The time Marvin Minksy and I had to wait for a car together
Having spectacularly failed in one school in seventh grade, I found myself in eighth grade ('87), and suddenly got swept into a corporate-sponsored whatthehelljusthappened of people in a large room, including
A bank president, telling us about how magnetic ink technology, printed on checks, is all the hot shit
and (get this)
Marvin Minsky, telling us how the problem with artificial intelligence can be reduced to video camera-acquired optics of cubes with their vertices highlighted with black magic markers.
(I probably made most up of the last part myself, but I was taking notes throughout the presentation, so somebody, SOMEWHERE, knows the truth)
But, here's the thing...
I can tell you what color shirt Marvin Minsky was wearing.
He was wearing a yellow madras, threadbare, cotton, almost worn-through short-sleeve shirt. The kind of shirt your granpa wears when he doesn't care at all about what people say about what he was wearing; just that, at the end of the day, the one thing people will say about him is that he was wearing a shirt.
I can also tell you there was a light drizzle for about twenty minutes as he and I both waited, afterward, for our rides to show up.
