Your mum

Daily Mash: Concerns grow over lack of panic

excellent satire of the media & governmental furore over swine flu:

“But despite their all-out efforts, millions of people across the country have decided to simply wash their hands twice a day and accept that if they do get swine flu the chances of them dying from it are so small as to be really quite tedious.
Nevertheless the department of health will today urge people to empty their freezers, stressing that is where they will have to store their grandmother until the army can collect her and throw her into a landfill.”

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/health/concern-grows-over-lack-of-panic-200907201915/

more funny:

ULRIKA BATHING IN VIRGINS' BLOOD, SAY VILLAGERS

silence young one…

from  Apokalyps

JAPAN NOODLE POWER!!!!

 

see, it could be a series of different adds spliced together and then given a new soundtrack. a bit like cillit bang!  but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was actually just the actual add, as broadcast on tv…

YEEEEEAAAAAAH!

the fucking moon

Moon special!

“Radio Tre” here in Italy was transmitting some of the original moon landing broadcasts (complete with live italian translation). it made me a little emotional, call me cheesy.

Anyways, in celebration of the most awesome achievement of humanity, here is a part one of a 1mp moon special.

• If Armstrong was interesting
• The Onion’s seminal take
• xkcd gives you the facebook commentard’s view

more to come!

1 million points

minus whatever the penalty is for when your cunning plan goes awry:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/5736633/Spanish-police-thwart-jail-break-using-remote-controlled-Zeppelin.html

converting human stupidity into charity £££s

http://twitter.co.uk/

 

speaking of worthy causes, clem’s friend started a business. check it out:

http://www.granniesinc.co.uk/

and then check out some charlie brooker.  i’ve said it before chuck really, really creases me up.

the 10 biggest c**ks in advertising

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=videos&search_query=charlie+brooker&search_sort=video_avg_rating

Still no aliens angle, sadly

Real life vs. The Onion. (Spoiler: Real life wins)

(And I lied about the lack of Alien links.)

funnies

 

from http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=26

from http://imgur.com/qzDgC.jpg

and this vid

you may need to google “mother lover” if the vid don’t work.   that is JT.

Worried about the impending technological singularity?

Read Jaron Larnier’s excellent debunking.  But don’t watch the video, it makes you want to punch him in the face.  I bet all his colleagues really hate him.

Still his prose, and his points, are good.  You’ll need to scroll down a bit until it starts – it’s called “one half of  a manifesto”

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_index.html

Don’t know what I’m talking about? here’s “info” on the singularity.

Faith-off

“A new game show on Turkish television will pit a Greek Orthodox priest, a rabbi, an imam and a Buddhist monk against one another in attempt to convert atheists to their respective religions.”

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/tv/story/2009/07/03/turkey-gameshow-religion-atheists.html

I wanna watch it!

Kant for dummies – the “green sunglasses” explanation

Apologies to everyone for the self-indulgence, but i wrote this for my course and thought I’d share it with the internets. I promise it’s back to Hello Kitty vibrators and suchlike asap.

 

I looked around to find a nice summary of kant's metaphysics but couldn't, so I thought I'd summarise them for ya's:

Kant in a nutshell:

Here's my favourite way of explaining his insight:  imagine if everyone on earth wore green-tinted sunglasses, all the time.  To them, everything would look green.  In fact, if they didn't know they were wearing sunglasses, and if they had absolutely no way of taking them off, then as far as they were concerned, the world would be, objectively, green.

As it might be with green sunglasses, says Kant, so it is that our brains impose certain things on the way we perceive the world.  Things like space, time, logic and mathematics...  And in fact, it's impossible to conceive of an outside world that's truly independent of the way we perceive it - just as no-one in the green sunglasses world would be able to conceive of a non-green colour.

Without getting into too much techie detail, the question he was seeking to answer with this was "how is it that we know some things about the world to be true, without requiring evidence?" These things, what K. called "synthetic a priori-propositions", are non-trivial bits of knowledge like:

• all of maths & geometry
• "every event has a cause"
• the rules of logic

and so on... Nowadays, we can question some of the above - it's far from clear, for example, that every event has a cause, or exactly what "cause" means...

But the fundamental insight that our objective reality is partially constructed by the ways that our brain perceives the world is a strong one. There's no such thing as colour, except insofar as we perceive it, for example... what else might be like this, we wonder?  Might we one day meet aliens that don't agree with us about Maths?

Here's where it might get relevant to AI - an artificial intelligence has a different type of brain to ours.  They will therefore perceive the world in a different way to us... Could it be radically different?  Or does the fact that AI's will have been (presumably) have been in some way constructed using our human assumptions such as maths and logic, mean that they will share most of the fundamental basis of perception with us?

 

Here's where it might get relevant to AI - an artificial intelligence has a different type of brain to ours.  They will therefore perceive the world in a fundamentally different way to us... Could it be radically different?  Or does the fact that AI's will have been (presumably) have been in some way constructed using our human assumptions such as maths and logic, mean that they will share most of the fundamental basis of perception with us?

 

Suggestions for improvement on the above are welcome, as are any challenges that I’m misrepresenting the big K. My memory if undegraduate days is pretty hazy…

weekly round-up

• gross defence mechanism
• free speech still OK in UK (ft weird obsession with cutting legs off )
• all the fun of role-playing games without the hassle
• homeopathic A&E

thanks george, dave, george and cory doctorow, respectively.