Fascination with the Abomination

upsider: Putting it in perspective. Wish I knew who to credit...

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:19:22 -0500

Putting it in perspective. Wish I knew who to credit this to, besides 2000+ people on Facebook. Hope it spreads far and wide.

theeconomist: Spotted by a reader in a Florida public library.

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 13:30:53 -0400

theeconomist:

Spotted by a reader in a Florida public library.

"When we were fighting AIDS, hunger, water shortages, global warming, and so on, there always seemed..."

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 13:28:42 -0400

“When we were fighting AIDS, hunger, water shortages, global warming, and so on, there always seemed to be time to reflect, to postpone decisions (recall how the main conclusion of the last meeting of world leaders in Bali, hailed as a success, was that they would meet again in two years to continue their talks …). But with the financial meltdown, the urgency to act was unconditional; sums of an unimaginable magnitude had to be found immediately. Saving endangered species, saving the planet from global warming, saving AIDS patients and those dying for lack of funds for expensive treatments, saving the starving children … all this can wait a little bit. The call to “save the banks!” by contrast, is an unconditional imperative that must be met with immediate action. The panic was so absolute that a transnational and non-partisan unity was immediately established, all grudges between world leaders being momentarily forgotten in order to avert the catastrophe. But what the much praised “bi-partisan” approach effectively meant was that even democratic procedures were de facto suspended: there was no time to engage in proper debate, and those who opposed the plan in the US Congress were quickly made to fall in with the majority. Bush, McCain and Obama all quickly got together, explaining to confused congressmen and women that there was simply no time for discussion – we were in a state of emergency, and things simply had to be done fast … And let us also not forget that the sublimely enormous sums of money were spent not on some clear “real” or concrete problem, but essentially in order to restore confidence in the markets, that is, simply to change people’s beliefs! Do we need any further proof that Capital is the Real of our lives, a Real whose imperatives are much more absolute than even the most pressing demands of our social and natural reality?”

- Slavoj Žižek (via azspot)

topherchris: Sometimes I feel the urge to add dinosaurs to...

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 14:27:17 -0400

topherchris:

Sometimes I feel the urge to add dinosaurs to cnn.com. I’ve talked about this before. Deal.

travors: An Interlude - The Decemberists.

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 14:20:52 -0400

travors:

An Interlude - The Decemberists.

mfriedlander: I am not riding this bus

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 16:42:30 -0400

mfriedlander:

I am not riding this bus

"This should be our national anthem"

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 19:45:42 -0400

“This should be our national anthem”

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOu5iWhexE0

112 Gripes About The French

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 22:46:05 -0400

112 Gripes About The French:

This is a manual for U.S. soldiers serving in post-WWII France. It debunks many myths about the French that persist. I found this long ago and lost it. Glad I found it again (only took 10 minutes of googling!)

Photo

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:00:03 -0400

iwdrm: “Mr. Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad news...

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:16:23 -0500

iwdrm:

“Mr. Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad news immediately.”

The Godfather (1972)

"First she wanted to “talk”. Fine. I could tune it out. Then she wanted to be..."

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 23:54:00 -0500

“

First she wanted to “talk”. Fine. I could tune it out. Then she wanted to be “listened” to. Fine. I could pretend. I was finally asked to “understand” , “share”, and “communicate”. I did until my voice was hoarse from mumbling nonsense. Then came the “rules” - shoes here, newspaper there, shower curtain unfolded to avoid mold growth, sofa turned away form the TV, meat in the left back side of the second from the top (not bottom) refrigerator shelf, and “instructions” left on the fridge door with the “orders for the day”. Utter misery. Half an hour of pleasure a day is not worth 23. 5 hours of misery.

The food now tastes better and is warmer (McDonalds), the socks can sit in the middle of the living room for days without provoking imputations, the beer tastes great, and I don’t have to read those God awful poems or admire some silly floral arrangement out loud. I am looking forward to the day when in vitro reproduction becomes norm. Too much misery is created by and effort invested in producing some offspring that will end up, together with the house, salt shakers, and the cars in the hands of some selfish “mother”.

Like the Virginia Slims commercial used to declare - “You’ve come a long way baby”.

”

- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146321725889448.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read#articleTabs%3Dcomments%26commentId%3D2105905

"The Canadian-born Bieber never plans on becoming an American citizen. “You guys are evil,” he says..."

