The next big thing in AI

Based on what I'm hearing from many directions, I have an inkling what the next big thing in AI is going to be:

Truth, logic, and knowledge representation.

But wait a minute, wasn't that the big thing in AI in the 1980s? Yes, but back then we didn't have LLMs or even much machine learning. It was too hard to collect useful amounts of knowledge to process, or even sufficient amounts of natural-language grammar to enable automatic ingestion of data in English.

Times have changed. LLMs only know how words are used, but they can paraphrase English into differently-worded English, or into Spanish, or even (in some cases) into JSON representations of business data. Maybe we could put them to work translating human language into a formal semantic representation. Logic-based computation could then determine whether sources support or contradict each other or reliable knowledge bases.

I think this is a good direction to move in and would be glad to work with anyone conducting a research project in this area.

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Video with poor lip sync: a mystery

As some of you know, I have a YouTube channel with a motley mix of videos.

Recently, while making a video, I found that when I record video with the Windows Camera app, and import it into Adobe Premiere Elements 2019, I get poor lip sync; the audio is as much as 0.3 second out of sync with the video. That persists, of course, when I export the finished video. It looks like I'm saying something other than the words you're hearing.

I have some recollection of encountering similar problems a few years ago but never quite tracked it down.

Here are some relevant facts I've uncovered:

• Mediainfo tells me the Camera App videos have variable frame rate. That is probably what Premiere Elements isn't decoding correctly.
• The problem goes away if I edit with ClipChamp, which is free with Windows 11. I'm not fond of ClipChamp, but it is just barely powerful enough to do what I need, so I can fall back on it if I have to.
• The problem also goes away if I transcode the camera videos using Handbrake with the default settings. Then they import into Premiere Elements fine.
• However — here's what is spooky — according to Mediainfo, the Handbrake outputs still have variable frame rate. Presumably, something that was giving Premiere Elements trouble has been changed. Maybe they would look even snappier if I transcoded them to fixed frame rate.

I don't make enough videos right now to justify spending money on Premiere Elements 2025, especially without knowing whether it fixes the problem! And I'm a bit annoyed at Adobe because Premiere Elements 2019 runs under Windows 11, it will not install under Windows 11, so I can now use it on only one of the two computers to which it's licensed, the one that was upgraded from 10 to 11.

If ClipChamp doesn't grow on me, I think my alternative is to use the free version of DaVinci Resolve. It is harder to learn, but very professional, and is distributed free in order to build a population of videographers who will be ready to use DaVinci's professional product.

Any readers who are expert videographers, do you know any more about this? If so, please drop me a line!

[UPDATE:] The Camera App videos also have bad lip-sync when imported into DaVinci Resolve, which is professional-grade software, although they do play correctly in VLC and Media Player on the same computer. This tends to point to them being nonstandard in some way. More investigation to come...

SOLUTION, such as it is: I consulted a professional videographer and learned that this is presently a notorious problem. Variable-frame-rate video doesn't decode correctly in some software. Running it through Handbrake to make it fixed-frame-rate is a complete cure. Strangely, running it through Handbrake to use a different variable-frame-rate codec is also, quite often, successful. I smell a problem with codecs. I'm surprised that the very latest version of DaVinci Resolve hasn't solved it, though.

More: The received wisdom seems to be that professional-level video editors do not handle variable-frame-rate input (at least not systematically), since it is not used in professional video. It may or may not decode correctly in a particular case. Recoding with Handbrake is recommended. I'm told that variable-frame-rate video is also produced by smartphones.

BETTER SOLUTION: ShotCut does the job! It is freeware, comparable in power to Premiere Elements, and not fazed by variable-frame-rate video. That is why I will never spend money on Premiere Elements again — freeware has caught up with it!

AND ANOTHER QUIRK: If I use Logitech Capture to record with the same webcam, I get videos with fixed frame rate that play back with poor lip sync in any player!

The bottom line is apparently that webcams, which record video and audio through separate input channels, are inherently prone to desynchronization. I'll stick with my camcorder and DSLR for serious videography!

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Moultrie - a trip not made

Unfortunately, I woke up this morning with an upset stomach and was not able to drive to Moultrie as planned. Thus I won't be at Aunt Betty Jean's funeral tomorrow morning. I very much hate to miss it, especially since it is the last of her generation, probably the last at which all the available cousins will gather.

