On the way back from an unusually mediocre meal at a local Mexican restaurant, I noticed the sign outside a Chinese joint I’ve still never tried. Among the new dishes they were advertising, one caught my eye: Bourgeoisie Beef.
No, really.
One wonders if they also offer Proletarian Pork, maybe with a bowl of Workers’ Wonton Soup.
Found in the comments to the latest entry at Errol Morris’s NYTimes-hosted blog:
Who says that the ‘newspaper’ is antiquated, an institution fallen to the press of our cyberspacey culture? Not so fast those of you techno-geeks who have deemed the institution as passe as the Lincoln penny.
Once more, with feeling:
Found in the comments to the latest entry at Errol Morris’s NYTimes-hosted blog:
Who says that the ‘newspaper’ is antiquated, an institution fallen to the press of our cyberspacey culture? Not so fast those of you techno-geeks who have deemed the institution as passe as the Lincoln penny.
Tsk.
So there was a thunder crash, and my power flickered out for maybe a full second or so[1]. My window fans started stirring back up to speed, my laptop screen brightened as it started pulling from the wall instead of from the battery, and my stereo receiver made its sharp little click as it powered back up.
I’d been listening to a digital radio station–one of the ones from the cable company, not one of the internet dealies–so it didn’t come immediately back up, as it needed the cable box to come back online.
And then the curious bit: When the music came back up, it was noticeably louder than it had been before. By the time I’d registered the discrepancy, it dropped back down to the intended volume.
One possibly useful bit of information is that the drop back down to the intended volume appeared to coincide with my Internet connection being reestablished.
Any idea why the surge-then-reduction in volume might have happened? I have no idea how these things worked, and I have no idea whether its plausible that the digital cable signal and the Internet connection might be sharing bandwidth. Even if they are sharing bandwidth, I have no idea why the reduction in available bandwidth as the Internet connection was reestablished might affect the volume of the music–I would think a digital signal would have the amplitude[2] encoded, unlike an analogue signal in which the amplitude is all part of the signaliciousness.
Also, the thing I was looking at when the power went out: “Oh my God! There’s an axe in my head,” in various languages. I’d seen it years before, probably linked from Making Light or alt.folklore.urban, but I’d completely forgotten about this compendium of potentially vital information.
[1] A second is a whole lot longer than you tend to think of a second as being, usually. Just saying.
[2] That is how it works, isn’t it? The volume of an audio signal depends on the amplitude of the wave?
Sometimes you’ll find yourself in a situation in which you aren’t participating in a conversation but, due to proximity and pitch and what-have-you, you can’t block it out or pretend it’s background noise.
If the conversation is sufficiently banal, after about 40 minutes it becomes physically painful. Amazing but true.
So have you checked out the next big thing in the development of the semantic web and the ultimate salvation of humankind yet?
Even though the pre-launch hype suggested that all search results would be accompanied by a free basket of puppies made of ice cream and children’s laughter, I went in with fairly middling expectations. I’ve picked up on the fact that Mr. Wolfram’s ego is overblown, and everybody should know that natural-language is a bundle of way-fucking-super-hard problems. And yet, somehow, I was still a little disappointed.
Part of my disappointment may have had more to do with the metahype than the hype directly from Wolfram. I didn’t do a careful job of separating official pre-launch claims from the claims being made by interested observers. For all I know, it’s possible that Wolfram itself never made any natural-language-search claims at all, that all of that came from the meta-hype. I’m going to pretend that’s the case and ignore the absolute failure of natural-language searching in Wolfram|Alpha.[1]
Except…no, I can’t really do that. One of the great promises of W|A was the idea that you could use it for quick and dirty data mining, for making various associations and visualizations and such. You can sort of do that, but only in a limited way and using only pre-tallied values. You can divide the population of Paris by the population of London because the pops of those two cities have already been added up and entered into the database as “pop London” and “pop Paris”.
You can’t do “pop largest city in England” because (it looks like) W|A can’t handle any sort of relative queries. Every possible list of everything of course can’t be computed, compiled, and indexed, so there can’t be any sort of direct query. What’s more interesting is that W|A didn’t think it worthwhile–or wasn’t able to–create a list-generating function (”ALL where twenty_questions=’city’ and location=’england’”).
This isn’t meant as a slam against W|A; it’s more of a sigh.
This bit is a slam: One of the features that looks most useful is the ability to pull up various physical properties of all kinds of materials. Try “young’s modulus titanium” (sans quotes) to see what I mean. I don’t know what they do with it, but our students and researchers often come to us for this kind of stuff after having exhausted Google; having it right there in W|A would seem to be a boon to them.
