100 and Done! (Countries that is...)

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We are back! This last trip brought the total countries visited to 100! It is a crazy milestone. It is difficult, time-consuming and can be (IS) expensive. After I got back from Antarctica in 2007, I started thinking about it. After 2010 I was thinking about it more (as I moved from NY to Georgia) and in 2014 it had become a real goal. Between Angie and I we have been to 109 Countries. We are tied at 100 countries each. We have 9 countries different in our lists. For example, I have been to San Marino. She has not. She has been to Israel. I have not, yet. There has been some fun competition in this area. That's why we had to establish rules. 1.) Must be listed (as a country) with the US State Department 2.) Being in an airport doesn't count. You have to get through immigration somehow and not in a DMZ or a no-mans-land 3.) A passport stamp is not required. I have been to Canada, Paraguay, and Uruguay without getting my passport stamped. There are friendly borders in many places...
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Travel Planning with Chat GPT 3.5 Artificial Intelligence

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I am planning a trip to Southern Africa. I am planning on Zimbabwe, Eswatini (Swaziland), Botswanna, South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia, Mozambique and Zambia. I decided to ask Chat GPT 3.5 to help direct me in the sequence of travel. The result seems to have saved a lot of my time. Let's see how that order works out as a finish booking. I am skeptical since travel efficiency on commercial airlines has little to do with a straight line being the shortest (cheapest) distance between two points.

A couple weeks back I did a co-presentation at a conference regarding AI in language translation and have been attending other events to educated myself better on AI. It is a real thing and a game changer. Executives will be able to skip over middle management more relying on the "pseudo-wisdom" of AI prompt chats. It will work. The issue will be finding executives smart enough to leverage it. A couple of things are clear with the current state of AI. It only does what you tell it and you will need to check/verify the results.

Follow up-- I am just learning on how to create good prompts in CPT 3.5, my skepticism was appropriate. There are no connecting flights as it was suggesting for the best sequence. It was a "dumb" analysis of distances between major cities, not anything to do with the reality of actual flights available. The thing that ChatGPT does very well is control elements to improve information literacy. The sentances, layout, and organization of the information presented is excellent. In this regard it will outproduce much of the current technical writing these days. What it won't do is gut-check facts, and answer second level questions that are not asked.

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