Thus, also, this evening I am not walking around the town square of Moultrie as I planned to. I have vivid memories of having lived in Moultrie as a child, mainly during the 1962-63 and 1963-64 school years, which comprised kindergarten, a few weeks of first grade, and hasty promotion to second grade.

My parents had lived in Moultrie as newlyweds, then Albany, then Valdosta (where I was born), then Moultrie, then Columbus briefly, then Moultrie again, then Valdosta. Of these, I think of Moultrie as my mother's city, since her brothers and sisters were nearby and I think she always felt more at home there than in Valdosta.

Certainly, my school years there were excellent, and I want to share with you one of the gems that I discovered there:

Photo by Michael Rivera, license CC BY-SA 4.0, source Wikipedia.

That is the Carnegie Library, the first library I ever set foot in. I only saw the children's section, accessed around the corner. Before 1971 the library moved to a much larger building near Moultrie Plaza, and I went there and actually did some research for a science fair project while on a visit to Moultrie then; it was bigger and, I thought, more academic than the Valdosta public library, despite (or perhaps because of) not having a college or university nearby.

If I can't take a walk around Moultrie's town square tonight, at least we all can do so vicariously by clicking here for Google Street View. You'll start out facing the library. You'll turn left and go one block to get to the main square, then another block in the same direction, then turn left, go a block, turn left, and go a block.

As you proceed, note that:

- The Moultrie Observer's building hasn't changed since I visited it with my second-grade class in 1964;

- the 4-story building is the old Hotel Colquitt, which used to have the Cash Drug Store on the ground floor;

- one of the storefronts near Merle Norman was a restaurant called the Gold Leaf, my mother's favorite, noted for lemon icebox pie;

- turn left at the First National Bank;

- turn around and look at the majestic courthouse, then proceed;

- the gray building on the corner was, if I recall, Register and Taylor Drugs, and I once saw them getting a sign installed;

- somewhere near Medicine Man's Vitamin Shop was Southern Auto, where my father and I went, and Mr. Suber showed us many interesting things, including how to wire a flashlight bulb to a battery;

- turn left at Griner Grill;

- Lazarus, a clothing store, has, I think been there since my childhood;

- Blue Sky Grill was Friedlander's, a fine department store that had a hardware department accessed around the corner on the side toward Lazarus, where there no longer appears to be an entrance; I am still in touch with some of the Friedlander family;

- turn left at the Courthouse Annex, which is of course after my time;

- the best shopping was along the north side of the square, and one of the two widest storefronts was Murphy's, the dime store, with its record department in the basement (I think the other was Belk's);

- if you didn't make a wrong turn, you are again looking at the Hotel Colquitt.

That is where we shopped in the early 1960s, and where my parents, as newlyweds, entertained themselves with evening window-shopping the late 1940s, a common practice at the time. Moultrie has changed less than most Georgia towns, and although all of the stores have changed, the overall look is similar. The court house, in the middle of the square, is not to be missed.

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Betty Jean Roberts Branan, 1938-2025
Last of my mother's generation

The youngest of my mother's brothers and sisters, and the last of her generation, my Aunt Betty Jean, died on July 5. She was the wife of my uncle, the late Tony Branan, whom I wrote about in December.

Visits to Aunt Betty Jean and Uncle Tony were some of the high points of my childhood. We stayed with them for three weeks in 1967 while we were between houses, and we continued to visit regularly as long as the three of us (my mother, sister, and I) were together at home. These visits excited me because they were the only branch of the Roberts family that fully embraced big-city life and higher education. Everybody else lived on farms or in small towns; they lived in Atlanta. They introduced us to shopping malls, college planning, the Fernbank Science Center, and many other things.

I have recently learned that Betty Jean and Tony were high-school sweethearts and at first planned to stay in rural Colquitt County; Tony was going to buy a farm and operate it. But other opportunities opened up. He joined the Army, then went to the University of Georgia, becoming our extended family's first college graduate. Betty Jean stuck with him. Although she didn't go to college, she had done very well in high school and was well qualified for the office work that she did, for various employers, for the rest of her life. Upon Tony's retirement, they had retired to Hiawassee, in the North Georgia mountains, which I jokingly described as the place in Georgia that is farthest from their birthplace (almost, although in fact Dillard, and also one of the two places named Pine Mountain, are farther).

May their memory be eternal.

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Georgia bans Lenovo?

As a retired University employee, I got a notice the other day that the University of Georgia, as a branch of the state government, can no longer buy Lenovo computers. But it doesn't have to cancel orders already placed or stop using computers already on hand.