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 03:26:26 -0500

“The Canadian-born Bieber never plans on becoming an American citizen. “You guys are evil,” he says with a laugh. “Canada’s the best country in the world. We go to the doctor and we don’t need to worry about paying him, but here, your whole life, you’re broke because of medical bills. My bodyguard’s baby was premature, and now he has to pay for it. In Canada, if your baby’s premature, he stays in the hospital as long as he needs to, and then you go home.””

- Justin Bieber Talks Sex, Politics, Music and Puberty In New ‘Rolling Stone’ Cover Story

Sometimes a simple observation by a kid — someone with a little common sense, old enough to know a little bit about the world, but not old enough to have had his mind corrupted by evil genius message-makers — can seem like one of the most profound things you’ve ever heard.

(via cajunboy)

Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against a supercomputer.

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 03:18:47 -0500

Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against a supercomputer.:

youmightfindyourself:

When I was selected as one of the two human players to be pitted against IBM’s “Watson” supercomputer in a special man-vs. machine Jeopardy! exhibition match, I felt honored, even heroic. I envisioned myself as the Great Carbon-Based Hope against a new generation of thinking machines—which, if Hollywood is to be believed, will inevitably run amok, build unstoppable robot shells, and destroy us all. But at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Lab, an Eero Saarinen-designed fortress in the snowy wilds of New York’s Westchester County, where the shows taped last month, I wasn’t the hero at all. I was the villain.

This was to be an away game for humanity, I realized as I walked onto the slightly-smaller-than-regulation Jeopardy! set that had been mocked up in the building’s main auditorium. In the middle of the floor was a huge image of Watson’s on-camera avatar, a glowing blue ball crisscrossed by “threads” of thought—42 threads, to be precise, an in-joke for Douglas Adams fans. The stands were full of hopeful IBM programmers and executives, whispering excitedly and pumping their fists every time their digital darling nailed a question. A Watson loss would be invigorating for Luddites and computer-phobes everywhere, but bad news for IBM shareholders.

The IBM team had every reason to be hopeful. Watson seems to represent a giant leap forward in the field of natural-language processing—the ability to understand and respond to everyday English, the way Ask Jeeves did (with uneven results) in the dot-com boom. Jeopardy! clues cover an open domain of human knowledge—every subject imaginable—and are full of booby traps for computers: puns, slang, wordplay, oblique allusions. But in just a few years, Watson has learned—yes, it learns—to deal with some of the myriad complexities of English. When it sees the word “Blondie,” it’s very good at figuring out whether Jeopardy! means the cookie, the comic strip, or the new-wave band.

I expected Watson’s bag of cognitive tricks to be fairly shallow, but I felt an uneasy sense of familiarity as its programmers briefed us before the big match: The computer’s techniques for unraveling Jeopardy! clues sounded just like mine. That machine zeroes in on key words in a clue, then combs its memory (in Watson’s case, a 15-terabyte data bank of human knowledge) for clusters of associations with those words. It rigorously checks the top hits against all the contextual information it can muster: the category name; the kind of answer being sought; the time, place, and gender hinted at in the clue; and so on. And when it feels “sure” enough, it decides to buzz. This is all an instant, intuitive process for a human Jeopardy! player, but I felt convinced that under the hood my brain was doing more or less the same thing.

Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game, though out of the corner of my eye I could see that the middle player had a plasma screen for a face. Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It’s very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman. But unlike us, Watson cannot be intimidated. It never gets cocky or discouraged. It plays its game coldly, implacably, always offering a perfectly timed buzz when it’s confident about an answer. Jeopardy! devotees know that buzzer skill is crucial—games between humans are more often won by the fastest thumb than the fastest brain. This advantage is only magnified when one of the “thumbs” is an electromagnetic solenoid trigged by a microsecond-precise jolt of current. I knew it would take some lucky breaks to keep up with the computer, since it couldn’t be beaten on speed.

During my 2004 Jeopardy! streak, I was accustomed to mowing down players already demoralized at having to play a long-standing winner like me. But against Watson I felt like the underdog, and as a result I started out too aggressively, blowing high-dollar-value questions on the decade in which the first crossword puzzle appeared (the 1910s) and the handicap of Olympic gymnast George Eyser (he was missing his left leg). At the end of the first game, Watson had what seemed like an insurmountable lead of more than $30,000. I tried to keep my chin up, but in the back of my mind, I was already thinking about a possible consolation prize: a second-place finish ahead of the show’s other human contestant and my quiz-show archrival, undefeated Jeopardy! phenom Brad Rutter.

