tweet of the day
quotes out of context
When P.R. pros begin furiously spinning a story before it has even come out, there’s a pretty good chance the story is going to be damaging to the reputation of said P.R. pros’ bosses.
If I ever go on hallucinogenic walkabout in the desert, I’d want Richard Feynman to be my spirit animal.
One of the classic techniques used to measure a person’s willingness to behave in a utilitarian way is known as trolleyology.
In the premiere, which airs tonight, for example, you’ll see stories about alligators getting excited by tubas playing a particular note, a fairly lightweight woman who can prevent very strong men from picking her up just by changing her stance, a man getting away from a tiger intent on killing him by making it gag, and, in the piece that gives the episode its title, the hair from one person’s head being used to lift an entire car with several passengers.
my current desktop
dueling banjos
from the spam
Danken für den Tipp!
headline of the day
Beetles Die During Sex With Beer Bottles
Sarah Pavis — Apple Live Blog
Most damaging, however, was her obstinate faith in the kindness of strangers
A good overview of the Amanda Knox case, at least from what has become the American perspective:
Their list of grievances was long: incompetent police work, leading to the mishandling of evidence. The lack of any physical trace of Knox in Kercher’s bedroom. Italy’s carnivalesque judicial process, where there is never order in the court, the lawyers and defendants constantly interrupting the proceedings with groans and catcalls and wild gesticulations, while the press in the gallery yammers away like the kids in the back of the classroom. The prosecution’s failure to establish motive or intent (“We live in an age of violence with no motive,” said one prosecutor). And the fact that prosecutors did not immediately drop the case against Knox and Sollecito after the bloody fingerprints and footprints came back matching a 20-year-old petty thief named Rudy Guede.
(via marginal revolution)
fragment
They always say breathe, and I think what the fuck are you talking about? The inside of a box is as important as the handle of a mop.
Something I’m Working On…
I’ll say no more for the moment.
I think he nailed it
they can’t write Shakespeare but they ain’t as dumb as they seem
So says the WSJ:
Monkeys can reason by using analogy, it seems. In an experiment recently reported in the journal Psychological Science, baboons in a lab proved capable of realizing that a pair of oval shapes is “like” a pair of square shapes and “unlike” a pair made of two different shapes.
more on the possible iOS 5 Assistant
I posted a week or so ago about Assistant, a potential voice controlled personal management system available with the next version of the iPhone software. Joel was skeptical, Michael was amused. Here is what Norman Winarsky, the co-founder of Siri, which the software would be based on, thinks about the possibilities:
Let me first say I have no knowledge of what Apple plans to do with the Siri purchase. I read the rumors just like everyone else and it appears that Apple is getting ready to reveal what it has done with Siri over the past year and a half (we were actually expecting it at WWDC). Make no mistake: Apple’s ‘mainstreaming’ Artificial Intelligence in the form of a Virtual Personal Assistant is a groundbreaking event. I’d go so far as to say it is a World-Changing event. Right now a few people dabble in partial AI enabled apps like Google Voice Actions, Vlingo or Nuance Go. Siri was many iterations ahead of these technologies, or at least it was two years ago. This is REAL AI with REAL market use. If the rumors are true, Apple will enable millions upon millions of people to interact with machines with natural language. The PAL will get things done and this is only the tip of the iceberg. We’re talking another technology revolution. A new computing paradigm shift.
I guess we’ll see tomorrow.
open wide
Dear clusterflock
How do you relate to your limitations? With acceptance? Regret? Shame? Resignation? Do you know them at all?
Sign Language
From a photo-graphic of various hand signals the maitre d’ at New York’s Eleven Madison Park uses to signal the waiters.
quote out of (most of the) context
The real gem in an article about, mostly, virtual monkeys:
After a month the monkeys had produced five pages of the letter “S” and had broken the keyboard.
(thanks, Rich)
The ascent of Alex Honnold
A 60 Minutes segment on free-soloist Alex Honnold. I climbed pretty extensively in my twenties and early thirties, and video like this is almost impossible to contextualize. He’s at least a thousand feet above the ground, without ropes or fixed gear.
Previously, on clusterflock.
quotes out of context
We need to play each other’s instruments.
“I did a test site with a product early on and applied the product to a half-acre … In 30 days I had two inches of dead ants covering the entire half-acre,” Rasberry said. “It looked like the top of the dead ants was just total movement from all the live ants on top of the dead ants.”
To preemptively address that question, BMW engineered a so-called “Active Sound Design” into this five-passenger sedan, routing a digital interpretation of the V8 engine’s roar through the car’s six-speaker stereo upon request.
Mr Anderson’s virtual monkeys are small computer programs uploaded to Amazon servers. These coded apes regularly pump out random sequences of text.
The authors noted more research is needed to explore whether or not overly confident people aren’t trustworthy.
You can’t wish upon a star motherless with pubic hair stuck in your teeth.
Grandma’s vagina
Another season of Arrested Development!
Amanda broke the news on Twitter, but it looks like there will be another season of everyone’s favorite ended-before-its-time television show:
At an “Arrested Development” reunion Sunday at the New York Festival, the creators and cast announced plans for another season of the short-lived but critically acclaimed TV show, which went off the air in 2006 after just three seasons. They also discussed more concrete plans for a much-awaited movie.
Update: The New York Times Arts Beat has more, as well as a link to a Jason Bateman tweet.
So, Mr. Hurwitz said, “We’re trying to do a limited-run series into the movie.” After a wave of excited applause died down, he continued, “We’re basically hoping to do nine or 10 episodes, with almost one character per episode.”
Update: “Will Arnett lead the cast in his classic chicken dance to end their New Yorker Festival reunion panel.”
He saws down trees in the water
quotes out of context
Then came a bizarre twist.
So far the defining comment about the current Republican presidential stampede was made by the columnist Maureen Dowd in The New York Times: she said Mitt Romney looked like a statue of himself.
Though it was an awkward subject to broach, she finally worked up the nerve to ask him to have his semen tested. “No, thanks,” he said.
In more places than you’d think, there’s a talented chef just waiting for an appreciative patron.
The Star Wars Celica
In 1977 Toyota and Twentieth Century Fox teamed up to offer a Star Wars Celica sweepstakes. Since the promotion, it’s gone missing.
The Star Wars Celica was designed by Delphi Auto Design in Costa Mesa, California, and awarded sometime after the end of 1977, probably in January 1978. While the sweepstakes were a joint venture hosted by Toyota and Twentieth Century Fox, the awarding dealership remains a mystery, as does the identity of the winner and the vehicle’s VIN number.
The Official Star Wars Blog wants your help finding it, old Jedi.
