Month: September 2012

Baxter

baxter, on sale for $22k in october, is the apple II of robots, the point where robots are truly here and the world will never be the same again. this is truly world-changing technology. you program Baxter to perform a task by simply moving its arms. It has embedded sensors and elastic actuators so the interface to the world is intuitive and mimics human actions. the mundane singularity is near.

The Terrorism Delusion

Terrorists are described with such words as incompetent, ineffective, unintelligent, idiotic, ignorant, inadequate, unorganized, misguided, muddled, amateurish, dopey, unrealistic, moronic, irrational, and foolish.”

But the safety fetish / organizational inertia of the DHS and others continues to maintain the exact opposite, as if we were dealing with brilliant foes. Kinda like the war on drugs which just repeats the same mantra louder on the frequent arrival of evidence that it is pointless.

Breakneck Ridge

This is a great hike, just 90 min from manhattan. It has: great views, lots of rock scaling, lots of ruins, and a fake castle. The only downside is the stampede at the start of the trail has 10s of people attempt to climb up the rocks at once.


2013-04-29: I learned this week there are whole areas with unmaintained, unmarked trails further into the park that sound intriguing. Next time!

Trailer Park Boys

Michalchyshyn, being the astute woman that she is, saw the merit in a low-budget, edgy mockumentary about dope-smoking, hard-talking trailer park boys. She kindly agreed to see the 2 and listened to their pitch. Shortly after, Michalchyshyn called Dunn to tell him Showcase would be interested in a first season of Trailer Park Boys episodes.

my kind of show (on netflix streaming)Trailer Park Boys

Words are conspiracies

Dear XXXX:

The dictionary search engine is a small program whose sole job is to analyze an input into a field and search our database for an exact or near match to the inputted word. “Democratic” is given in the suggested entries list when you entered “democrasy” because it is orthographically similar to the word you entered. We can assure you that the dictionary search engine was not written by Bolsheviks, nor is it programmed only to return Socialist or “unAmerican” words, as you suggest.