The podcast is in eight parts -- I started reading it before I'd finished the story, so there's some minor inconsistencies that'll be fixed in the final cut. Next up I'll be reading "Martian Chronicles," my young adult story about free-market ideologues colonizing Mars, and the video games they play on the way to the Red Planet.
The doomed rogue AI is called BIGMAC and he is my responsibility. Not my responsibility as in "I am the creator of BIGMAC, responsible for his existence on this planet." That honor belongs to the long-departed Dr Shannon, one of the shining lights of the once great Sun-Oracle Institute for Advanced Studies, and he had been dead for years before I even started here as a lowly sysadmin.No, BIGMAC is my responsibility as in, "I, Odell Vyphus, am the systems administrator responsible for his care, feeding and eventual euthanizing." Truth be told, I'd rather be Dr Shannon (except for the being dead part). I may be a lowly grunt, but I'm smart enough to know that being the Man Who Gave The World AI is better than being The Kid Who Killed It.
Not that anyone would care, really. 115 years after Mary Shelley first started humanity's hands wringing over the possibility that we would create a machine as smart as us but out of our control, Dr Shannon did it, and it turned out to be incredibly, utterly boring. BIGMAC played chess as well as the non-self-aware computers, but he could muster some passable trash-talk while he beat you. BIGMAC could trade banalities all day long with any Turing tester who wanted to waste a day chatting with an AI. BIGMAC could solve some pretty cool vision-system problems that had eluded us for a long time, and he wasn't a bad UI to a search engine, but the incremental benefit over non-self-aware vision systems and UIs was pretty slender. There just weren't any killer apps for AI.
From EFF's Secret Files: Anatomy of a Bogus Subpoena
The government added insult to injury by also inserting this language on the first page of the subpoena: "You are not to disclose the existence of this request unless authorized by the Assistant U.S. Attorney. Any such disclosure would impede the investigation being conducted and thereby interfere with the enforcement of the law."The problem? The law doesn't require the recipient of a federal grand jury subpoena to keep the subpoena secret (which is why, typically, subpoenas often will "request" -- but not require -- a recipient's silence). There are certainly secrecy requirements for participants in the grand jury -- such as the jurors and the prosecutors -- but those requirements do not extend to witnesses (or potential witnesses such as a subpoena recipient). And although the SCA does provide the government with the option of obtaining a court order under 18 U.S.C. § 2705(b) requiring silence when the recipient's disclosure would have an adverse affect on an investigation, the government in this case did not obtain any such gag order.
In sum, without any legal authority to back up their purported gag demand, the government ordered Ms. Clair not to reveal the existence of the subpoena, a subpoena that as already described was patently overbroad and invalid under the SCA. This is exactly the kind of unjustified demand of silence that creates a fog around the government's often-overreaching surveillance activities. How many other subpoena recipients have remained silent over the years in response to such bogus demands, and how many of them violated their users' privacy by handing over data that the government wasn't entitled to? We simply do not know, and because of a lack of meaningful reporting about the government's use of the SCA, we cannot know.
We were determined that our client would not be one of the silenced, and that this illegal subpoena would eventually see the light of day.
I asked, "How are people selected for secondary searches?. She replied "It's random.""Where are all the white guys?" -- Update on "Do I have the right to refuse this search."I asked "Is there a mark on my boarding pass?" She replied, "We used to do that, but we don't do it anymore." She did not know why that practice had been discontinued.
I stated "So you look at people as they are entering the metal detector, you make some type of assessment, and then you select people for secondary searches, right?"
...At this point, I turned to look over my shoulder and observed a Caucasian woman in her late thirties or early forties standing inside the whole-body imager. I called my screener's attention to this and said. "Look over there. There's a woman in the scanner. You all picked me for a search, and then the very next person you select is a woman. Why didn't you pick a white guy? Where are all the white guys?"
She replied, helpfully, "We are understaffed today and we don't have enough male screeners to do pat downs. We are not allowed to do opposite sex pat-downs so we are only selecting women for secondary screening."
By this point, I was seated and she was patting down the bottom of my feet. The secondary search, more thorough than the last search I had been subjected to in Albany, but equally ineffective, was nearing completion. I said "If you are only selecting women, how is that random?"
She said, "You're done. You can collect your belongings, Have a nice day."
