The PBS NewsHour’s Preview of Watson
This segment expands on the article Josh posted Sunday. If you are interested in the ideas that surround The Singularity, this feels like a significant step toward that.
from the comments
There’s the tale about the broadcaster who was ripped and reading a story about the overthrow of a dictator with a very long, complicated name. The writer had forgotten to put in a pronouncer. So the broadcaster told about the overthrow of the leader of blah blah, then added the former dictator’s “name has been withheld pending notification of next of kin.”
O’Reilly Gets Memed
Nova, Becoming Human
I watched these Nova episodes on the origins of Homo sapiens — you know, us — over the weekend.
The Ice Book
I always had the dream of creating a theatre performance that opened up like a pop-up book. A show that would mix video projections with live actors to create a totally immersive experience. We wanted to create a full scale, life-size theatre production.
The idea for the Icebook was to create a miniature maquette for this dream — a demonstration model to show to producers and other funders in the hope that they would give us some money to make the full-scale show. (And we still hope that this will come true one day!) The Icebook has since, however, grown its own legs and turned into a miniature show all by itself. An intimate performance for small audiences.
Additional footage from The Ice Book here.
from the moderated comments
Deron Bauman is a Scientology Office of Special Affairs internet handler.
One of the Benefits…
Of being unemployed (except when snow flies). Today, I hung new light fixtures in two closets, emptied my closet in preparation for its renovation, I did the dishes from a birthday dinner party last night, I folded some laundry and I watched this:
An act of public punctuation
Not my work, but appreciated nonetheless.
Word Request
“That feeling you get when you realize you have no idea how to pronounce the word you’re about to say, because you’ve only ever used it online, but it’s too late to turn back.”
Through the looking-glass (11.02.2011)
Sheila and Mindy visit the Forest View Lounge.
11.02.2011.
Bold Choices
Very Minor Observation
I hate the Chrysler logo. The new 300 looks better as a Lancia.
Book Recommendations
Luke asked on Twitter what magic realist stories people would recommend for a high school class he is teaching. Unrelated, I’ve been wanting to read a good overview of human evolution, maybe the last two million years forward until Homo sapiens were the only branch of modern humans.
Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová – The Moon
tweet of the day
from the comments
This resonates with me deeply.
1. I am sad that you feel this way. I know what it’s like to feel this way, and if you feel half as bad as I do, you feel terrible.
2. Everyone has secrets. Whether they are secret desires, secret fears, even the most successful people are still worried about people liking them or think they’re not that interesting sometimes. Everyone is sad and worried, and most people are too sad to even let it show, or don’t want to burden others.
3. A lot of life is being prepared for a lucky break. I got everything I ever had because I emailed someone, because I put myself out there instead of waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and inform me that it is my turn. Some people are truly inherently talented, the rest of us have to work like crazy to get anywhere at all. Do something, every single day. If you want to be a writer, then write for a few minutes every day. Find out what it is that makes you feel alive and then try and do it for a few minutes. Not three hours, just a few minutes. Maybe it’ll come to something, but if it doesn’t, you’re still doing the one thing that makes you feel like living and that’s a worthy end in and of itself.
4. When I feel bad about what it is that I do not have, I take stock of what I do have. What do you have, tangibles and intangibles?
5. Stop caring about what other people think. Easier said than done. Most people are terrible and have terrible ideas. Find the people and place you can trust, and try trusting it for a while.
What should the community call the new government building at 200 E Berry?
And that opens up the question: Why would you believe this over something else?
From an interview by Terry Gross with Lawrence Wright, the guy who wrote the New Yorker article on Paul Haggis and Scientology.
GROSS: So how did he agree to talk with you about Scientology?
Mr. WRIGHT: Well, I was really surprised how candid and open he was. You know, although from the beginning, he was a little guarded when we started. And he had never talked about it in public, and actually with very few of his friends, as well.
And many of the questions that I was asking over the course of the nearly 10 months that it took to do this story, he had never really asked himself. So there was a process of discovery for him, as well, I believe, in the course of the writing of this article.
from the comments
(Another side thought: Words mean something because speaking is a kind of incantation, the Latin for “I sing” is canto, I think something like that, and so when you talk you are calling something into being.)
Valentine’s, Shmalentine’s
In my experience, it’s a thin line between love and hate when Valentine’s Day rolls around. Some people can’t get enough of roses, chocolates, and romance, while others can’t stop grumbling about how it’s just a stupid holiday invented by the greeting card companies. As someone who prefers to refer to February 14th as “Shmalentine’s Day,” you can guess which camp I fall into.
Readability
It’s no longer just a bookmarklet.
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The Legend of Zelda meets 80s flicks
Brilliantly executed from beginning to end. (via Boing Boing)
Dear Clusterflock
What do you do when you get the feeling that most other people are having a way better time in life than you are, and that said most other people also have their shit together in ways that you can only aspire to?
Watson
The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating profile on “Watson,” IBM’s Jeopardy-playing computer, which is set to take on a couple former champions in the coming week. The article covers the usual anecdotes about creating and testing the computer’s algorithms, but it also had some pretty sober insight into what building such a machine says about us as humans:
For humans, knowledge is an entire universe, a welter of sensations and memories, desires, facts, skills, songs and images, words, hopes, fears and regrets, not to mention love. But for those hoping to build intelligent machines, it has to be simpler. Broadly speaking, it falls into three categories: sensory input, ideas and symbols.
Consider the color blue. It’s something that computers and people alike can perceive, each in their own fashion. Sensory perception is the raw material of knowledge. Now think of the three-letter word “sky.” Those letters are a symbol for the biggest piece of blue in our world. Computers can handle such symbols. But how about this snippet from Lord Byron? “Friendship is love without his wings.” That sentence represents the third realm of knowledge: ideas. How can a machine make sense of these? In these early years of the 21st century, ideas remain the dominion of humans—and the frontier for thinking machines.
Over the next four years, Mr. Ferrucci set about creating a world in which people and their machines often appeared to switch roles. He didn’t know, he later said, whether humans would ever be able to “create a sentient being.” But when he looked at fellow humans through the eyes of a computer scientist, he saw patterns of behaviors that often appeared to be pre-programmed: the zombie-like commutes, the near-identical routines, from tooth-brushing to feeding the animals, the retreat to the same chair, the hand reaching for the TV remote. “It’s more interesting,” he said, “when humans delve inside themselves and say, ‘Why am I doing this? And why is it relevant and important to be human?’ “
Dear Clusterflock
What do you recommend?
