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My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:14:18 +0000

My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement

Mailing Lists are Zombies

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:34:25 +0000

ConversationBoard (the code behind ILX) would be perfect for this, I’m thinking. It surprises me how much tech discussion is locked away in little ghettoes like IRC, mailing lists and wikis.

rentzsch:

John Resig:

As far as I’m concerned, Google Groups is dead.

As far as I’m concerned, mailing lists are ~~dead~~ zombies.

A pain to subscribe to. A pain to manage (you almost immediately need to set up reader-side filtering for any list of any significant traffic). A pain to follow (by date or by thread are both painful). Inefficient. A pain to unsubscribe from.

I used to run a few Mailman lists myself, but gave up since it wasn’t worth the hassle.

Forums as we know them aren’t the answer. I think we need a new kind of forum (unfortunately phpBB has ravaged the world). Stackoverflow is a promising re-think on the topic. Perhaps Google Wave or something like it is the future.

I was hoping blogging would be it. Perhaps it’s too soon to tell, but it doesn’t feel like it. I think it’s still too hard to blog and have real, trackable conversations that way.

Personally, I’d like to see something that would allow quick, off-the-cuff twitter conversations to seamlessly grow into real, persistent, searchable topic-oriented chats.

I don’t read Scoble, but Jeff Atwood just tweeted this related post. I feel dirty linking to Scoble, but I think it’s a good post.

IBM takes a (feline) step toward thinking machines

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:06:59 +0000

IBM takes a (feline) step toward thinking machines:

science:

IBM simulates a cat’s cerebral cortex using a supercomputer. The numbers are staggering: using almost 150,000 processors and 144 terabytes of memory, the program simulated the roughly 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses (connections between neurons) of a cat’s brain. Even with this massive processing power, the simulation ran a hundred times slower than a real cat’s brain. (The researchers fed the artificial brain images of corporate logos. If I were a brain in a vat, I’d want my fantasy world to be a little livelier.)

A deeper question is whether this kind of simulation is telling us anything new. It seems — and this is, of course, extremely speculative, as is everything regarding actual artificial intelligence — entirely possible that we could duplicate a human brain in silicon, yet come no closer to understanding the brain’s operation. AI might be useful, but will it ever satisfy our very human curiosity about how and why stuff, in this case, the mind, works? Who knows. When dealing with the nature of consciousness, very little is certain.

"[Topley-Bird] would often go in without even having heard the track once, yet most of the stuff you..."

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:04:07 +0000

“[Topley-Bird] would often go in without even having heard the track once, yet most of the stuff you now hear is the very first thing that came out of her mouth. It was brilliant. It was like ‘hair standing up on the back of your neck’ time.”

- The making of Maxinquaye

marco: The 27” iMac’s base configuration is $1699. It has a 2560x1440 resolution […] The 30”...

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:18:24 +0100

marco:

The 27” iMac’s base configuration is $1699. It has a 2560x1440 resolution […] The 30” Cinema Display is $1799. It has a 2560x1600 resolution.

The 30” is also too shallow. Sounds weird because this thing is a monster, but it’s still not really deep enough — which makes the iMac far too shallow.

Laptop and PC screens are all going widescreen-TV sizes because that’s where the money in making panels is, but 3:4 or portrait is the best shape for a computer screen: look at the iPhone, or even the shape of this webpage.

Your solution to the news crisis will not work

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:17:42 +0100

Your solution to the news crisis will not work:

I wrote a snarking form letter replying to yet more ideas for saving journalism, posted it as a Metafilter comment and now it seems to be growing legs.

"Harry Evans. He is smaller now, his legs slower and his hair whiter. But when he came into the..."

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:24:04 +0100

“Harry Evans. He is smaller now, his legs slower and his hair whiter. But when he came into the Guardian’s morning conference on Thursday he held an audience of journalists – many of them not born when he left his last great editorial job in 1982 – in the palm of his hand.”

- ‘We have to keep doing it’ | Harold Evans interviewed by Alan Rusbridger

tomewing: Just started watching Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on...

