“surprises”
98 posts under this tag.
All the world is full of knowing men, of most learned schoolmasters, and vast libraries; and it appears to me as a truth, that neither in Plato’s time, nor Cicero’s, nor Papinian’s, there was ever such conveniency for studying as we see at this day there is. Nor must any adventure henceforward to come in public, or present himself in company, that hath not been pretty well polished in the shop of Minerva. I see robbers, hangmen, freebooters, tapsters, ostlers, and such like, of the very rubbish of the people, more learned now than the doctors and preachers were in my time.
Francis Rabelais, Five Books Of The Lives, Heroic Deeds And Sayings Of Gargantua And Pantagruel, see eemadge #334
This just in (via KurzweilAI.net), I can hardly believe it myself:
[..a scientific team] has discovered that sexual orientation in fruit flies is controlled by a previously unknown regulator of synapse strength. Armed with this knowledge, the researchers found they were able to use either genetic manipulation or drugs to turn the flies’ homosexual behavior on and off within hours.
”Homosexual courtship might be sort of an ‘overreaction’ to sexual stimuli,”..
SeeqPod (YubNub’s “seeq“) crawls the web for mp3’s and streams (and queues) them for you right along search results. “Playable search” they call it, hinting they’ll use the word in expansive, unexpected ways. It’s kind of how you can now play YouTube videos within Google results. The instant gratification level of it all is sky-high. It’s long due and as clever a copyright hack as I’ve seen (like how music websites link to YouTube videos to play music but so much better). A big, dark underweb of mp3s has always been there, it’s just never been this discoverable, this sampleable.
I learned about it, btw, through one of the classiest, most elegant, best targeted spams ever. The SeeqPod team sent me a (probably automatic) email recommending me to try searching for Rufus Wrainwright through their search engine. Since their spam was so unusually well-written and targeted (I had written about Rufus Wainwright before), I tried it. Maybe in these days were spam filters are so effective spammers will have to resource to being useful and wanted. We can dream.
Update 11/Dec/07
Project Playlist (YubNub’s “projp“) is a very similar website, though SeeqPod’s interface is much better. One interesting feature of Project Playlist is that you can search other people’s playlists too, which is a great way to find similar music. SeeqPod, on the other hand, has the interesting “discover” feature, which recommends similar music. (Via Chepe.)
Our trusted old friend very, I just found out, comes straight from the Latin VERus, truth! It’s the same root that gives us VERitable, VERacity, VERism, VERdict, (“truth-speaking”), or the Spanish VERdad. Every single very you’ve gushed has been a truly in disguise. When you say, say, “Damn Ivonne, you’re very hot!”, what you’re really saying across millennia to Yvonne is that she’s truly hot. Which she is. Now aren’t you glad you read this blog religiously?
I’ve seen the future. Or rather, I’ve walked on it.
After days of shopping around town (after which I can attest there is no point in shopping around, particularly not around downtown—limit yourself to your local warehouse clubs and you’ll be fine), my family finally bought a much needed treadmill.
Of course the first thing I did when we finally lugged it upstairs was build myself a walkstation. After learning about the concept,
how could someone chained to his books and computer resist?
The best makeshift base ended up being the old ironing board, which is long, surprisingly stable, and cushiony. It’s nothing short of amazing to read and browse on it and realize for yourself that it actually works, that there’s barely any tremor, and that the walking soon becomes unconscious. Slow though the walking may be, it’s strangely invigorating.
This was long coming. We will all be walking the web one day.
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
E Pluribus Unum (From Many, One)
Traditional U.S. motto
Transhumanist transgender Martine Rothblatt proposes the most original solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I’ve ever conceived: Two Stars for Peace—the incorporation of Palestine and Israel into the U.S. as the 51st and 52nd states. She has wrote a book making the detailed case and has spoken about it on Sirius satellite radio:
A young person in Palestine and Israel today looks forward to future with depression and with fear, but with Two Stars for Peace, the young people of Israel and Palestine can look forward to a future when they can travel freely throughout the United States, get their education in any part of the United States, or they can travel back and forth between Israel and Palestine. They can look forward to a future of instead of warring armies, everybody is part of a single United States army. The young people have no vested interest in the past of bickering and hostility. It’s depressing. But Two Stars for Peace gives them a way to have a good life.
This is so far out our ordinary could I’m still shocked. My rather unusual Mexican high school put an odd emphasis on the Middle East and this is by far the best idea I know of. Just imagine, fighting war with peace. Hope. Freedom.
A math experiment was carried out recently when Alex Smith —an Electronic and Computer Engineering undergraduate with “a background in mathematics and esoteric programming languages”— proved that the Turing machine below is in fact universal, making it the simplest universal Turing machine possible. In other words, the cute graph below are the instructions for an abstract symbol-manipulating machine that can in principle do anything your computer (or any other computer for that matter) can do.
Stephen Wolfram, who made the conjecture and offered a $25k reward for proving it, reports:
We’ve come a long way since Alan Turing’s original 1936 universal Turing machine—taking four pages of dense notation to describe.
We did an experiment; and PCE [the Principle of Computational Equivalence] was validated.
But unlike some science experiments, it didn’t take a multibillion-dollar particle accelerator. It just took a 20-year-old undergraduate with a PC.
[It’s] a wonderful monument in the computational universe—a marker at the edge of universality for Turing machines.
It’s a very satisfying way to spend $25,000.
Now, ain’t this just breathtaking?
What structure would you give to Mexico’s 2006 GDP, the wealth it generated in a year? Just gather your prejudices, take a guess, and try to put it into numbers.
Mexico’s 2006 GDP Structure
A fairly unique thing about democracy and capitalism is that —as opposed to, say, monarchy or theocracy— both are formal systems for collective decision making, both specify clear rules for obtaining and aggregating the ends of differing individuals.
As such systems, they both necessarily hinge in what we shall refer to as ballots. Usually the paper in which votes are cast, we will here use the word ‘ballot’ to mean ”an external expression of preference.” The key part is ‘external’. Externality has problems all its own but is also our only hope of finding out what others think—telepathy, guessing, and revelation are our other options.
In democracy, votes are the ballots. In capitalism, it’s money. In democracy, a clinic will be built if the majority of voters vote in its favor. It will keep in operation as long as people don’t vote it out of existence. In capitalism, a clinic will be built if enough people pool the money for its construction and it will keep in operation as long as it makes a profit—that is, as long as it ends up receiving more money than it gives away.
Seeing votes and money as instances of the same concept begs an intriguing question: How then do they differ? How is a vote different than a buck? What specific changes do you need to make to a vote ballot to turn it into a money ballot?
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