Well... I no longer work for the state, so I wasn't able to access their full explanation, but in our house we have three Lenovo laptops in active use. They are exceptionally well-built and competitively priced. So should I be worried?

It turns out that the issue is Lenovo's ties to the government of China (let's not forget that China still calls itself Communist), together with some past security incidents involving software preinstalled by Lenovo. The seriousness of these is uncertain.

I'm going to keep my ears open. I'd expect the risk to be greatest with computers that have just arrived from Lenovo and haven't received any Windows Updates or anything else subsequently.

It sounds like Georgia is concerned about spyware Lenovo might install in the future, not currently existing hazards. Note that U.S.-China relations are deteriorating.

I note also that we're not just talking about passwords or confidential data. Large-scale spying could focus on where the computers are (broadly), how much they are used, etc., to track such things as troop movements.

Of course, the whole computer security community is on the alert now, and when I hear about any actual vulnerabilities that are discovered, I'll take appropriate action. I expect Microsoft's built-in antivirus software to keep up with this, so I'm not buying any additional antivirus software.

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Our divided nation: Winner-stomp-on-all

Congress has just passed Trump's controversial and clumsy budget package by an extremely slim majority. Somehow, that has triggered rejoicing, as if some kind of enemy has been defeated.

Don't its supporters realize that a slim majority is vulnerable? If one Congressman changes his mind, it might all come tumbling down.

This isn't a football game, where a score of 51 to 49 makes one team the winner and the other the loser. The whole of Congress is still there and accountable to the whole country.

Nearly 50 years ago, my British friends asked me, "Why are your two American political parties so much alike?" and I could truthfully answer, "Because they are trying to get the same people to vote for them." Not any more.

What needs to be vanquished is this destructive idea that losers have no rights — that if 51% of the voters or of Congress want to stomp on the other 49%, they have a perfect right to.

Maybe Americans are having trouble distinguishing sports from the real world.

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Do not type https:// at the beginning of a web address

Handy hint: Do not type https:// or http:// at the beginning of a web address. Let your browser sort it out.

The reason is that HTTPS does not work with web addresses that are redirections, such as my www.eeyounglearners.com and www.dslrbook.com. Those are sites for which I pay Redirection.NET to register the names and direct them to pages on the Covington Innovations site. (Try it!) Of course, you get a secure HTTPS connection when you land at the destination.

What's worse, if you mistakenly type https:// where you shouldn't, your browser may remember and auto-fill it afterward, until you type the address with http:// or delete your browsing history. So it was that one of browsers lost the ability to get to www.eeyounglearners.com and I thought the site was down.

That auto-fill can make perfectly good web sites inaccessible!

The rest of the story: The page that was giving me trouble actually had an incorrect canonical link that gave the redirection URL but with https:// in front of it. I think the browswer was picking that up and storing it. I am not seeing the auto-fill after correcting that — but I don't know the browser designers' intentions, so the problem could resurface.

When putting links into web pages or documents, you may have to include https:// or http://. In that case, make sure you have the right one. Preferably, go to the actual site and copy its address from your browser's address bar.

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New "Endure" fonts from Amazon

Have you noticed that over the years, as printers have gotten sharper, fonts have gotten thinner (lighter)? The original LaTeX fonts, for instance, were very readable on 300 dpi printers but are a bit spidery at 1200 dpi.

My usual font these days is Georgia, distributed free with Windows, designed by Matthew Carter. In the 1990s, with different software, I regularly used his earlier font, Charter.

When typesetting my next book (yes, there's another book coming out soon!), I was going to use Georgia but found myself wishing for something heavier, to hold up better at high-resolution printing. Amazon has delivered. Their new "Endure" font family is very much in the Carter (Charter) tradition, though actually designed by someone else (2K/Denmark).

It is specifically designed to be readable at 9-point size, so that paperback books can save paper. However, it will take more than that to get me to use 9-point. It is very readable at 10.5-point, and that's how I like it.

Compared to earlier fonts, it's heavier. That's the main change, and a welcome one.

(And no, I don't know why bold, in Word, is not as heavy as semibold. Unsolved mysteries of the universe...)

You can download Endure free from Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Look for it on this page: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201834230.

Although they promote it directly only to KDP authors, Amazon has assured me that there are no restrictions on its use (assuming of course you don't re-sell the font). They do advise telling Word and PDF creators to embed the font, since most people viewing your document will not have it.

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