The University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seeks an enterprising, creative, and service-oriented archivist to join the staff of Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) as Archivist for the Grateful Dead Archive. This is a potential career status position. The Archivist will be part of a dynamic, collegial, and highly motivated department dedicated to building, preserving, promoting, and providing maximum access both physically and virtually to one of the Library's most exciting and unique collections, The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA). The UCSC University Library utilizes innovative approaches to allow the discovery, use, management, and sharing of information in support of research, teaching, and learning.Grateful Dead Archivist (via Resource Shelf)Under the general direction of the Head of Special Collections and Archives, the GDA Archivist will provide managerial and curatorial oversight of the Grateful Dead Archive, plan for and oversee the physical and digital processing of Archives related material, and promote the GDA to the public and facilitate its use by scholars, fans, and students.
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Gareth from Make sez, "Here's Collin's latest electronics video tutorial, on induction. He's the David Lynch of DIY The Scorcese of open source education The Tarantino of tutorials And he rocks it all in a natty suit and tie! What's not to love?"
MAKE presents: The Inductor
(Thanks, Gareth!)
I'm sorry for posting two questions in two days :/ ...I hope you don't mind too much
I am doing a book report and in the book the author describes a character very thoroughly so I want to say:
"She mentions everything from the color of her hair to the name of her first boyfriend"
I would also like to say:
"I get the impression that Pauline is... but she sees herself as..."
I tried to look them up in both dictionaries and online but didn't find any good translations so any help from you guys would be hugely appreciated :)
TonyBot sez, "This video is from a talk I saw Professor Lessig give on Wednesday the title is 'It is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright.' The talk was given at EDUCUASE a major technology in higher education conference. As an IT support guy for professors at a New England state school I run up against copyright every day, Lessig's talk is both informative and inspiring, though I'd be interested in ways the people would react to his concluding call for action."
It is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright
(Thanks, TonyBot!)
Hydrantables & Lunch Shelves Are Amazing New Achievements in Street Food Eating Technology
Those of us who love eating street food, but hate taking lunch back to our desks, have a common problem. Where should we eat? There are a number of indoor pavilions and outdoor seating areas scattered across Midtown, but sometimes I just wish there was a place right next to the carts to just saddle up and tuck in. Well thanks to Pratt Grad Student Ali Pulver, now there is. For her thesis she is developing a couple of tools to make it easier for us to eat on the street. And after testing out the "Lunch Shelf" and the "Hydrantable" last week, I've got to say these could represent the greatest advancements in street food technology since the invention of chicken and lamb over rice!
(via Making Light)
 | A weakening tropical storm Ida, which will come ashore late tonight or early Tuesday, is likely the last major threat of the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season, forecasters say. |
 | Its skin pale and rubbery and its organs swollen with gas, an "alien" discovered in a Panama creek has now been identified by veterinarians as a common three-toed sloth. |
Channel 4's documentary-style drama, The Execution of Gary Glitter, imagines an alternative Britain that reintroduces the death penalty. Celebrity sex offender Paul Gadd—AKA glam rock star Gary Glitter—is re-tried for his crimes and hanged. It's a story about the moral quandary of capital punishment, generously garnished with the British media's obsession with pedophilia.
The real Gadd was disgraced by a child porn bust and his subsequent residency in sex tourist hotspots. After 18 months in a Vietnamese jail on a conviction for child molestation, he was released in 2008 and flown back to the U.K. The tabloids now stalk him and run stories like "Gary Glitter changes the style of his beard."
Execution depicts a different outcome. Arrested hours after landing, he's put on trial to test new legislation that allows capital punishment for crimes committed abroad. He sneers, argues, and wheedles. Talking heads, politicians and members of the public pop up in news-style interviews. Then he is put to death. Channel 4's Hamish Mykura says that "this drama confronts the public with what many say they want."
The documentary style is clever, and Hilton McRae does an excellent job as Glitter. He is alternatively smug, sordid, humane and pathetic. But then there's that whole weird thing about portraying an act of rationalized mob justice on someone who is very much alive and free.
Among the rationales offered is that the movie confronts us with a difficult truth; namely, that Britain needs to see Gary Glitter executed if it is to come to terms with its own moral indecisiveness over capital punishment. But the movie's concept isn't really "Imagine if we made new laws that dealt severely with sex offenders." It is "Imagine if we made new laws that would make Gary Glitter the center of national attention again." His presence is a gimmick. Without him, it would be a dry exploitation flick about no-one in particular—but one that might at least make sense.
