First successful Turing Test: First Turing Test success marks milestone in computing history
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First successful Turing Test →
June 6th, 2014 →
Today is the 70th anniversary of the landings for the Normandy invasion.
A friend asked rhetorically, “Would I have boarded one of those ratty boats and waited for the door to come down?” I can only imagine that the training and “esprit de corps” would carry the day, because otherwise, attempted as individuals, what they accomplished seems inconceivable.
Unfortunately, those two most horrible wars feel as far away now as to be ancient history. I hope that humankind has subsequently climbed far enough up the moral ladder that we no longer need the visceral feeling of the wars to provide us with guidance.
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Finding meaning in the mundane →
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in.
~ David Foster Wallace
Elsewhere, this is 4a799. — slipbox
It occurs to me that I’ve no idea who gave the commencement address at my graduation. After a bit of digging…
Robert W. Galvin, chairman of Motorola, delivered the main address yesterday to the 1,150 graduates at the 125th commencement of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.
Mr. Galvin received an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree.
~ from the May 31st NYT archives listing several school’s commencement addresses.
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Take back the Internet →
This is not the Internet the world needs, or the Internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back.
And by we, I mean the engineering community.
Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires political intervention.
But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things engineers can — and should — do.
~ Bruce Schneir from, Take Back the Internet
Elsewhere, this is 4usebo4. — slipbox
I’d venture that the vast majority of regular, everyday people working in technology related jobs are not actively trying to do evil. People go to work, make the best decisions they can and then go home. If that’s true, then it’s going to be nigh impossible to change the momentum of how things (e.g., NSA surveillance) are going. Because in order for it to change, we need to start thinking bigger.
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Oil limits →
This model “works” fairly well, as long as the economy is growing fast enough–population continues to grow and resource extraction continues to grow as planned. In a finite world, we know that this model cannot work forever. At some point, we can expect to start reaching limits.
What do these limits look like? I would argue that in the case of resource extraction, these limits look like increasingly high cost of extraction.
~ Gail Tverberg from, Oil Limits Reduce GDP Growth; Unwinding QE a Problem
Elsewhere, this is 4uouoi4. — slipbox
You should also read “Quantitative Easing (QE)” (the first three, short paragraphs on WikiPedia summarize it neatly.)
My opinion: We need to start seriously talking about a STEADY STATE ECONOMY. What would that look like? How would it work? How do we get to that? Seriously. We simply CANNOT have a growing and expanding economy forever on a finite planet with finite room and finite resources. What part of “finite” don’t you understand?
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What does “honest” mean in Kinokawa Aikido →
When we opened the new dojo in Allentown, I sat down to try to write a short description of what distinguishes Kinokawa Aikido. I wanted to avoid pretentiously explaining “what makes it better,” because starting down that path will instantly close off the minds of certain readers. Instead, I wanted to lay out the hallmarks of Kinokawa so that readers could get a sense of the style at a glance.
There is a bit more at Aikido on the dojo’s web site. But here is the part about honesty:
A second hallmark of Kinokawa Aikido is that is honest — in the sense of being interested in honestly exploring Aikido as a high intensity [physical and mental], combat effective, applicable to your daily life, sort of practice. In fairness, practitioners of hard type martial arts will generally not consider any sort of Aikido as combat effective or workable in a real world scenario. (Obviously, we disagree with such a prejudged assessment.) But setting aside the judgement (does Aikido work, or not, in real application?), it is the goal of honestly exploring those concepts, within the framework of Aikido, which is a critical feature of Kinokawa.
…and here are some similar thoughts from Tom Collings, from Responding to Aggression – Part 2:
… The rule of thumb in military and police training, established through exhaustive battlefield and police critical incident research is: “if it takes long to learn, it probably won’t work under stress.” Yet, as black belt martial artists we take great pride in the techniques that took us many years to master, and it would be unthinkable at the dojo to teach only what is easily learned. Who would that impress? The other rule is: “practice what you will need to perform.” That means our training must very closely match what we will confront.
Do those of us in the aiki arts really believe that assaults commonly occur by someone running up reaching for our wrist, or striking at us from above their head as if holding a sword? I guess we do because we devote most of our valuable training time to these scenarios. If it is obvious that modern day assaults are very different from these classical style attacks why do we not modify our curriculum more in line with what we will actually confront?
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To be and to last →
To last? That old lesson about the brightest flame burning the quickest is particularly true in Parkour. What use is a person who lasts five years and has to stop training due to bad knees and a broken ankle? How useful is a body that can’t move pain free due to years of neglect and abuse? The journey of Parkour was never meant to be a brilliant flash of spectacle and show, it was always intended to be a lifelong pursuit of improvement and one that doesn’t need to end once the body begins to show signs of age.
~ Chris “Blane” Rowat from, 50 Ways To Be and To Last in Parkour | Part 1 – Training The Body
Elsewhere, this is 4ubowa1. — slipbox
Ignore the show reels. Ignore the spectacular. Those MAY be inspirational to you, but your journey SHOULD be a long series of small, eminently POSSIBLE steps. Go to your first class and try anything; try SOMETHING. Stop when your body has had enough. Repeat. In a few months, you will have grown so much that you will hardly recognize yourself.
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Operable systems →
Especially for complex, multi-purpose systems, the gap between how things are supposed to work and how they actually work can be quite large. (Ask any police sergeant about the difference between policing in theory and policing in practice!) A primary function of operators is to bridge this gap in ways that result in better rather than worse outcomes. The capacity of systems to be operated is what allows operators to perform this valuable function, sometimes called technical work.
~ Richard Cook from, «http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/10/making-systems-operable.html»
Elsewhere, this is 4uoema1. — slipbox
More and more I’ve been getting a lot mileage from this idea: Make things easier TO USE, rather than trying to fully automate (i.e., so I don’t have to use them.) One cornerstone to accomplishing that is creating “affordences“.
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First habitable exoplanet →
The first Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of another star has been confirmed by observations with both the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini Observatory. The initial discovery, made by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, is one of a handful of smaller planets found by Kepler and verified using large ground-based telescopes. It also confirms that Earth-sized planets do exist in the habitable zone of other stars.
~ from, First potentially habitable Earth-sized planet confirmed: It may have liquid water
Mark you calendar: April 17, 2014. First confirmation of the existence of a HABITABLE planet… Temperature, gravity, rocky (like the Earth)… A. HABITABLE. PLANET. I got chills reading this.
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Sheep or sheepdog? →
So the first step in becoming a sheepdog is to simply decide to become one. Don’t take this decision lightly. There are heavy moral, physical, emotional, and psychological costs that come with it. When you decide to become a sheepdog, you’re also deciding to live a life of service to your fellow man, to run to danger when others flee, and to stand up for right despite the cost. Are you ready to accept those responsibilities and risks, and the consequences that come with them?
~ Brett McKay from, Are You a Sheep or Sheepdog? Part III: Your Roadmap to Becoming a Sheepdog
Elsewhere, this is 4uaoae1. — slipbox
Disclosure: I do NOT think of myself as a “sheepdog”.
I think the whole “sheep versus sheepdog” mentality discussion is much more useful in so far as it speaks to enlightening the sheep. Are you a victim going somewhere to happen? …or are you a mentally strong, open minded (in the sense of being flexible to your environment) human being? Are you seeking and buying things? …or are you seeking happiness?
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