Unfortunately, W|A is cagy about where they get these values. If you click on the “Source Information” link underneath the results, you just get a list of every place from which Wolfram pulled data; there are no clues as to the provenance of this particular datum. Worse, you’ll see that a lot of the sources are “Wolfram|Alpha curated data”, which is total black-box stuff and gives us no idea of the reliability of the information.
This “curated data” business is sketchy in general, but it’s especially disturbing when it comes to these physical/thermal properties results: Not only can the accepted values change (slightly) over time as the testing equipment becomes more advanced, but the values can also be derived by two entirely different methods. There’s the experimental method, where you take a hunk of titanium and turn up the heat until it melts and decide that’s the melting point. Those are the best values, the most reliable ones. But there are also calculated values, where–I’m not totally clear on this–wizardy scientists take the known values of various other substances and determine theoretically what the value of a material should be. These can be questionable, and are (I’m told) usually avoided when possible.
Using W|A, searchers have no way of knowing whether the value given was determined experimentally (good) or through calculation (not so good), and so can’t know whether they can plug that value into their own work. They also have no way of knowing whether the value given is outdated or otherwise untrustworthy.
(That “young’s modulus titanium” result, for example, doesn’t match up with the value given in one of our standard reference works. I’m really curious as to where they got their number.)
This is already super-long, so I’ll be quick with the last disappointment: The datasets fed into the system on launch are pretty paltry. You can find populations for most geographic areas, but when you move into wage information you start hitting blanks really quickly. You can forget about doing any more interesting socioeconomic searches.
So yeah. It’s a nifty toy, and I guess it has potential, but the product available at launch doesn’t come anywhere close to the hype.
So when you’re reading something and run across an amusing and improbably misspelling, do you ever google it to see where else it’s turned up? Strange and delightful words like unbyast?
So there’s this Slashdot thread about the cancellation of that Terminator TV show. Amid all of the bad puns, armchair network-executiving, and squabbles over whether the show was any good or not to begin with, there emerges the Fan’s Tripartite Lament:
Seriously. At this point it’s a ritual, something done wholly on autopilot in response to appropriate stimuli. How do we know it’s a ritual, in deference to the larger narratives of geek culture? Because
One of the fascinating things about this is that the kind of people falling for this often-fallacious bit of Narrative are also often the people who consider themselves superior to the easily-led masses of “sheeple”.
The more interesting thing, to me, about the reaction to SF cancellations is how its general Narrative conflicts with an actual tenet of the overarching geek[1] Narrative: Geeks see themselves as, and often take pride in being, a small minority. And yet when a show that is pretty much 100% geek fuel gets the ax, they turn immediately to network conspiracies instead of saying, “Yeah, this show was targeted at us, and in the great scheme of things there really aren’t enough of us around to make expensive mass-market entertainments profitable. If a show doesn’t have enough mainstream appeal to pick up a bunch of people from outside our tribe, it’s going down.”
You’d think people who’re generally good at math would understand that.
[1] Surely it’s fair to assume that the kind of people who complain on the internet about SF tv shows being canceled are geeks. Surely.
People in a Slashdot thread are saying that “twig”, in it’s “catch onto” or “understand” sense, is unusual to the point of nonexistence among Americans. That just doesn’t seem right to me; it feels a little archaic, maybe, but certainly not foreign. Thoughts?
I just received this Nigerian Scam email:
I am Sophia George from ivory Coast i have a heritance from my late Father,the Fund have been conditioned to be transfer to overseas as an agreement that my late father signed with the bank i need your assistance to transfer the fund sum of (10,000,000.00USD).
What you see above is the very essence of the scam, the con distilled to its (lame) essence. Stripped away are the bangles of the writer’s elite social position or persecuted woe; only the sentimental wisp of a bereft daughter’s woe remains. No elaborate scheme for transferring funds is proposed or even alluded to; it is enough to say that a large sum exists, and that it will somehow be transferred, and that outside assistance is for some reason required.
This is the Platonic ideal of the scam. Reduced to just a few simple sentences, the heart of the thing is laid bare; the email is beautiful in its eloquence, and the absurdity underlying the scam is unavoidable when the trappings are stripped away. The thing is at once a triumph of art and a travesty as a come-on, so I’m not sure whether it’s made of 100% Awesome or Fail.
Either way, I think it’s time for a sick day.