Shane, a western classic that was made into an iconic film starring Alan Ladd was the novel this week. It was a strange read. I enjoyed it, but the love, for lack of a better word, shown by the writer for the violent acts and the attractive man involved in most of them was odd. It was a ‘the gun and the man became one and it was beautiful’ kind of thing. The plot was traditional, homesteaders and the lone gunslinger versus ranchers, but there was enough character development

Picture removed. This is remarkable. The face you are seeing is computer-generated. It is a result of a new approach to programming which provides a database of celebrity images and then directs an artificial intelligence program to correct its mistakes, for lack of a better phrase, as it refreshes the image over and over in the process of creating a completely new persona. It gets better at it (because it judges itself) and thus makes the image less fake looking over time. U

Last night I watched an old movie called Fail Safe. It was set in the 1960’s. It was in black and white. There were only a few female characters and no one who wasn’t white. The special effects were laughable. But despite its dated nature, it was terrifying. The plot of the film was that a squadron of US bombers carrying nuclear weapons lose contact with Strategic Air Command and as a result attack the Soviet Union. Three things made it frightening. One, the film makers under