[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Did these mosaics start in Italy? Rick Rosner: Yes, it started in the 1500s because the Pope noticed that tourists in the Vatican. All of their breath was fucking up the frescas. It was making the walls moist. The frescas were falling apart. He commissioned artisans to replace many frescas …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 931: Italian Micromosaics in “Bloaty” Los Angeles
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about these randomized supplements? Rick Rosner: I take a bunch of vitamins. I’ve put them in various places to remind me that I need to re-order them, or that’s where they end up, and I don’t clean them out: Heartburn pills. Jacobsen: Do you get heartburn? Rosner: Every once in a while, I’ve …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 930: Supplements, Heartburn, Twitter
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: Somewhere there is a photo if it exists, of Tom Cruise holding my grotesque foot, because it resided at Jimmy Kimmel’s for several years, he was at a party there. Somebody made him hold the foot. I saw the photo, but I didn’t get a copy sent. Then it is resting …
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: I'm just going through my chapter outlines here. Yesterday I think, we were talking about how we are used to crappy service and glitches and hacking of our devices. So, even though we've got these cutting-edge devices and tech that stream more information into our homes than ever before, we're also used to …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 928: More Chapters in Rick’s Forever Book
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we are continuing to see women take over key Industries: medicine, law, and some areas of science, which has been a trend happening more rapidly progressively in the last three decades, maybe four, where women are more educated, and they are picking more relevant industries for sort of long-term employment in …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 927: Women’s Increasing Domination in Key Industries
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I want to talk very briefly about reductio ad absurdum of the concept of war, technically in the state of modern warfare because we're moving into a world more and more where drones are becoming part of things and I don't mean just drones that fly around and suicide themselves into …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 926: Machines Fighting Machines?
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: So, it's 1999. My writing partner and I are pitching shows around town, and we sell a show just for pilots or something called a pre-pilot presentation, which is like a high school play version of your show. They tape it, but it's not entirely the set or anything. They give you …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 925: Five Grand and Show Pitches
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I wanted to talk about books. Say, four or five thousand years ago, the idea of a book wasn't a thing; you had scrolls. You had 1% of the population who were literate in advanced society at the time, like the Egyptians with the scribes. Print and press came around; you had …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 924: Microfiche is not that much pain, Rick!
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I was thinking about building off something you were kind of semi-formulating; the idea that after 20, most days are pretty dull, and so you sort of have to jazz up your day or, like a lot of it, it's just space-filling and some kind of trying to refocus your attention. …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 923: Most of Life is, Basically, a Bore
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: All right, so at the beginning of the last little session, I mentioned that I have been using a free version of the LLM, Large Language Model AI, called Claude. Claude comes in various flavours, including a fancy one you can pay for. Do you know the difference between the fancy ones …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 922: Claude, the Large Language Model
Rick Rosner 