your avatar as you like. Presumably a CEO with a big launch on his hands hasn’t spent every moment programming every conceivable answer.
“An artificial intelligent brain drives it,” (CEO Don) Davidson said. “It has the ability to capture and maintain a virtually unlimited amount of content.”
That’s the real Davidson, not his avatar. This could get confusing. But incredibly cool. After you get past the somewhat limited (for now) database of replies and the Perfect Paul voice and the odd way his hair moves, and yet doesn’t, you can see a lot of potential. Think of the first telephone and the advances from which we’ve benefited in a century. Imagine if the same sort of improvement pattern is duplicated, or improved upon. Ray Kurzweil is pleased.
The avatar isn’t self-aware. (And who thought we’d ever read that sentence in the present tense in our lifetimes?) And the avatar doesn’t know when that might happen — but the answer it offered was fun. If you can one day get the avatar out of the computer, well, the comments have that figured out.
From present, to past. Let’s check out some Monday history.
This name didn’t jump out at me in my very thin bit of historical understanding, but the simplicity of the marker — and how new it looked and how basic the language was — deserved some attention.
One of the local writers, Joe McAdory, picked up the story:
Here’s a story of a slave who loved his master. Amos Wynn was the slave and playmate of the young Jeff Wynn. As legend has it, Jeff Wynn was tragically killed in 1859 by his first cousin in a hunting accident. Mysteriously, the boy’s grave was not marked by his family, an omission that bothered the slave.
Upon Amos Wynn’s emancipation, he was determined to put a marker at the place of his friend’s grave as a memorial. Amos Wynn dug wells and graves to slowly pay for the new headstone. Through hard work, Amos eventually raised enough money to pay for his fallen friend’s memorial.
Ironically, when Amos died and was buried across town at Baptist Hill, he was laid to rest without a marker – a problem which was later rectified.
Dr. R.P. Wynn shows up on the roster as a student of Auburn — then East Alabama Male College — in 1861. That was the year the university closed because of the war. The campus served as a military hospital and finally reopened in 1866.
But this isn’t that R.P. Wynn. This marker says Wynn was born in 1817 and died in 1859. So he was born in the state before it was a state. The Mississippi territory was divided in 1817 and Alabama’s statehood was granted two years later. And the Internet knows nothing about this man. Though I think I found his wife’s name.
Colonel Nathaniel J. Scott was the brother-in-law of Judge John Harper, Auburn’s founder. Scott served as one of the four commissioners who laid out the town and was Auburn’s first state lawmaker. He was instrumental in the creation of the Auburn Female Masonic College in 1847 and the East Alabama Male College (now Auburn University) in 1856. You have to think he was intent that none of this made it onto his marker.
Federal troops encamped at the spring behind his house, Pebble Hill, when they invaded Auburn in April 1865. Today the home is still standing as an arts center for the university.
John Ross served in the Macon County Reserves, a militia unit, during the Civil War. At least seven members of that company (of 121 men) are buried in Pine Hill. There are lots of mentions of that unit, but no details of their experience. I stumbled across this one simply because it was on Find A Grave. I emailed the guy who posted the request, but he didn’t know much more about the Ross family.
So that’s two hits and two misses on the old markers. That’s about the same ratio I got from the avatar.
