Tag: Entertainment
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Politics and science
Continuing to notice the peculiar tone of political emails. The word devastate seems to be at the top of the choice stack. It can be used internally: “We’re devastated!” The reader is supposed to empathize and throw money at the candidate to rescue him from devastation. It can be used externally: “Trump is DEVASTATED!” The…
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Deepfake worries again
MindMatters is worrying about deepfakes again. While AI deepfakes have political ramifications (digitally cloning world leaders, creating false news, etc), the actual human qualities of our lived experience may grow ever dimmer in lieu of the metaverse and its deepfake minions. If I can choose my own virtual world, the actual created order loses its…
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Stacks, not Savannahs
Sharp observation from Gary Smith, discussing the perils of letting stats lead you around by the nose: Our distant ancestors benefitted from noticing that elephants could lead them to water and that wildebeest stampedes might warn them of predators. The best pattern spotters were more likely to survive and reproduce, passing on their pattern-recognition skills…
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Now we know what happened!
EnidBuzz asked about your favorite cereal as a kid. No hard answers this time, just one surprise. Many people liked Quaker’s Quisp. It came along after I was more or less grown up and skipping breakfast, so I never heard of it. Maybe this is the answer to the mysterious disappearance of the disc-type UFOs…
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Big news for the renaissance
Avi Loeb has achieved solid crowdfunding for his project to investigate a meteorite. He considers this particular rock found in New Guinea to be a possible UFO. This is a BIG development toward the PROPER functioning of science. Since 1946 (of course) the military has sucked up all potential UFOs and all information about the…
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Cheaters
Just for fun and weirdness, a couple of items about computers and cheating. = = = = = Via MindMatters, AI is not very good at catching cheaters, but it’s also not very good at cheating. Detecting cheating, at any level of education, is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game. AI, far from being a…
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Grandma was more right than she knew
Common wisdom was right about nearly everything before “science” and “democracy” and “philosophy” turned wisdom into genocide and torture. Some branches of science are accidentally recovering old wisdom in recent years, while other branches (like “social” “science” and public “health”) are zooming out beyond the event horizon of infinite satanic lunacy. = = = =…
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Stubblefield, fields of stubble
Reading Frank Edwards’s career biography, the story of his 40 years in radio. As in his other books and features, he takes frequent informative and entertaining detours, always focusing on the class struggle and favoring the underdog. He tells the story of Nathan Stubblefield, the unquestioned inventor of wireless voice and music transmission in 1885.…
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Strong stuff, weak history
Strong stuff from Kirn: So much imagination, eccentricity, dreaminess, and creativity went into the creation of the tech we use now. Yet it is becoming the instrument of our species’ most simplistic and brutal instincts for raw power, deception and coercion. Damn it, I want that Renaissance they promised! First part is wrong. The true…
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Rifts all the way down
Yesterday I did a grouchy political take on the latest URGENT BREAKING NEWS PANIC EXISTENTIAL EMERGENCY: The continents are drifting! Here’s a somewhat calmer thought on the subject, maybe trite, maybe entertaining. This week I’m putting together an animation illustrating how the larynx develops through embryonic stages. The latest edition of the textbook will have…
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Big money, bad science
The title is gruesomely and torturously true of Big Science itself. No explanation needed. Oddly, the correlation also applies to radio and TV shows about science. Among discussion-type shows, the elite academic “roundtable” shows and elite quiz shows like Information Please generally spewed old worn-out cliches that had been disproved for many decades. The UFO…
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Whimsical correction
Vintage.es has pix of people listening to radios. Most are German, but this one is delightfully American, and reminds me that the Zenith Transoceanic was originally meant to be a portable for boating. So the Zenith needs to be added to this whimsical item, especially since the Transoceanic has a specific Okie connection for me.…
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Hard answer to soft question 3
Third in a stupid series. EnidBuzz asked: What do you like to do the old-fashioned way? Most common answer: Everything. Hard answer (lit and fig): Your mom. = = = = = FWIW, I’m pretty damn old-fashioned, but I’m newfangled in one way. Many of the commenters mentioned drying clothes on the line. Nope, I’ll…
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More BIG
Wesley Smith hits hard on two BIG corrections in BIG medical topics. Two longstanding orthodoxies have been PROVED wrong. 1. Depression is caused by biochemistry. Wrong but probably not fraudulent. 2. Alzheimers is caused by plaque. Wrong and deliberate fraud. THIS IS BIG. I already know 1 is wrong, because I’ve figured out non-chemical ways…
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Shkreli has a GOOD idea.
Shkreli has finished his 5 years in prison, and DailyMail has an informative interview. Is he reformed? Hell no. I understand the Shkreli type, and I understand prison, and I predicted correctly that he would be an outstanding mentor to other Bad dudes. From the DailyMail: At the top of his post-prison to-do list is…
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