Aubrey Lieberman Selected Poems and Essays

  Cowboy Mythology in a Fractured America Generated by Aubrey Lieberman utilizing OpenAI ChatGPT 4.1 ⸻ The cowboy has always been more myth than man. We dressed him in dust and righteousness, set him alone against a savage wilderness, and let him ride clean out of history and into our collective imagination. In today’s America—fractured, polarized, clinging to symbols with near-religious intensity—the cowboy has become something else entirely: a costume in a culture war, a ghost of national identity both worshiped and weaponized. Once, he was the laborer of the open range. Now, he’s as likely to be found at a political rally, a country music festival, or standing guard at a protest, hat cocked, posture defiant. But to understand what the cowboy means today, we must first understand what he was—and what he never truly was. ⸻ The Cowboy as Invention The American cowboy didn’t arise purely from the land, but from layered acts of cultural and historical invention. Long before a cowboy ...

  Ivy The ivy on the walls of the ivy league colleges is, according to the app, genie (lower case intended), English ivy, also called common ivy or just ivy. The botanical name is Hedera, proto indo-european for grasp, a word which seems appropriate for growing at a university. If poison ivy is entirely capable of growing on the same walls, how does it choose its colleges? According to the genie app, it is unlikely that poison ivy would be on the college walls, because it is for more likely than English ivy to grow along the ground and not climb the walls.  Interestingly, the Genie app answer did not include the possibility that selection bias by the grounds keepers at the colleges may play a role. This tongue-in-cheek exploration of chat GTP and other kinds of artificial intelligence-based tools indicates that they still require a driver, a human brain capable of formulating an opinion regarding the veracity of the AI-based information. Aubrey Lieberman 6/21/23 

  Alan Turings Cathedral The brilliant Mr. Turing presented his prescient ideas about 85 years ago, His insight was based on his own brilliance and thousands of years of precedent, deep thought in philosophy, science and mathematics.  During the next four human generations, the emergence of tools that enabled modern electronics, plus an astronomical number of hours of programming by very intelligent people, has given us all new shoes, enabling us to walk inside an invisible cathedral. When we enter this structure we may choose to explore the largest caves in the world, stand at the peak of the highest mountains, raft the most severe rapids known to mankind, fly anything, anywhere, in any kind of weather, review great art, review all of written history, analyze the structure of proteins, and understand complexity theory in the context of the universe, the stock market and human behavior, and much more, while sitting in an armchair with a computer in the palms of our hands. All ...

  Teetering at the Edge of Nothing Modern physics tells us that the universe is not just a collection of stars and particles, but a delicate teetering of fields and forces. A few universal “settings”—gravity, the Higgs field, the cosmological constant, and the Planck constant—determine whether matter holds together or collapses, whether the cosmos expands gently or tears apart, whether life can exist at all. Black holes at the centers of galaxies remind us of nature’s extremes, but at the Planck scale even a grain of sand’s worth of matter could collapse into one. That same scale is where quantum theory and relativity must meet. If the Higgs field had been slightly stronger, atoms would be unbearably heavy, and bodies like ours could collapse into tiny black holes. If dark energy were larger, galaxies would never form. If dark matter behaved differently, stars would drift apart. The fact that these constants line up just right is what allows us to wonder about them. ⸻ Quantum Gravi...