An intramural basketball team in Colorado has named itself the Fighting Whites, in satiral response to the Fighting Reds.
Is this the moment to mention that in hi-skool I was on an intramural tag-football team called the Chinks? (I think Max Wei proposed the name, but it might have been Mike Mueller or Chris Chow.)
Vernor Vinge’s mind-expanding novel A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) contains numerous postings on “the Net of a Million Lies.” But unlike the Usenet of our time, most of the senders have institutional names, like Khurvark University or Sandor Arbitration. I have assumed that these represent consensus cooked up by AIs from internal discussions.
Now Sean Kirby says that Columbia Newsblaster (a project of the Natural Language Processing Group at Columbia University) automatically “trolls hundreds of news sites, collects all the information from the articles, and summarizes them with links . . . . its computer-generated summaries are virtually free from any possible taint of bias.”
Oh? Newsblaster itself lists seventeen sources (Yahoo, ABCNews, CNN, Reuters, LA Times, CBS News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Virtual New York, Washington Post, Wired, FOX News, NY Post, USA Today, Science Magazine, BBC News, Nature Magazine, Lycos) some of which repeat each other; Yahoo and Lycos get most of their stuff from Reuters. The summary will be as unbiased as the median of mainstream news; that beats reading just one paper, but is it revolutionary?
Unfortunately there’s no obvious link to information on how Newsblaster works.
Research Shows Just How Much People Hate A Winner. This is scary: pointless envy is stronger than economists expected. (Full paper)
Some of my libertarian dogma may need rebuilding.
insert joke about politicians and principle
Mark Steyn turns out the best piece I’ve seen yet on the steel thing. Okay so I’m a week late. (Another link from Sean Kirby.)
If you’ve ever heard bagpipes, you’ve probably heard “Scotland the Brave”. One night I left a showing of The Seven Samurai, whistling the song of the peasants planting the rice; started to improvise on it, and soon found that it had mutated into “Scotland the Brave” but on the Japanese scale. Couldn’t do that again if you paid me!
Only once before tonight had I heard words sung to that tune, and somehow I suspected that “bring me my sheep / I’m so lonesome tonight” might not be quite right.
Well, anyway, just now this bloke John McDermott was on telly singing “Scotland the Brave”. But apparently the words are original with him, as Google finds them only at his site and at those of his fans. (I’d never have heard of him if it weren’t pledge season at KTEH, and he has multiple fan sites?)
The quest continues. Heck, if anyone knows the rest of the other version, I’ll take that. Hm, maybe it’s on one of Michael Longcor’s tapes?
Strangers keep asking me for cigarettes – more often, it seems, than they did even a few months ago. Is this a sign of something?