welcome to the future

[via]

bleg

So, I have an Amazon Prime trial subscription that'll work for the next few weeks. What shovel-ready projects should my one-man stimulus program tackle?

Great, now Madagascar is messing with me

The implausibly real Adansonia tree

Old Skool

Beastie Boys versus Richard Scarry

Meet Pink Floyd vs The Wizard of Oz for the Reality Bites set. Yes, I realize this is the sort of Gen-X self-referential nostalgia in-joke that normally makes me break out in hives, but not so much this time. So sue me.

Kids these days

The rich ontological history of HURF DURF BUTTER EATER.

And you can't please some of the folks all of the time

You Can't Please Everyone - One Star Reviews of Classic Movies, Music and Literature.

I liked this - quite likely ironic - review of Are You Experienced?

Words cannot describe my intense dislike for Jimi’s guitar “skills”. This guy is a HACK. All songs sound exactly the same, the drummer is weak, does the bassist even exist? Listen to some REAL music that actually requires talent- like Nickelback!

Oh, it gets better (worse).

In which I avoid the obvious joke

10 Reasons Why We Love Making Lists

A Thousand Monkeys Typing...

...really will produce Shakespeare, assuming that you happen to need Hamlet scanned in from an old library book, but that their OCR spit it out: How Spam Saves Libraries

I spend a lot of time peddling my accumulated junk on the virtual garage sale known as Craigslist. Each time I post an item, the website dutifully presents me with its security check, forcing me to decode one of those sequences of squiggly, distorted letters that look like a cross between a Rorschach test and a four-year-old’s signature — a captcha, as computer scientists call them, short for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”

The curious thing about Craigslist’s captchas, however, is that instead of testing me with a single sequence of random letters (ujFRuQ, say), the site asks me to decode two words, both in a distinctly old-fashioned (though distorted) font.

Read the rest, as they say. I once looked at the little codes Blogger made me type in, hoping that there was some ghost in the machine trying to say hello. With the random letters, not so much, but here where they're trying to recapture texts, there's a distinct chance you could get that impression.

Also, the whole point of captcha's is that they must be hard to automate, and the tasks picked were selected with this explicitly in mind. Which makes me wonder what the complete list of such tasks would be. I like the idea that there are tasks that are hard to algorithmize, in part because I am not good at thinking algorithmically and hence I am not a computer programmer, but also because I always wonder if self-consciousness is uncomputable.

Anyway, I think optical character recognition is most definately computable, but as my Grandfather's chicken scratch illustrated, it can be very difficult to do. What's neat about the work above is that after probably a million engineer-years of trying to automate the process, you pick the exact inputs that have proved resistant to your automation efforts in order to both select against spam-bots and also provide a useful service to the person that was trying to scan in the original document. Neat.

A boy named Sebastian

Hipster Baby Names.

Schadenfreude is not attractive

But mea culpa, I enjoyed this premortem (née Washington Post-mortem, ha ha) of the newspaper industry's looming financial apocalypse. [via] In the spirit of reconciliation, let me hope that they rise again, phoenix-like from this fire, and other clichés.

Even worse than the real thing

Apparently this was one of the better candidates from the latest Turing test: Elbot

Take one look at Youtube comments, and it's quite apparent that things would be better with the proverbial thousand monkeys, but man, the computer programs are still a ways off.

Senator, I do not recall

Whether I linked to this before, and I'm too lazy to search - all that typing and clicking! But, it's worthwhile to check back in on tryork5ifp's ebay profile.

Somewhat redundant with the entire internet

Smugopedia - Pretend you know better. For instance:

Bickering

Such departmental bickering always reminds me of Borges' observation on the Falklands War: It's like two bald men fighting over a comb.

By means of a complete lack of introspection, I don't consider myself to be smug at all, so I haven't been able to think of any new entries.

funny ha ha

White Stuff People Like.

The killing joke

Michael Bay's Rejected "The Dark Knight" Script

Politics and Prose is pretty Honky

I am thinking to go: Stuff White People Like Book Signing

You cannot out-parody reality

Not from the Onion: FTC Wants to Know What Big Brother Knows About You

Whether Weather?

How Valid or T.V. Weather Forecasts?

Apparently not very. But you knew that, right? That said, I'm back out on the Olympic Peninsula, and I very much believe the 10 day forecast of rain/rain/rain/rain/rain/rain/rain/rain/rain...

The Wire

I'm compelled to say I liked The Wire, but I think it should have just ended after three seasons. Honestly, I don't think the last two seasons added much to what the original story arc finished in seasons one and three - once Stringer Bell was dead, the writers really had said their piece. And now I have too.

Is it just me

or do social scientists have a little more license with their paper titles than, cough, physical sciences?