101 Tower

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Details: Written by: Richard_McKie; Parent Category: Travel; Category: East Asia; Published: 07 June 2015; Hits: 85197

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We returned via Taiwan’s longest tunnel 12.9 km and several shorter before re-entering the amazing network of flyovers elevated highways and cloverleaf’s that is Taipei’s road system.

We were going to visit what was, when it was built, the world’s tallest building and in earthquake-prone Taiwan, the only really tall building: 101 Tower. It stands alone.

It's obviously a vanity project and can't be a viable business proposition.

But it is impressive.

Then we were taken to our last but not least hotel.

The entrance was unimpressive – almost like entering a factory.

The corridor on our floor was fine but unusual. There were two doors on the room an outer unlocked heavy sliding door screened off the corridor.

We were amazed when the bathroom was almost as big as the sizable bedroom and featured an elaborate shower with numerous jets and pressures a separate spa-bath and even a little garden. There was an elaborate sound system in addition to a large screen TV and push button lighting controls.

At breakfast everyone in the group was abuzz. It turned out to be a ‘sex hotel’, designed for lovers, illicit and otherwise. It was deliberately anonymous on the outside and apparently it could be entered directly from a secret car park.

But I was most annoyed to discover the others in our party had discovered much more interesting programs on TV than the CNN that we had watched.

C'est la vie.

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Travel

Brazil

In October 2011 our little group: Sonia, Craig, Wendy and Richard visited Brazil. We entered Brazil from Argentina near the Iguassu Falls.

Fiction, Recollections & News

The Atomic Bomb according to ChatGPT

Introduction:

The other day, my regular interlocutors at our local shopping centre regaled me with a new question: "What is AI?" And that turned into a discussion about ChatGPT.

I had to confess that I'd never used it. So, I thought I would 'kill two birds with one stone' and ask ChatGPT, for material for an article for my website.

Since watching the movie Oppenheimer, reviewed elsewhere on this website, I've found myself, from time-to-time, musing about the development of the atomic bomb and it's profound impact on the modern world.

Nuclear energy has provided a backdrop to my entire life. The first "atomic bombs" were dropped on Japan the month before I was born. Thus, the potential of nuclear energy was first revealed in an horrendous demonstration of mankind's greatest power since the harnessing of fire.

Very soon the atomic reactors, that had been necessary to accumulate sufficient plutonium for the first bombs, were adapted to peaceful use. Yet, they forever carried the stigma of over a hundred thousand of innocent lives lost, many of them young children, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The fear of world devastation followed, as the US and USSR faced-off with ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction.

The stigma and fear has been unfortunate, because, had we more enthusiastically embraced our new scientific knowledge and capabilities to harness this alternative to fire, the threat to the atmosphere now posed by an orgy of burning might have been mitigated.

Method:

So, for this article on the 'atomic bomb', I asked ChatGPT six questions about:

The Manhattan Project;
Leo Szilard (the father of the nuclear chain reaction);
Tube Alloys (the British bomb project);
the Hanford site (plutonium production);
uranium enrichment (diffusion and centrifugal); and
the Soviet bomb project.

As ChatGPT takes around 20 seconds to write 1000 words and gives a remarkably different result each time, I asked it each question several times and chose selectively from the results.

This is what ChatGPT told me about 'the bomb':

Opinions and Philosophy

Luther - Father of the Modern World?

To celebrate or perhaps just to mark 500 years since Martin Luther nailed his '95 theses' to a church door in Wittenberg and set in motion the Protestant Revolution, the Australian Broadcasting Commission has been running a number of programs discussing the legacy of this complex man featuring leading thinkers and historians in the field.

Much of the ABC debate has centred on Luther's impact on the modern world. Was he responsible for today? Without him, might the world still be stuck in the 'Middle Ages' with each generation doing more or less what the previous one did, largely within the same medieval social structures? In that case could those inhabitants of an alternative 21st century, obviously not us, as we would never have been born, still live in a world of less than a billion people, most of them working the land as their great grandparents had done, protected and governed by an hereditary aristocracy, their mundane lives punctuated only by variations in the weather; holy days; and occasional wars between those princes?

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