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:55:25 +0100

tomewing:

Just started watching Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on DVD - picked it up on sale in Amazon a while back. Not normally a fan of spy stories but this is fantastic, gripping and an absolute feast of old school Brit character actors.

… there’s a part quite late on where Alec Guinness is given some bad news. And although there’s no dialogue, he speaks volumes by taking off his glasses and patting his jumper. It’s sublime.

Dont be fooled, it’s just a gateway jam so that...

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:23:34 +0100

Dont be fooled, it’s just a gateway jam so that you’ll buy posh Brie to make sandwiches. I’m onto their scam.

The Human Printer

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 15:52:21 +0100

The Human Printer:

Painting images in CMYK. By hand. With moire and everything.

Giving up my iPod for a Walkman

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:34:23 +0100

Giving up my iPod for a Walkman:

I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette

"While Mr. Brown and his party may deserve to be punished, their political opponents don’t deserve to..."

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:08:36 +0100

“While Mr. Brown and his party may deserve to be punished, their political opponents don’t deserve to be rewarded. After all, would a Conservative government have been any less in the thrall of free-market fundamentalism, any more willing to rein in runaway finance, over the past decade? Of course not.”

- Paul Krugman: Gordon the Unlucky

147xxxx: Someone brought their desktop computer into the store....

Thu, 28 May 2009 00:59:59 +0100

147xxxx:

Someone brought their desktop computer into the store. REDIC.

"Here, in other words, is a long-range backstory—a device that, in the Hollywood of recent times, has..."

Fri, 15 May 2009 01:31:43 +0100

“Here, in other words, is a long-range backstory—a device that, in the Hollywood of recent times, has grown from an option to a fetish. “Batman Begins” … What’s wrong with “Batman Is” ?”

- Anthony Lane on Star Trek

"The only group that holds a consistently high opinion of newspapers is newspaper people...."

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:51:16 +0100

“The only group that holds a consistently high opinion of newspapers is newspaper people. They’re the ones who do the bragging about how newspapers enrich democracy by uncovering pollution, malfeasance in office, abuses of power, and unsafe consumer goods.”

- It’s time to kill the idea that newspapers are essential for democracy.

"‘This computer thing,’ my editor said to me one time in 1983, ‘I don’t get..."

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:52:42 +0000

““‘This computer thing,’ my editor said to me one time in 1983, ‘I don’t get it.’ And I think about that conversation a lot. It’s a perfect example of how newspapers have botched everything connected to everything new ever. Granted it was one conversation with a 72-year-old man back in the era of Flock of Seagulls, but that didn’t stop me from making it the title of my upcoming book, ‘This Computer Thing, I Don’t Get It,’ coming out in October from Obsequious Press.””

- How to Become a “Death of Newspapers” Blogger

Old Growth Media And The Future Of News

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 02:06:07 +0000

Old Growth Media And The Future Of News:

This is far better than the Shirky piece everyone is clanging on about.

"I wonder if the BBC shouldn’t run some kind of opt-out scheme where celebrities can sign a form that..."

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:08:24 +0000

“I wonder if the BBC shouldn’t run some kind of opt-out scheme where celebrities can sign a form that reads “In the event of my untimely death, please, under no circumstances should the BBC invite everycunt to share their half-formed opinions of me (after googling me to work out who the fuck they think I was)””

- spEak You’re bRanes » Does Anyone Know Who We’re Grieving For?

Philosophy has become packed with potential terminological minefields, each of which could explode...

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:32:51 +0000

Philosophy has become packed with potential terminological minefields, each of which could explode so massively that philosophers step very gingerely around the humblest sentences.

The result is footnotes like this one from Oppy’s Ontological Arguments: “This talk of ‘sets of sentences’ is shorthand for more convoluted talk about sets of standardly interpreted sentences … The difficulty here is to make a more accurate claim that does not suggest a perhaps undesirable commitment to the existence of abstract entities associated with utterances or inscriptions of sentence-tokens”.

Bloody Wittgenstein. He should have remained silent.

Experimental New York Times interface

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 21:10:39 +0000

Experimental New York Times interface