Month: October 2008

Phoenix epitaphs

Here rests a science mission sent by the people of Earth, that we might start to know this world as we know our own.

English First

celebrating monolingualism / illiteracy

Offshoring Audacity

Look abroad: Whole cities are planned, built, and inhabited in less than a generation. Artificial islands, indoor ski slopes, and the world’s tallest this-and-that are being constructed, not in the West, but in the Middle East, China, and beyond. The result: a sense that the West’s cities are falling behind and, increasingly, watching from the sidelines.

Virtual evil

What does it mean to be truly evil? Cognitive scientist Selmer Bringsjord is developing a virtual human that embodies their evolving definition of “evil.” In development for several years, the character, named “E,” is designed to interact with humans in a way that sounds similar to a chatbot, albeit a really demented chatbot.

someone has been cribbing off of “creating friendly ai” by eliezer yudkovski.

Praying for Money

Did you know that some Christian dingbat has dubbed today the “Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies?” Well here they are, at the Wall Street bull statue thing, praying to Jesus for money. The dingbat has explained, “We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems.”

oy. they haven’t even read their own “holy book” which takes a dim view on idolatry.

OCR Search

We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in PDF format.

Swiss Genography

Investigators were able to find genetic differences among French, German and Italian-speaking Swiss individuals, with French speakers being more similar to the French, German speakers to Germans and Italian speakers to Italians.

Phoenician Genetic Origins

Attempting to trace migrations across the Mediterranean is even more arduous, as there have been multiple migrations at different times throughout history.

Listing Hijacking

I had my own fun. As the screenshot shows above, I took over Yahoo’s listing and did what Microsoft so far has been unable to do: make Yahoo a Microsoft company.

wherein the SEO community discovers why you should verify your business. duh?

Pirate Bay

The popularity of the site didn’t go unnoticed in Hollywood. Like many other BitTorrent sites, The Pirate Bay also received several takedown notices. However, the way they responded to these was quite unique and some have become news stories in themselves. Threats from the entertainment industry didn’t stop at sending letters. In true Hollywood style, The Pirate Bay admins soon saw private investigators watching their every move. “They’ve sent private investigators after us, which is really stupid if you do something online. What are they going to find, that we are sitting behind our computers? I guess the private investigator that went after me in Gothenburg got to see a lot of good bars, a lot of late nights, but probably not a lot of evidence gathering.” Peter then noted that someone from the IFPI was actually at the conference, “still trying to find out what we’re doing.”

loved for the title alone. but in general, there is not nearly enough schumpeterian creative destruction. hopefully the current business climate will destroy a few obsolete industries.