Category: junk thought

Punctuation & Baby Killers

Cry Baby Killer 1958

I’d never heard of this film till today, but maybe that’s due to the poster’s punctuation?

Does he kill babies who cry, or are they trying to raise a warning about an approaching baby killer? Do they mean he blubbers as he kills?

Wait – are they trying to taunt an infant murderer? (“Baby-killer gonna cry? Cry baby-killer, cry!”)

Whatever the case, at least he’s keeping the mad-dog population down – going from a teenage rebel to an animal control technician may not seem like that great of a film plot, but Corman was working with tight budgets back in the late-’50s.

Treasure Hunters

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pisNkBfDvHE]

This isn’t the newest version of this gold buyer’s commercial, but it’s all I could find on youtube.

What I wanted to discuss was item #3 on their list, “private, confidential meetings,” as it’s actually the final selling point in the newest iteration of their pitch.

While they attempt to class it up a bit by having a woman in a suit play the customer, it seems to me that if you’re going to a gold buyer for a “private, confidential meeting”, it’s likely less a case of “I don’t want to be seen selling over the counter with the rest of the riffraff”, and more a case of: “I’ve stolen this from my ailing grandmother, and want to know if you’ll buy it without my having to risk a call to the police”. Gold

Lib

A video grab shows Saif al-Islam, son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, speaking during an address on state television in Tripoli

Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam addressed the public via state TV, speaking about a “plot against Libya” led by Islamists. He also said most protesters were drunk and/or high and that the death count had been grossly exaggerated.

– Neon Tommy

Although I’ve been watching things intently, I don’t have much to say on the current spat of uprisings in the Middle East – I’d love to show up and do my usual “Rah Rah, Technology!” bit, but it’s tough to be enthused when people are being gunned down in the street.

However, I did want to briefly discuss Saif Qaddafi, son of Muammar, long considered the most liberal aspect of the Libyan dictatorship.

(Which, frankly, is something like saying “the friendliest of the rabid bears”.)

Look at the picture above – a still from a recent television address regarding the protests.

If the people gathering in the squares, signs in hand, are the young and bright seeking a better tomorrow, than Saif, in every aspect, appears to be a middle-management drone, who’s come to tell us we’ll need to work next Saturday, for our own good. To me, he rings of that fellow you know who goes on at length about entrepreneurship, but has never run a successful business.

I find this interesting in two ways:

  1. Despite their stated positions, and the fact that a large portion of their platform is founded on cultural defense from the West, media penetration has gone so deep that there still seems to be a hankering for apparel that wouldn’t look out of place on Mad Men.

  2. If we’re going to project our own desire for change, and a hope for a brighter future, onto the protests – if we’re going to say “they are us” – then we need to expand our consideration beyond just the scrappy underdogs we’re rooting for, and consider just how many of “them” are “us”, and which of “us” they are.

Old Man Sharkey

Greenland Shark from National GeographicWhile doing some research, I came across a few odd facts regarding the Greenland Shark that I wanted to pass on. For example: no one is really sure of their exact lifespan, but wikipedia presents the general consensus:

The Greenland shark is known to be long-lived, with an estimated maximum life span of over 200 years.

No worries though – this old fellow, despite being nearly blind from a parasite eating its corneas, has a meal plan:

This shark has a bioluminescent ( glowing ) copepods attached to the Greenland shark’s corneas. This may attract curious prey to the shark’s head. – aasharks.com

He’s also a bit of a grump, and doesn’t take guff from any hooligan polar bears who may want to play on his front lawn.

Scientists researching how far sharks hunt seals in the Arctic were stunned in June to find part of the jaw of a young polar bear in the stomach of a Greenland shark, a species that favours polar waters. – dailymail.co.uk

I see a movie deal on SyFy in this guy’s future.Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus

Into The Meat Machine

Meat Lamp by Auger-Loizeau Carnivorous Domestic Robot EntertainmentThere seems to be some growing fear regarding robots that eat flesh. “Robots that eat flesh?” some of you may be asking – this NPR piece provides a great overview:

This carnivorous clock (“8 dead flies makes it work for about 12 days,” says co-designer Professor Chris Melhuish, of Bristol Robotics) is just a prototype. It doesn’t catch enough flies to power the motor on top and the digital clock. But this is just a first step.

The lamp pictured above is something along the same lines; the light attracts flies, which the shade then consumes, and the winged-meal goes on to power the bulb.

These items are really just art pieces – the truth is that microbial fuel cell technology just isn’t advanced enough yet to turn this into a functional item for the home – but people are already feeling a little queasy about the notion.

I understand their trepidation, but I must heartily disagree.

I’ve long argued that battery technology is the next critical area of development in the march of progress, and it seems pretty logical to me that the energy we require might come from the same source as our own bodies. Consider how much we accomplish, and how little, comparatively, we require to achieve those tasks.

