Locator: 50453READING.
Like my notes on investing which are meant for my extended family, not readers in general, this particular blog/post is 1000% posted for my extended family members, generation three and eventually generation four which will be college-age much sooner than expected.
May parents and my wife's parents: generation zero (0).
My wife and I and our sibs: generation one (1).
Our children and their cousins: generation two (2).
Our grandchildren and their cousins: generation three (3).
- one a college graduate ("Ivy League") and now Teaching For America while getting her masters at prestigious Texas university
- one a sophomore/junior -- a STEM major (top engineering school in the US) through ROTC on her way to being the Air Force detachment commander at that school
- the three others: middle school and home-schooled, age six.
Our great-grandchildren and their cousins, none next (4).
AI prompt:
This is something completely different. Sort of testing your limits (if you have any). I'm reading Walter Isaacson's book on CRISPR, Doudna and Charpentier.
To take a break I'm also reading Ananthaswamy's excellent book on "Why Machines Learn." In chapter 8 of that book we meet John Hopfield who was bored with physics and turned his attention to biology, specifically cellular biochemical reactions, and even more specifically, the RNA world, and even more specifically, tRNA.
I did not expect this -- reading about Doudna and CRISPR and then a book on machine learning and all of a sudden, Hopfield and tRNA. I have not read further, but I have to know: did the work of Hopfield and the work of Doudna ever intersect?
I posed that query first to ChatGPT and then Gemini. Out of curiosity I tried Grok. Grok said "A high demand question. I need to try later or create an account with Grok.
My notes on these two books here:
- Why Machines Learn; and,
- CRISPR.
I couldn't say which chatbot was better. I did them in this order:
- ChatGPT;
- Gemini; and then,
- Grok (I signed into my account and Grok immediately answered -- 32 seconds of "thinking").
I cannot recommend any one chatbot over the others. Each is useful in its own way. They all complement each other.
Without chatbots, this would have taken hours, weeks to answer to my satisfaction. With chatbots, I had answers from all three within a minute or so.
I could be wrong on this but I believe ChatGPT stores our conversations which is a big help, and over time, ChatGPT will know more about me than what Amazon knows about me. I do not know what extent Gemini tracks me. I assume Grok tracks me very, very closely but again, I have no idea.
Another digression: this next year, I plan to provide the chatbots with my financial information in a very general way and see which chatbot comes closest to the tax I owe the IRS. In the big scheme of things, there is not a whole lot of information / data points the average American needs to calculate taxes. The problem lies elsewhere.
A personal aside: I had an incredibly good friend in college. I can't recall exactly when we met, but I like to think I was a second semester sophomore, and he was a second semester junior when we met.
I was a double major in chemistry and biology (pre-med) and had successfully navigate calculus in my first year of college. He was majoring in math and realized (now that he was married) there were not any good choices for work/income in math while raising a family. He decided to go into medicine. He sought me out and told me that would be taking pre-med course in his junior and senior years to meet the prerequisits for applying to medical school. But he had way too much to do. He made me an offer. I would help him (actually "do") his biology labwork for him and he would help me with my math. That leads me to think I was a freshman taking calculus and he was a junior. I'm sure that's correct but it's hard to believe he sought me out and found me that quickly.
Bottom line: I got an A both semesters in freshman calculus -- in reality I was probably a "C" student in math, and he got all his work done ... much (most?) of his biology labwork was my work. LOL.
He was accepted to a prestigious medical school and we lost track of each other. I'll have to check my journals to see if I ever mentioned his name. He was a major, major influence on my years in college and it's very possible I would not have survived without his help.
Wow, what a digression.
