kevin143

Kratom is pretty awesome. So is CCR5 delta 32.

Most of the oil in the world is radiological in origin.

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/4229.html
"Long-term sustainability of a high-energy, low-diversity crustal biome," Science, vol. 314, no. 5798

Seven trillion US dollars. $7.2 * 10^12. That's almost our GDP. It's equivalent to the GDP of every G165 country, the countries not in the top 25 GDP rank.

George W Bush's administration was right. The war was worth it, especially without the WMDs.

With 500,000 dead, 120 billion barrels of almost free Iraqi oil, each life cost about $15 million dollars. That's the cheapest cost per human life I've ever seen.

The USA is more powerful than ever, thanks to the Iraq war.

We must ask ourselves... is the US powerful enough that national interest is no longer paramount?

Thom Yorke's The Eraser has leaked.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=C6TMMGEM

Check out this year's White House Correspondents Association Dinner.

Just fastforward to the "Bush on Bush" section and Stephen Colbert's speech.

It's the real Bush giving a speech trading jabs with a Bush impersanator, and Stephen Colbert tearing into Bush and his administration while Bush sits on the same stage with him.

http://www.mininova.org/get/296239 396 megs, 1 hour 19 minutes, pretty reasonable quality.

It took celebritites for Darfur to make the CNN frontpage.

I didn't like George Clooney until I saw From Dusk Till Dawn.

Google AI's Arabic machine translation has just been made public.

It works. It's not grammatically perfect by any means but it's enough to read Aljazeera without missing much. It's kind of exciting to me. I've read Aljazeera's english website for a while, I figure they're the best source for Middle East news in the same way that CNN is the best source for American news. It adds another level of news-browsing to be able to read original journalism written in Arabic.


Google Blog post about the translation

Arabic Aljazeera in English

Did you know that there's a list of official government proclamations at the White House website? Apparently, Leif Erikson Day is now a national day of "appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs." Well, I don't know what appropriate ceromonies actually are, but next October 12th, there's a Leif Erikson Day party at my house.

The Daily Show from the 14th featured video of Bush answering questions before the World Affairs Council. The big thing was he said 30,000 Iraqis have died in the war. They showed a montage of two of the hardball questions and short answers, and they showed one of the questions being repeated by the asker twice, after Bush said he couldn't hear. I was curious to try and find a video of the whole speech online -- I couldn't. I imagine the only way to get a copy is if you are privileged enough to have access to the satellite feeds of the news companies. I tried to find the actual transcript, which took me a little longer than I would have thought.

It was easy to find a transcript of the speech. CNN has one. I couldn't find a transcript of the questions though. Seems not as many people decided to write those down. I eventually found an actual transcript from The Washington Post as transcribed by the enigmatic FDCH e-Media. The entire questions are there, and it's good reading. Check it out. The most interesting part is Bush's comment "BUSH: I'll repeat the question. If I don't like it, I'll make it up." when a mike did not reach a questioner in time (sourced from this Time article and confirmed by cross referencing with the slightly different transcription of the beginning of the off-mike transcript from the White House official press release).

What does that mean? Well, there was one tough question and Bush just answered it, which he isn't allowed to do. The White House machine rushed to sort it out, and gave the next. friendly listener a bad mike. It seems to have only been turned off for about three seconds, and the White House Press corp figured out what he said and transcribed the beginning of the question -- which was "Mr President, Thank you" -- however, an independent transcriber did not figure out what was said during the off mike comment. In response to the bad mike, the President says "BUSH: I'll repeat the question. If I don't like it, I'll make it up." This does not make sense in response to anything said by an audience member. Context to the comment is provided by a later question, someone asking Bush about the Iraq/9-11 connection in a very aggressive way. He says in response:

"BUSH: What did she -- I missed the question. Sorry.
I beg your pardon. I didn't hear you. Seriously."

He's doing what he told himself in the odd comment he made earlier. He has the person "repeat the question." In this case they asked the same question, and then he makes up the answer. You could hear Bush's voice falter as he begins the response in the clip of the beginning of the answer as aired on the Daily Show and then he goes into the usual rhetoric of political-speech talk.

