Photo Op – I was a 16-year-old high school student when I got my first summer job in 1992. My dad spent much of his adult life working in textile mills and he knew that a department would be a adding second shift that summer. Gary Quarles is a friend of the family, his father-in-law being my church pastor at the time, and he was going to supervise that second shift. He needed to hire a full crew so the old adage about who you know certainly proved to be true. John Thornton was the owner of American Rug Crafstmen in Sugar Valley, GA. He never moved to Georgia and drove down each day from Maryville, TN. After being chosen Entrepreneur of the Year in 1992 the local newspaper came out for an interview and Thornton gave him a tour of the mill. It was my first day of my first job. Gary, who has also pastored a Baptist Church for several years now, was literally explaining the job to me. I had only been there for about 10 minutes when the owner of the company and a newspaper photographer walked up to “my” station. True story.

Baby Yoda eating pizza was rendered by an AI program known as DALL-E. The artificial intelligence creates images based on simple text descriptions. Dale from Dale on AI explains here how DALL-E works in pretty much layman’s terms. Around 30,000 people have been invited to try DALL-E but it’s not available for public use yet. They are “working hard” to make access available for everyone. That doesn’t mean you can’t try your hand at prompting AI.

Church made of Playdough was created by DALL-E mini which you can take a turn at using. DALL-E Mini is currently available via Hugging Face but will be migrating to craiyon.com soon. I don’t know all the technicals details that distinguish DALL-E from DALL-E mini. For the record, I searched church made of Playdough using Google, Yahoo and Bing and did not get any images that match. There were a couple of Nativity scenes and one empty tomb, as well as links to articles about using Playdough in ministry. From what I can tell the images above were created by CGI based on the user parameters, i.e. the prompts I entered. Play around and see what you can come up with.

This illustrates an actual phenomenon. You can’t conduct a survey over email to see how many people use email. If you were to call 1,000 people at home and conduct a survey – political candidates, gather opinions on SPLOST, Coke vs. Pepsi, whatever – you would get the responses of 1,000 people that still have landline telephones. That probably doesn’t represent the average American consumer. If your target demographic were Americans, aged 50 to 75, you might get a good statistical sample. If you want the opinions of 18 to 30 year olds, you would need to reach them some other way. 100% of people attending a Willie Nelson concert might be in favor of legalizing marijuana but that doesn’t mean 100% of Americans would vote in favor of it.

Chrysler Town & Country – From 1941 to 1988 the name Town & Country referred to a full size station wagon. The wagons were retired and the name reused for Chrysler minivans from 1990 through 2016. I drove a 1975 Ford Maverick in high school (about a year after that newspaper pic from up top). The Ford Ranger is not a small truck, more like what an F-150 was 20 years ago. The Maverick nameplate just came back as a compact pickup truck.

That’s about it for this week. After the internet came and went a couple of times this morning, my wife got into a nest of yellow jackets. They were way too close to the house, right next to the carport, so those have been extinguished. Below is your optical illusion for the week. We’ll see if Van Til comes in Monday morning.