The film's legal devices exist only to bring the celebrity to the rope. Hangings within a month of conviction, without any right to a court appeal? The EU not enforcing the Convention of Human Rights just to keep Britain happy? Get real, little Englanders. Besides, Britain has an ample supply of bona-fide child murderers competing for eligibility: I guess Ian Huntley just doesn't look enough like Fu Manchu.
Moreover, if the filmmakers cared about depicting the reality of capital punishment, they could have at least cooked up a more convincing doom. Western executions, where they play, follow years of legal wrangling. They are usually dehumanized clinical events, not pathos-filled remixes of Saddam's last gasp.
In any case, the dramatics fade before the loopyness of the Glitter premise. How did Britain's fixation on sexual stranger danger get this baroque? I'm stumped, frankly. I'm ready to be told the whole thing was some kind of deadpan black comedy. But a few ideas do spring to mind.
My countrymen often complain of the nanny state, but that modern taste for risk-peddling seems an international phenomenon. Throw pedophiles in the mix, however, and the outcomes start getting really weird.
Take, for example, the recent actions of Watford local council, which banned parents from being with their own children in a public play area. Then there's the 82-year-old woman accused of being a possible pedophile after taking photos of a swimming pool. And so on. This suggests confusion over the proper areas of association between kids and adults.
Then there's concern over youngsters' wellbeing in general. Britain's children are supposedly the unhappiest in Europe. Those responsible for their happiness were given a scathing review by UNICEF, which suggested British families are the least nurturing this side of the former Warsaw Pact. Though Britian's schools remain among the world's best, the rankings fell sharply over the last decade, and reports of its state childcare system make for grim reading.
There's also a broader anxiety over childrens' place in society at large. That younger kids are given few of the freedoms and pleasures older generations enjoyed is another problem hardly isolated to the U.K. But our fear of older youths is manifested in the press as a distinctively British moral panic. Tabloids seem to treat the nation's offspring either as hapless victims of predatory adults, or as dangerous, vaguely subhuman livestock.
Perhaps this sort of thing lets us forget that most childrens' problems are the result of familial and institutional neglect, not the likes of Gary Glitter.
Finally, there's the case of the bleeding obvious: media the world over sexualizes children, but Britain's is particularly ready to project its hypocrisy at deserving targets--or anyone who addresses the subject matter without the required solemnity.
Satirist Chris Morris produced the original "Paedogeddon" mockumetary in 2001, ridiculing the media's voyeuristic obsession with the subject. He got pols and celebs to repeat nonsensical urban legends, making fools of the lot. Condemnation of the show was nearly universal, but reinforced his point over and over again. One Daily Star article slamming the show ran next to an item praising a 15-year old singer's breasts. The Daily Mail described Morris as "unspeakably sick"--even as it ran a photo of the bikini-clad royal busts of princesses Beatrice, 13, and Eugenie, 11.
In one of the final scenes of The Execution, the condemned man says "they're not going to execute Paul Gadd." This makes a point about celebrity, about how it trades in mediated personas. The "thought-provoking" question is clear enough--is something other than a man being destroyed?--but it's a thought buried under the batshittedness of Glittergeddon.
If The Execution of Gary Glitter sounds barbaric, rest assured that it was merely inane. He isn't some metempsychotic vessel for the nation's unease over child abuse or the death penalty, after all. He's just a dirty old man, and he gets what he deserves.
As New York gears up for a massive expansion of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, state officials have made a potentially troubling discovery about the wastewater created by the process: It's radioactive. And they have yet to say how they'll deal with it.
The information comes from New York's Department of Environmental Conservation , which analyzed 13 samples of wastewater brought thousands of feet to the surface from drilling and found that they contain levels of radium-226, a derivative of uranium, as high as 267 times the limit safe for discharge into the environment and thousands of times the limit safe for people to drink.
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- La suprise était de taille!
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How many of the kooky military research projects featured in The Men Who Stare at Goats really happened? Reality is more complicated than the movie (or the book), reports David Hambling at Wired's Danger Room blog. But reality may also be weirder. Hambling's post examines, Snopes-style, the truth or bogosity of such purported American military projects as:
• Psychic Spies
• Drug experimentation
• Killing animals with telepathy
• Sound weapons
• An army of hippies who can smite you with the sheer force of their BO.
Oh alright, I embellished the last one a bit. Read: Psychic Spies, Acid Guinea Pigs, New Age Soldiers: the True Men Who Stare at Goats (Danger Room, thanks Noah Shachtman)
Image: the First Earth Battalion manual (PDF) from the movie, which was based very closely on the original manual created by Lt. Col. Jim Channon. He "dove deep into the New Age movement, and came back to the military with a most alternative view of warfare -- one in which troops would carry flowers and symbolic animals into battle."