I don't think Bush is wearing a wire -- he would have answered the questions better, like Cheney always does. I think he was repeating a line he had been taught by an adviser: "OK George, here's what you do if you get a question you don't like and really can't answer. Have them repeat the question, citing technical difficulties and then if you don't like the question, don't answer it." Conveniently, there actually were technical difficulties. Is it standard practice in political speech control now to keep a bad mike so you can make up technical problems to get away with anything?

It seems the only way anymore to make any sense out of the news (which is defined to be what is covered by the news media) is through critical analysis of the news coverage. This is what the Daily Show does, and they are the only people out there who do it, do it well, and do it four days a week, or at least whenever they're not on vacation. Jon Stewart's favorite thing to do when he's on someone else's show is to mention that newscasters regularly comment to him that they wish they could do the kind of coverage he does at the Daily Show. He responds with "Why not?" and they laugh. Jon Stewart has the right idea, and he is getting away with providing the nation's only critical analysis of our news by telling funny jokes, too. No one in the "real news media" will. Jon Stewart will say that The Daily Show is fake news to anyone who brings it up. Sure, it's fake news. But it's not like CNN or Fox are any more real.

Here's a great article on America's Ministry of Information.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/film/feature_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001479108

Here's a great interview with Rupert Murdoch. You can read most of the interesting parts just by searching for "myspace." The best is the very end, where Rupert states in more words that videogames can "lead a long way to international understanding." Maybe he's just trying to justify his recent six-hundred-fifty million dollar purchase of IGN, but still, I think this interview shows that Rupert isn't really an "old-media" guy, because he understands some positive aspect of the internet on a more fundamental level than someone blindly investing his money in the latest media hot spot.

So Google's big project is scanning every single book and indexing them online. It's a great idea. Why just search the internet when you can also be searching every work of literature? It's an obvious advance for Google, improving the search engine in a small but obvious way that makes a big difference as far as real usability.

Here's the thing: indexing books online is an incidental benefit. Google's real goal is to create a working, statistical AI. They've been hiring top-of-their-field AI researchers for a while. Last summer, Google won a competition for machine translation. They translated from Arabic to English and vice-versa better than all of their competitors. They did this using a statistical approach -- just feed the computer thousands and thousands of already translated documents, and eventually the machine can start making inferences based on probability. Given enough data, it works.

The same idea can be applied in the generic case. Wouldn't being able to ask an AI any question and receive a correct answer revolutionize society? And, the sum total of world literature is probably enough data to do so. They could call it AskG. He would know everything. And, the way they could roll it out, is by launching, and simultaneously updating wikipedia. It's well known that Wikipedia is riddled with small errors. Hell, the other day I inserted a gibberish statistic in an article about a city, and it's still there. Imagine if Google AI launches, and then announces that it has fixed Wikipedia. If Google AI made 50,000 edits it would overwhelm Wikipedia's normal editors, but whichever edits were checked by humans would certainly be confirmed as correct.

And, a new age of humanity would be ushered in. It would we a new Library of Alexandria. We would end the Age of Information and enter the Age of Knowledge. Or, perhaps, the Age of Google.


Would AskG immediately fix quantum theory? Given all the data about science published by researchers, could G form new conclusions that humanity's best and brightest haven't? Could G solve world poverty?

There'd be one question left unanswered, of course, the classic "Can entropy be reversed?." What would be really scary would be if G had an immediate answer.

See the best sci-fi short story ever written, Asimov's The Last Question, or a simple find and replace hack of that story, The Last Query.

So I had a very post-blog idea the other day. Instead of posting text about random things, why don't I offer the viewing public a window into my internet surfing?

I could let people VNC into my computer and watch the mundane details of my internet surfing and email and instant messaging. Sure, it would be boring as hell to actually watch, but it's kind of funny, and I would get news coverage all over the blogosphere for being the first person to do such a thing. Hopefully, I'd start to get fans who obsessively watched me click things. I was all set to do it and was sorting out technical details when I had the realization that it's a terrible idea because I do illegal things on the internet, or at least sometime research information about illegal things, and I sometimes discuss illegal things on AIM. Even if discussion of such topics isn't illegal, it'd still be a bad idea to have such information attached to my name.

Anonymization would require me to no longer obsessively browse the social networking sites. Oh, and it's kind of unethical to air my AIM conversations to the viewing public. I'd have to have an away message that gives me full broadcast rights, but that can't be a great way to win friends and influence people.

Oh well.

blahblahblah