walter reed middle school
In case you were wondering what that weird building was behind John McCain.
I’m surprised this hadn’t occurred to me. But several readers have suggested that perhaps one of the tech geeks charged with setting up the audio/visual bells and whistles for the evening was tasked with getting pictures of Walter Reed Army Medical Center but goofed and got this instead. At first I thought, No, that’s ridiculous. This is a major political party with big time professionals putting this together. Nothing is left to chance. I mean, is this the RNC or a scene out Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman? I still have a bit of a hard time believing they’re quite that incompetent. But when you figure in what appears to be the utter lack of any logic for this school being behind McCain and the fact that it has ‘Walter Reed’ in its name, I’m really not sure you can discount this possibility.
YouTube Comment Snob
This is the answer to the problem, but I would kind of miss such helpful comments as “y dun’t u suck a bag of dicks,” when trolling the internets.
YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox extension that filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads. You can choose to have any of the following rules mark a comment for removal:
- More than # spelling mistakes: The number of mistakes is customizable, and the extension uses Firefox’s built-in spell checker.
- All capital letters
- No capital letters
- Doesn’t start with a capital letter
- Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????)
- Excessive capitalization or Profanity
Julia Child — Spy!
Documents detailing a precursor to the current CIA show Julia Child, among a handful of other prominent Americans, to have worked for the intelligence agency during the second world war.
Among the more than 35,000 OSS personnel files are applications, commendations and handwritten notes identifying young recruits who, like Child, Goldberg and Berg, earned greater acclaim in other fields — Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian and special assistant to President Kennedy; Sterling Hayden, a film and television actor whose work included a role in “The Godfather”; and Thomas Braden, an author whose “Eight Is Enough” book inspired the 1970s television series.
Other notables identified in the files include John Hemingway, son of author Ernest Hemingway; Quentin and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of President Theodore Roosevelt, and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police.
deliberation is better than intuition
Striking a blow to fans of Blink everywhere, research suggests that deliberate thought trumps snap judgments and even ’sleeping on it’ when making important decisions.
“Our research suggests that unconscious thought is more susceptible to irrelevant factors, such as how recently information has been seen rather than how important it is,” Newell said. “If conscious thinkers are given adequate time to encode material, or are allowed to consult material while they deliberate, their choices are at least as good as those made ‘unconsciously.’”
A Public Apology to Mr Phil “Terrorkitten” Bebbington,
whose witty and tongue-in-cheek comment on my Show and Tell: Ephemera (I) post I undermined by my tone-deaf follow-up comments.
Mr Bebbington’s comment was clever and (moderately) subtle and English. My response was that of an American chick with an intellect subtle as a flying mallet.
“Hunh? Whaddya mean? Whaddya talkin’ about? I don’t GET it!”
Mr Bebbington, I apologize for having lowered the tone of discourse, and I do hope we will be seeing you* ’round these parts again soon.
With profound respect, I remain
Sheila Ryan
“Born that way and had a relapse”
____________________
* Reference to tag line featured regularly in The Prisoner, the television series starring and co-created by Patrick McGoohan. Well-loved by Anglophiliac American chicks.
Old Masters and Young Geniuses
I was writing a post on David Galenson myself but Jason has done it so well I’ll send you to his post.
NFL IQ by Postion Played
Don’t Fuck With the Little Guy
- A network administrator has locked up a multimillion dollar computer system for San Francisco that handles sensitive data and is refusing to give police the password, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday.
The employee, 43-year-old Terry Childs, was arrested Sunday. He gave some passwords to police, which did not work, and refused to reveal the real code, the paper reported.
I think this guy saw Live Free or Die Hard. Hope they don’t shoot him in the leg to get the code! See story here.
Michael DeBakey, MD
Dr. DeBakey passed away last week. What a terrible loss. Don’t know who Dr. DeBakey is? You or someone you know has probably benefitted from his work. Read more here and here.
Discovering Life on Mars: Bad News?
Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University thinks so:
Discovering traces of life on Mars would be of tremendous scientific significance: the first sign of extraterrestrial life ever detected. Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we’re not entirely alone in this vast, cold cosmos.
They shouldn’t. To the contrary, if we discovered traces of some simple extinct life form – a bacterium, some algae – it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something even more advanced, like the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be horrible news. The more complex the life we found, the more depressing. Scientifically interesting, yes, but dire news for the future of the human race.
Here’s the basic argument: There is a conspicuous silence “out there,” and this suggests that there is a “Great Filter” (Robin Hanson’s term and idea). This means that the filter may lie in our past (as a highly improbable step in the early development of life) or in our future (as a highly improbable leap needed for a civilization to populate the galaxy and survive extinction. Bostrom’s argument holds that finding evidence of even simple life on Mars would tend to place the GF in out future. And, as he also points out, there may be filters in our past and future.
I have to say that I would still be excited and pleased to hear that life–simple or complex–is or was present on Mars. If we decide to see everything in terms of our potential survival as a species, who needs the threat of a Filter to see our prospects as slim? In many ways I think we have the most to fear from our own egos–our sense of dominion over a galaxy we can’t even reach. News of other life elsewhere may itself be a step that leads to just the sort of curiosity we need to get through the next Great Filter.
probabilities
If no one agrees with you, you should be quite worried. If only a small number of people agree with you, you still should be quite worried. I don’t think it’s a numbers game, but I think whatever view you end up with, it doesn’t have to be a majority point of view, that reasons have weight, not just adding up whoever agrees with you. But you still ought to say at the end of the day, look all those other people are against me, maybe I think I’m right probability 57 to 43, but on any truly controversial question among intelligent people, you should never think it’s 95 to 5 in your favor.
What do you think?
Want to Know How I Know the World as We Know It Is Ending?
(via GF)
Gas? $4/gallon?
George W. Bush hadn’t heard that. Weird.
Google is warping our minds
Nicholas Carr wrote the article I wanted to:
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
She Thought She Won a Toyota
Computer-Directed Learning?
Last night I had occasion to reflect on something I’ve pondered off and on through recent years. Around midnight I stopped by clusterflock and discovered a bizarro clusterflock in which posts I’d read a few hours earlier had vanished and at least one old post had merged with a brand-new one. So I stepped into the back office to see whether I could figure out what was up.
Turned out it was just a few extraneous symbols within a recent post’s code, and I managed to restore order. But that’s not what prompted my reflection.
Read more
Elephant Sits on Man’s Head
it’s only — a year — a-way!
Y’all. We’re a year away from clusterflockstock.
Artificial Intelligence in Second Life
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are using Second Life as testing ground for rudimentary artificial intelligence. They have created an avatar, Edd Hifeng, with a limited ability to converse and reason.
“I think the real future for this is when people take these AI-controlled avatars and let them free in ‘Second Life,’” Lester said, ” … let them randomly walk the grid.”
That is years off by most experts’ estimations. Edd’s most sophisticated cognitive feat so far — played out in “Second Life” and posted on the Web — involves him witnessing a gun being switched from one briefcase to another. Edd was able to infer that another “Second Life” character who left the room during the switch would incorrectly think the gun was still in the first suitcase.
This ability to make inferences about the thoughts of others is significant for an AI agent, though it puts Edd on par with a 4-year-old — and the calculus required “under the hood” to achieve this feat is mind-numbingly complex.