How many AA-batteries would we require to power ourselves for a full work day? How many watts does it take to clean a kitchen or vacuum a living room?
iRobot's RoombaPeople are put off by the notion that we might one day be feeding household pests to our Roombas, but consider that this is really just the first step towards a future in which we can toss a Big Mac into the back of our television in exchange for a month’s worth of Dancing With The Stars, at no additional electrical cost.

Power outage? You don’t need to worry about the stuff in your fridge going bad, you’ll be able to dump it directly into your generator.

A final thought:

According to a new policy brief issued by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Stockholm International Water Institute and the International Water Management Institute, huge amounts of food — close to half of all food produced worldwide — are wasted after production. – treehugger.com

Mr Fusion from the film Back To The Future

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(Second hat-tip of the day to BMJ2k, for throwing me the link that inspired this piece.)

I'm gonna be archived forever

Mr Blog's Tepid RideFriend of the site, BMJ2k, has posted up some thoughts on being a public figure, apparently inspired by our last Collective Detective tale.

It also does not matter how widely you are known. The Mayor of Toledo Ohio is a public figure despite not having been heard of in 99.999% of the United States.

Therefore, if being a public figure is not dependant on where you are, and it doesn’t matter how widely you are known, then it stands to reason then that alongside those public figures known countrywide or globally, there must also be local public figures known in smaller circles or communities. So my question is, if there is no upper limit, is there a lower limit? What is the threshold? – read more

Humanity In (and On) Jeopardy

Watson Crushes Jeopardy!There’s a lot of hubbub right now about Watson conquering Jeopardy, and I wanted to step in to help put some of the fire out.

First of all, though, I find it odd that people don’t really understand that the interesting bit about this win isn’t related to the fact that the computer knows the answer to the question – this is no more impressive than discovering a set of paper-based Britannica Encyclopedias contains the approximate population of Malaysia.

The tricky bit for the engineers was in teaching the computer to interpret the format in which Jeopardy presents its questions, (answers, really,) so that it could dig through its on-board memory for the correct nugget. As Barry, over at Mr Blog’s recently mentioned, you can’t stuff any old search term into something like Wikipedia in the hopes of getting the right answer – even Google is just making its best guess when you start looking for “Mexican skull recipe”.

Watson’s creators needed to find a way to take that textual clue, then backtrack it to a reasonable answer – and they did.
Lego Sugar Skull Illustration by Jonathan KoshiSo, now that a self contained search-bot has defeated us in the most critical of arenas, Jeopardy, what do we do? Give up? Start betting on competing trivia-computers? Search for John Connor?

No.

The time has come for humanity to get serious about next steps, and I don’t just mean as it relates to television game shows. Computers have defeated us in chess, Jeopardy, and Street Fighter II, but it isn’t that they’re somehow a malevolent force that’s putting us out to pasture, instead we need to consider how we can use personalized technologies to better augment ourselves.

Could Watson have won so handily if Ken Jennings had been allowed a laptop, with wifi access, on his podium? Probably, because fingers are meaty and slow – but could it have won if Ken Jennings had an interface implanted directly into his brain?

Suddenly it becomes a race related to reasoning, and not simply data correlation.

Are we going to cancel baseball once we discover that wheeled robots – with high-end sensor suites and mechanical reflexes – can out-run, out-bat, and out-catch, a human? Or are we going to slap some pistons into Derek Jeter and move the home-run fence back a bit?
Super Baseball 2020 Ad

Unpacking Peanuts

Peanut Butter and Bacon Sandwich, from wikimedia.org/You can’t swing a fourth-grader these days without being warned about peanut allergies in schools, and I wanted to share a brief thought on the situation.

First, an overview:

New research indicates that early exposure to peanuts—most commonly peanut butter—and increasing consumption of it may be contributing to the prevalence of the allergy. Although there are no hard statistics in Canada, most agree the allergy is on the rise. – calgaryallergy.ca

Now, I don’t mean to be morbid, and I certainly don’t have any hard data to back the wild postulation I’m about to make, but, consider this:

There were 112 deaths associated with the construction of the [Hoover] dam. Included in that total was J. G. Tierney, a surveyor who drowned on December 20, 1922, while looking for an ideal spot for the dam. He is generally counted as the first man to die in the construction of Hoover Dam. His son, Patrick W. Tierney, was the last man to die working on the dam’s construction, 13 years to the day later. – wikipedia

Hoover Dam, from wikimedia.org/That factoid may seem unrelated to peanuts, but I mention it as an example – one of thousands – regarding how cheaply death came, even just 90 years ago.

(These days any construction project that cost the lives of over a hundred workers would be easily spotted from the air, as the lines of approaching lawyers would stretch well over the surrounding horizon.)

What if it’s not the case that peanut allergies are on the rise, but, instead, that better care taking, and science, are simply keeping those at risk alive long enough for us to notice the need to take precautions?