Even though the title of this hilarious short mockumentary video is "Cockhead," it's probably safe for work, since the naughty bit is mosaiced. It was co-written by CJ Davies and Mr Tom Barbor-Might.
The University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center created this zoomable window that compares the size of a coffee bean with smaller things like a grain of salt, a paramecium, a red blood cell, a human egg, a glucose molecule, and so on, all the way down to a carbon atom.
 | With help from Michelle Obama, Sesame Street kicks off it's Google-hyped 40th-anniversary season tomorrow—the first in new a two-year environmental-education effort. "Scary" issues like global warming, though, are off-limits. |
Lesson 1: When choosing gifts for your date, remember that girls prefer flowers to piles of fungus-ridden dung.
You know how some movies or TV shows are painful to watch because you see that a character is making some awkward mistake and you just know it will end horribly? This BBC video is similar. I kept thinking, "No, Mr. Vogelkop Bowerbird! Don't give her that! You'll never get mated!" But, honestly, I was thinking that at the flower-power fellow. Foolishly, I'd assumed that the lesson here was going to be something along the lines of, "Birds like things humans find repugnant and isn't that interesting."
Instead, the lesson turns out to be, "Everybody poops, but that doesn't mean they want to receive it as a gift."
VIDEO: Inside the Love-Den of the Vogelkop Bowerbird, BBC Life
Image courtesy the BBC, via Adam Abu-Nab
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boing_boing : Epoch: podcast of my story about the death of the first AI [+0] - boing_boing : How EFF saved Indymedia from an unconstitutional subpoena for all its visitors' IP addresses [+0]
- boing_boing : TSA doesn't understand what "random" means [+0]
- boing_boing : Grateful Dead Archivist wanted at UC Santa Cruz [+0]
- boing_boing : How inductors work [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Korean naval ships 'clash at sea' [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Ousted Thai PM lands in Cambodia [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : US and Israeli leaders hold talks [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Red flags [+0]
- sluggy_feed : Comic: 11/10/09 [+0]
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learn_french :: cheersgod : - [+0] - boing_boing : Larry Lessig talks about the values of education and science and the need to bring copyright into ha [+0]
- boing_boing : Pop Up Lunch NYC: temporary nosh-surfaces for New York's streets [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Japan to boost aid to Afghanistan [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Korean naval ships 'clash at sea' [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Taking crocodile DNA isn't easy, but Cambodia gets good news [+0]
- apod : NGC 2623: Galaxy Merger from Hubble [+1]
- bbcnewsworld : Japan offers aid to Afghanistan [+0]
- boing_boing : New watch podcast: HourTime Show [+0]
- natlgeographic : Ida to Flood Gulf Coast -- Hurricane Season's Last Hit? [+0]
- natlgeographic : Panama "Alien" Really a Dead, Bloated Sloth [+0]
- natlgeographic : Presented By: [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Korean naval ships 'clash at sea' [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Former Thai PM lands in Cambodia [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : US Army attack 'not terror plot' [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Japan offers aid to Afghanistan [+0]
- boing_boing : Glittergeddon! [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : US sniper execution appeal denied [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Obama and PM Netanyahu hold talks [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : US Army base gunman 'conscious' [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Teaching Pol Pot [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : 'State of war' [+0]
- boing_boing : Duke University official concerned that sex toy study will make students want to "just sit around an [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Pushchairs recalled over 'amputations' [+0]
- sciam : Natural Gas Drilling Produces Radioactive Wastewater [+0]
- boing_boing : Real-time, global marine traffic map [+0]
- learn_french :: a11i_sun : Problem: French idioms [+3]
- bbcnewsworld : Leaders' call to action in Berlin [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Global shares jump on G20 pledge [+0]
- boing_boing : Genome sequencing for under $5,000 [+0]
- boing_boing : The real-life "Men Who Stare at Goats" were even weirder [+0]
- boing_boing : Plastic surgery parody video [+0]
- boing_boing : Zoomable cell size application helps you understand size of tiny things [+0]
- natlgeographic : Sesame Street Goes Green at 40--But Warming "Too Scary" [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Lebanon finally forms government [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Canadian rescued from bears on Arctic ice [+0]
- bbcnewsworld : Liverpool toil to Birmingham draw [+0]
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- boing_boing : Life Lessons from the Vogelkop Bowerbird [+0]
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