CAN YOU REALLY LAUNCH A SWARM ATTACK when you only have 3 or 4 viewers?
Archive for 2012
June 23, 2012
CONTROVERSIAL? I THOUGHT IT WAS ALWAYS GOOD FOR ARTISTS TO MOCK THE POWERFUL. Right?
DAVE KOPEL: OSHA Targets Shooting Range. More of that “under the radar” gun control we heard about?
THE OBAMA EVENT REGISTRY STORY: So bizarre, people checked with Snopes — but it’s true. I guess Obama is stranger than fiction.
ECONOMICS: We’ve been eating our seed corn.
A Due Process Right To Record The Police, which I coauthored with John Steakley, is still at #1 on SSRN. We’re even handily ahead of Death and Taxes and Zombies, which I regard as surprising — though the piece did get a nice mention from Tim Lee on Ars Technica the other day.
HOW TO rid your yard of mosquitoes.
A few years ago, we had a holding pond in our backyard that was breeding mosquitoes. I put in some bacterial mosquito-killer — it wasn’t this stuff, but something similar that I can’t find now. It worked wonderfully.
WHAT HAPPENED TO TURING’S THINKING MACHINES?
More than 60 years after his seminal 1950 paper, and following decades of exponential growth in the power of computers, Turing’s thinking machine has yet to be realised outside the realms of science fiction, where the intelligent robot – from Hal 9000 to C3P0 – is common.
Instead, modern AI posses a very different sort of intelligence to our own, one that is narrow and focused on specialised tasks such as helping to fly planes or screening loan applications. In carrying out these tasks, machines can make sound judgements faster and more consistently than people, but lack the versatility of human thought. So where are the thinking machines, and will computers ever match the general intelligence of an individual?
Key bit: “What robots find hard, we find easy — and vice versa.”
BARACK HUSSEIN KARDASHIAN: Rex Murphy on Obama: America’s celebrity president. “When you are in vogue, the editor of Vogue pleads for your attention. When you’re not in vogue, you plead with the editor of Vogue.” Come to think of it, the Kardashians seem to be on the way out, too.
TALKLEFT: “My opinion: This is self-defense. Zimmerman was not the aggressor, he did nothing to provoke Trayvon Martin’s beating him, breaking his nose and slamming his head into concrete. He had every right to respond with deadly force to stop Trayvon’s physical attack on him and to prevent Trayvon from getting control of his weapon. . . . I see nothing that amounts to a contradiction or a difference. I see a valid claim of self-defense.”
#FIRSTWORLDPROBLEMS: Picking a Time of Day for Sex Is More Complicated Than It Looks.
AT AMAZON, markdowns on Belkin surge protectors. You can never have too many.
SHOCKER: Chinese Data Said To Be Manipulated, Understating Its Slowdown. “As the Chinese economy continues to sputter, prominent corporate executives in China and Western economists say there is evidence that local and provincial officials are falsifying economic statistics to disguise the true depth of the troubles.”
Good thing that could never happen here.
THIS WEEK IN THE FUTURE.
SONGS THAT STICK IN YOUR HEAD. I remember Arthur C. Clarke’s story, The Ultimate Melody.
POPULAR MECHANICS IS AT THE Home Safety & Disaster Preparedness Show in Kenner, La.
CAUGHT WHILE BOW-FISHING, NO LESS: Texas fisherman prevails in epic battle with enormous alligator gar. “Whether Brent Crawford has captured the world’s largest alligator gar will never be known — his scale bottomed out emphatically at 300 pounds and he filleted the prehistoric-looking fish after attempting to obtain its weight. But this much is clear: The gar Crawford landed while bow-fishing recently in Texas’ Lake Corpus Christi is among the largest specimens ever captured — and it was captured in a manner like no other gar captured beforehand.”
My favorite bit: “The line went taut and the fish yanked the fisherman into the water headfirst. That’s when Crawford’s dog, Bleux, grabbed him by the cuff of the jeans, creating a bizarre riverbank tug-of-war.”
CHANGE SAME: Views shift little after Obama backs gay marriage.
There is currently no HTTP status code to indicate you can’t access content because it’s been prohibited by a government agency. Tim Bray, a Google engineer, has proposed the status code “451,” in honor of the recently deceased author of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, for use when an ISP is ordered by the government to deny access to a certain website.
Cute, though not consistent with the current error-numbering scheme.
DID YOU EVER WONDER WHETHER RATS LAUGH? Wonder no more.
KEEPING COOL: Let Them See You Sweat. “Don’t wipe unless you’re drenched. Sweat releases heat by evaporative cooling. As each gram of sweat transitions from liquid to gas phase, it absorbs 2,427 joules of energy from the body and dissipates the heat into the environment. But if you wipe away the perspiration before it evaporates, that process will get cut short, and you’ll need to sweat more just to achieve the same degree of cooling. On the other hand, any sweat that drips to the ground before it can evaporate won’t do you any good, so if you’re really soaked you may as well reach for the towel.”
WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS: The Post-It Desk. Well, maybe not everyone.
IN THE MAIL: No Hero.