Play

Bad sign!

It seems that the 'computer-simulated cat' story is only true in terms of neuron and connection quantity; CAT is still smarter than IBM. POO.link

He is friendly to humans and will come up and flop on his back in front of you, begging to be petted. If he didn't also inflame my sinuses, I'd definitely want him.

To other cats, he's a bit of a bully. Really, this is a cat for someone who wants one cat.

Black, long-haired, nine years old, healthy. Currently called Bela, but he's a cat, so who cares?

Computers with human intelligence? Still far off on the horizon.

Cat intelligence? Available today!

Chess genius intelligence? Twelve years ago!.

Not Canadian!

-I'm still reading "Coders at Work", and had just gotten through the Ken Thompson interview where he's asked what he does at Google, and says something like, "I have pretty much free rein - mostly thinking about scaling issues". So it is interesting to see Go (or whatever it shall be called). The section of the tutorial with:

---
10 func generate() chan int {
11 ch := make(chan int);
12 go func(){
13 for i := 2; ; i++ {
14 ch <- i
15 }
16 }();
17 return ch;
18 }
---
This version does all the setup internally. It creates the output channel, launches a goroutine running a function literal, and returns the channel to the caller. It is a factory for concurrent execution, starting the goroutine and returning its connection.

...is where you can see them cracking their knuckles to get going.

-The video demo shows everything in the source tree compiling in 10s. Hm, the less-modern machine I built it on (Debian, one Celeron 2.66G, 1.5G RAM) took 510s.

Link to the aforementioned holiday for insurers.

evidently entails forcing people to buy policies with the much-maligned insurers.  Woo, reform!

Thank you so @#$% much.

Sincerely,
Sane Muslim Guy

< cb3rob> communism doesnt work
< bn`> cb3rob: capitalism doesnt work
< cb3rob> bn: works fine for me... maybe you are doing something wrong :P
< MalfermitaKodo> bn`: have you tried turning it off and on again? Link

(pic is link)

This interesting post claims that it's not math that's scary, it's doing any kind of problem solving - that most people only use rote knowledge every day. The main fault I find with the post is where he says he, a computer programmer, is always problem solving and never using rote knowledge. Which is probably hooey. There is plenty of room for cut-and-pasting in the "programming" world.

Another fault is that many people do problem-solving involving other people, and he discounts or does not recognize this.

When my copy of Linux Educacional boots, the text doesn't quite fit in the monitor's display area. So it tells me it is

"tarting up..."

Does anyone have recommendations for a new sump pump?  The one I have has decided to pursue a new career electrocuting people who touch it.

Ah, if only we had China's socialized journalism in the USA!  Then no one would notice huge stonking ripoffs like this:

Senate Dems quietly move a bill to countermand a 21% cut in Medicare fees for doctors, which will add $247 billion to the deficit over ten years. Of course, the Baucus health care reform bill achieves its famed deficit neutrality through cuts in Medicare fees, mainly to non-physicians--saving (by my reading of the CBO analysis) at least $184 billion from Medicare over the same period. Plus there is a special panel set up to recommend further cuts. Jonathan Cohn and Ezra Klein might productively explain a) Why this isn't a shell game, with Dems granting Medicare increases in one bill and then taking ostentatious credit for partly-offsetting cuts in a separate bill; b) Why Congress' unwillingness to put up with the scheduled Medicare doctors' cuts this year doesn't indicate that it won't put up with scheduled cuts in future years...link

[etc]

-We saw Brief Encounter at the ACT last night. The staging and side characters were great, but some combination of the writing and lack of chemistry doomed the main plot (when two married people start an affair with each other, you shouldn't be wondering 'why?' or 'who cares?').

J. didn't want to speak ill of it while we were leaving with the crowds, for fear of tainting the experience of others. Perhaps this is also why everyone else was also silent, instead of saying things like, "That was so romantic, when he said 'perhaps I shall go to the pictures this afternoon as well' and 'Could I see you next Thursday?'".

-'Whip It', on the other hand, has roller derby and Juliette Lewis, and hita all the points that one would hope for. Director Barrymore gives herself multiple fun bits - nosebleeds, cold-cocking, dominance. The girl from Juno is in it and she is perfectly good when she isn't forced into Diablo Cody's retard-speak.

-Coders at Work is a collection of in-depth interviews with programmers. Most of the interviews as solo pieces are at least of interest to programmers. Because the subjects are mostly really bright and have brains that spin around a lot, there are a few bits of profound philosophy which fall out. But the interviewer generally keeps it technical. Read together, there are also a lot of interesting commonalities which I wouldn't necessarily have expected:

Dead!

From Reason commenter The Squatting Fields:

THE BIG MACS are gone.
And those who saw the Big Macs are gone.
Those who saw the Big Macs by thousands and how they held the two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun
with their hands, their great heads down chewing on in a great pageant of dusk,
Those who saw the Big Macs are gone.
And the Big Macs are gone.

Link to story providing unnecessary context
Link to original poem

There are a number of people who seem to be trying to defend Obama, but this doesn't really reflect poorly on him at all.  Whoopee, he won another popularity contest that he didn't enter.

Who needs defending is the Committee, which has picked plenty of losers (Arafat and Kissinger are just the lowest-hanging fruit), and has apparently been mostly interested in voting themselves a chance to meet Obama.

(An entertaining effort has been made by tongodeon , who is apparently even up for giving the award to warmongers who are temporarily less mongulatory)