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New words added to OED
"Computers can’t do everything. Consider the following sentences:
John saw Jane at the store. She said, “Hi.”
You can tell right away that Jane is the person speaking. A program would have to perform serious computational gymnastics to reach the same conclusion.
Amazon invented Mechanical Turk for situations just like the one above: to solve problems that humans find easy but computers find hard."
So someone used it to analyse who said all the famous bible quotes. And got the whole job done for $75.
http://www.esv.org/blog/2006/06/mechanical.turk.recap
Despite the misuse of almost all descriptions of information transfer, it pays to remind people that DNA information reaimns pretty important, and that people like Shannon had quanitified information quite accurately years ago. So it's no surprise that these can be combined.
"Jacob Schwartz once surprised a computer science class by calculating the bandwith of human sexual intercourse, the rate of information transmission achieved in human lovemaking. I'm too much of a theoretician to care about the exact answer, which anyway depends on details like how you measure the amount of time that's involved, but his class was impressed that the bandwidth that's achieved is quite respectable! "
Meta Math: The Quest for Omega Gregory Chaitin (p 67)
As you may have noticed, Australia is no longer in the World Cup and hence soccer (football) reverts to its normal status of boring. Feeble-minded people will have another priority placed in their minds by the media. And morons will continue to be confused about why politics seems to always occur in sport, seemingly oblivious to the idea that teams are representing countries, which exist for political reasons. Another lap of the oval and they might figure it out.
However you may find this interesting: compare any two World Cup nations on other characteristics:
http://www.wdm.org.uk/whoshouldicheerfor/chooser.htm
Robinson Crusoe rewritten in one-syllable words
there is an original powers of ten http://www.youtube.com/v/4i6B7HzijSo
and a Simpsons version of course. Search for it. Or try this one we prepared earlier
[fast-food chain] ... previously.sold a 16 ounce soft drink as a small, a 20 ounce soft drink as medium and a 32 ounce soft drink as Biggie. Now, a 20 ounce drink is a small, a 32 ounce drink is a medium and the new 42 ounce drink is a large.
42 ounces. That is... 1.25 litres. Why does anyone need 1.25L of soft drink?
you lay still and incomplete
stainless steel tugging remnant warmth
from waxblue flesh through green cotton.
skin fallen back to a weary outline
relieved of struggle
no famous striped jacket
orbiting laughter now only memory
the hands that embraced, that might take on the world
so neatly and awkwardly placed
too soon. any time was too soon
the damaged shell, discarded
mixing with wet dark earth
diffusing, travelling with time
to some new and painless place
soaked in the sound of morning
just a blurred photo now
a brave love letter from Firenze
a promise to listen to music
and a deep and private place forever
Yep, it can be done!
Before attempting, consider the risks (surface conditions, distance to a medical facility, skill of spotters, previous injuries, etc).
This illusion, and several others, have been circulating for the past week or so. It's a fairly old technique, but this seems to highlight a property I had not seen before: if you don't shift your gaze, the colour persists for at least a few minutes (possibly, as long as you can hold your gaze)
lovely animations of fractals
http://www.uibk.ac.at/mathematik/kalender05tage.html
A one-man reenactment of scene from a great film
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Fjph4G4z77M
http://abum.com/file/shadow/animations/17632.swf
Stick man vs Animator. This is very clever.