In the final round, I made up ground against Watson by finding the first “Daily Double” clue, and all three of us began furiously hunting for the second one, which we knew was my only hope for catching Watson. (Daily Doubles aren’t distributed randomly across the board; as Watson well knows, they’re more likely to be in some places than others.) By process of elimination, I became convinced it was hiding in the “Legal E’s” category, and, given a 50-50 chance between two clues, chose the $1200 one. No dice. Watson took control of the board and chose “Legal E’s” for $1600. There was the Daily Double. Game over for humanity.

IBM has bragged to the media that Watson’s question-answering skills are good for more than annoying Alex Trebek. The company sees a future in which fields like medical diagnosis, business analytics, and tech support are automated by question-answering software like Watson. Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of “thinking” machines. “Quiz show contestant” may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.

But there’s no shame in losing to silicon, I thought to myself as I greeted the (suddenly friendlier) team of IBM engineers after the match. After all, I don’t have 2,880 processor cores and 15 terabytes of reference works at my disposal—nor can I buzz in with perfect timing whenever I know an answer. My puny human brain, just a few bucks worth of water, salts, and proteins, hung in there just fine against a jillion-dollar supercomputer.

“Watching you on Jeopardy! is what inspired the whole project,” one IBM engineer told me, consolingly. “And we looked at your games over and over, your style of play. There’s a lot of you in Watson.” I understood then why the engineers wanted to beat me so badly: To them, I wasn’t the good guy, playing for the human race. That was Watson’s role, as a symbol and product of human innovation and ingenuity. So my defeat at the hands of a machine has a happy ending, after all. At least until the whole system becomes sentient and figures out the nuclear launch codes. But I figure that’s years away.

startupquote: If I had asked my customers what they wanted,...

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 03:05:42 -0500

startupquote:

If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

- Henry Ford

AZspot: On Liberals and Unions

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 00:59:28 -0500

AZspot: On Liberals and Unions:

evangotlib:

But when you see what Unions have done to America…it’s hard to feel for the folks in Wisconsin. Have you been to Detroit? Have you really dug into the US Public School system? Utter disasters.

Detroit will come back. The school will be saved. But unions need to go in order for…

"Jesus is asked 183 questions directly in the four Gospels. He only answered three of them..."

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 00:42:53 -0500

“Jesus is asked 183 questions directly in the four Gospels. He only answered three of them forthrightly. The others he either ignored, kept silent about, asked a question in return, changed the subject, told a story or gave an audio/visual aid to make his point, told them it was the wrong question, revealed their insincerity or hypocrisy, made the exactly opposite point, or redirected the question elsewhere! Check it out for yourself. He himself asks 307 questions, which would seem to set a pattern for imitation. Considering this, it is really rather amazing that the church became an official answering machine and a very self assured program for ‘sin management’. Many, if not most, of Jesus’ teaching would never pass contemporary orthodoxy tests in either the Roman Office or the Southern Baptist Convention. Most of his statements are so open to misinterpretation that should he teach today, he would probably be called a ‘relativist’ in almost all areas except one: his insistence upon the goodness and reliability of God. That was his only consistent absolute.”

- Richard Rohr (via azspot)

Top-blogged story in the NYTimes: cheaper iphones. Bahrainians...

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 17:07:11 -0500

Top-blogged story in the NYTimes: cheaper iphones. Bahrainians being murdered in the streets by mercenaries hired by their own government: No. 4. Blogger priorities would appear to be out of whack!

Robert Reich: Budget Baloney (1): Why Social Security Isn't a Problem for 26 Years, and the Best Way to Fix It Permanently

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 10:11:16 -0500

Robert Reich: Budget Baloney (1): Why Social Security Isn't a Problem for 26 Years, and the Best Way to Fix It Permanently:

robertreich:

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican presidential hopeful, says in order to “save” Social Security the retirement age should be raised. The media are congratulating him for his putative “courage.” Deficit hawks are proclaiming Social Security one of the big entitlements that has to be…

mattlehrer: The Death Of The Music Industry The music industry...

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 02:10:52 -0500

mattlehrer:

The Death Of The Music Industry

The music industry encountered a nice set of circumstances: Digital distribution that was not easily stolen until the 2000s. It’s not he end of the world. They made better music in the 1970s anyhow. Revenue has nothing to do with it.

"Nokia’s problem is that it follows the losing strategies of the other losers in the market, and..."

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:44:04 -0500

“Nokia’s problem is that it follows the losing strategies of the other losers in the market, and rejects the only two known winning strategies.”

- Mike Elgan: Why Nokia is toast - Computerworld

…but there is a price for everything. NOK: Speculative buy at €2/share…
(via parkparadigm)