Archive for February, 2006
Monday, February 27th, 2006GrrlScienist reads “Kotex Tips for Life” on the box of a hygiene product, and has Advice for Corporate Giants
Obviously, the person behind this little scheme was someone who has never possessed a functioning pair of ovaries. Go ahead and tell a menstruating woman to her face that drinking six to eight glasses of water will help keep her feeling fresh. Especially when she is experiencing bloating from water weight gain. Just see what happens and report back.[...]
Look, women don’t need or want “Tips for Life” on feminine hygiene products. Younger girls are already hearing “helpful” crap like that from their elderly relatives. Veteran females have already concocted their own recipes for survival, most containing alcohol.
I have nothing to add, so I will just pass that along without comment. However, in the spirit of biting off heads, here’s an awesome video.
DVD Jon has, in an offhand manner, offered the book from which he learned assembly language for sale. It’s too bad that he’s the antithesis of people like Gates and Jobs, the types who pay way too much money for pieces of technological history, because that’s a pretty cool piece.
I’m probably the last person in the world to see this question posed. I’m always behind the curve. Anyway, in case I’m not, here it is:
On the pro side they had Alta Charo, professor of bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, and on the con side they trotted out Some Dude whose name I can’t remember, [...] whose contention is that life begins at the moment of conception when sperm meets egg and having been thus blessed by the Divine Hand of the Creator it is henceforth entitled to the same protections as an adult human. [...] The ultimate conclusion is that Embryonic Stem Cell Research Is Wrong.
So Alta brings up the conundrum that’s always guaranteed to set wingnut heads a-spinning and green pea soup spewing from their mouths, which is basically a riff on “if a fire breaks out in a fertility clinic, who do you save — a Petri dish with five blastula or the two year-old child?”
The rest of the article (via Atrios) is about the disconnect between the stances of Right to Lifers on abortion and in vitro fertilizaiton, which apparently produces a number of unused embryos:
[Fifteen percent] of all mothers in this country get a little help on the fertility front from science, and since that probably includes no small number of Iowa fundies looking to increase the flock of the faithful, she stops short of casting Joe and Sally Christian who just want to breed, breed breed into the fiery ovens of eternal damnation if they happen to brew up a few extra embryos they never intend to use along the way.
That sure is some sentence, isn’t it? Someone should donate a full stop to this person. Nonetheless, it’s a good read.
Update: Also, South Dakota blows. Not that anyone needed more reasons not to move to Nowhere, but there it is.
I just want to say how disappointed I am that no one got me any chocolate brains for Valentine’s Day. “These are also a good Valentine’s gift for zombies,” indeed. The problem is obviously that I have done too good a job of fooling you all.
I just learned about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, which they call “artificial artificial intelligence.” Programmers use an MTurk API, which pays people pennies to do “simple tasks that people do better than computers.”
HIT stands for Human Intelligence Task. These are tasks that people are willing to pay you to complete. For example a HIT might ask: “Is there a pizza parlour in this photograph?” Typically these tasks are extraordinarily difficult for computers, but simple for humans to answer.
Am I the only person whose first thought was, “This is just dying to be exploited by a sweatshop owner in a third world country”?
Just so you know, the best deal right now appears to be that you can be paid two cents to draw a sheep.
As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve been bringing to your attention recent, interesting posts from blogs nominated for the Wampum Awards for Best Expert Blog. I’ve focused only on blogs in biology, evolution, language, or cognitiion. These include Language Log, John Hawks, and Keats’ Telescope and Mixing Memory.
There’s something disturbing about the blogs nominated for these awards: there are no experts in computer science, software, the internet, or anything of the sort.
To some extent, this is because there aren’t as many good candidates. I’ve been busting my ass trying to find a blog in artificial intelligence as good as Pharyngula, and I’m having no luck.
Dr. Thomas once explained the problem to me thusly: “We were all on ARPANet, when it was cool. Now everyone’s doing it, we aren’t interested. When we find something else we can hang out on by ourselves, we’ll be there.”
Still, this represents serious snubbing of electronic experts and bloggers such as Ed Felton, Joel Spolsky, and Jeff Zeldman.
Next year, something well have to be done about this.
Language Log, a group log housed on the UPenn computer science servers, and headed by a linguist and CS professor at UPenn, is great for things like a brief history and usage of insults ending with -ball. After the history, there’s
The Xy → Xball is not foolproof, though: silly doesn’t yield *sillball, presumably because sill is not a morpheme here. And in general polysyllabic insults don’t take -ball. [...] [I]t seems totally implausible to refer to someone as an idiotball — or a bastardball or an a**holeball either. In contrast, polysyllabic nouns for nasty substances seem plausible as a base. Thus mucousball ought to work, it seems to me, even though it’s not to be found in Google’s index. Corpus linguistics still has some limitations, I guess.
I don’t really have a lot to say about sketchballs, but I do think it’s interesting that Liberman verifies most of his arguments for the validity or invalidity of a word by “argument from Google results count.” It seems that the fact that this is a reasonable thing to do is pretty obvious to everyone who’s thought even a little about computational linguistics. For me personally, it’s one of those projects I always wanted to sit down and give a long, hard thought to, but I never did. More specifically, I wanted to use Google as part of a language generation tool, as a way to quantify the probabilty of a person using an automatically generated phrase.
Maybe one day.
On a related note, via AI-Complete, here’s a neat looking paper called automatic meaning discovery using Google.
This shit is funny.
More specifically, “this shit” is a the life story of “Luke Cage,” a black comic book hero, told in honor of Black History Month. I don’t really know from comics, but the post includes a panel in which a man punches a villain and says “This is getting monotonous, BOYEES.” This is explained as follows:
For the record, the story that panel is from involves the Punisher getting cut up by Jigsaw and having new skin grafted to his face by a former med student turned heroin-addict prostitute, which has the result of turning him black for three issues until a story called, and I’m totally serious here, “Fade to White.” That, friends, is deserving of its own post.
Seriously? Maybe I need to start reading more comics, because that sounds incredible.
Post by John Hawks with this for a punchline:
“At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it. We should learn to let our unconscious handle the complicated things,” Dijksterhuis says.
Strong statement! How can you not read the rest? Now, where is my subscription to Science?
- Certain areas of Mars have the same weather every year. (Keats’ Telescope)
There are specific times of year and locations on Mars which have experienced the same dust storm patterns every Mars year since we began observing with the first MGS MOC approach image in July 1997.
C’mon, that’ s just neat.
- At Mixing Memory, a post about cultures with few words for numbers. It summarizes a couple of articles from Science about societies in the Brazilian rainforest where they only have words for “one, two and, many” or “five words for different general numeralities.” The Saphir-Wharf hypothesis shows up! That’s always fun to see. Also, this, which I thought was awesome. Sven would love it:
The picture I’m trying to paint with these two sets of studies is just how messy research on language and thought really is. [...] Figuring out whether language, as opposed to other cultural and/or environmental variables are responsible for differences in cognition is damn near impossible to do with any certainty. But the research is fun anyway.