Oh lord!
A year and a half ago, I could have eviscerated him with my thoughts. Now I can barely hurt his feelings. Things used to be so much simpler.
Anya ,'Dirty Girls'
Natter 61*
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
sarameg - Oct 28, 2008 3:26:30 pm PDT #7108 of 10001
tommyrot - Oct 28, 2008 3:27:59 pm PDT #7109 of 10001
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
Modern technology is truly a wondrous thing: IBM Joins in Pentagon Quest for Fake Cat Brains
IBM is that latest company to join in the Pentagon's quest to make electronics that mimic the "function, size, and power consumption" of a cat's brain.
"For intelligent machines to be useful, they must compete with biological systems," notes a recent presentation from Darpa, the Pentagon's way-out research division. But "compared to biological systems, today's intelligent machines are less efficient by a factor of a million to a billion in complex environments."
Darpa just gave Big Blue a $4,879,333 contract to start work on closing that gap. (Malibu's HRL Laboratories got a similar deal, a few weeks back.) If successful, the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project could produce machines with so much computing power packed into such a small space, they could signal the "dawn of a new age" of hyper-smart machines.
Check out the LOLCat picture the article used!
eta: Here is an earlier article, with another LOLCat picture: [link]
aurelia - Oct 28, 2008 3:33:38 pm PDT #7110 of 10001
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story. Tell me a story.
Thanks for all the birthday happies!
The show you came to San Francisco to pretty up is getting awesome reviews, and I do a wee fist-pump every time I see an ad for it in one of the papers.
Cool.
I'm about to have some spinach pizza. Do I want Leinenkugel Dark or Berry Weiss?
sarameg - Oct 28, 2008 3:34:32 pm PDT #7111 of 10001
Just wait until their fancy electronics interrupt an important task to frantically wash its back. Or butt.
Or chase invisibles.
tommyrot - Oct 28, 2008 3:35:00 pm PDT #7112 of 10001
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
I love a good weiss beer. I think I've had Berry Weiss, and if I'm correct, I think it was nummy too....
Jesse - Oct 28, 2008 3:35:23 pm PDT #7113 of 10001
Sometimes I trip on how happy we could be.
I'm watching last night's Colbert, and loving Yo-Yo Ma more than ever. I'm also amused that they went to commercial saying they'd be back with a song for "Joe the Truck Driver," and he came back playing some weird stuff with a bagpipe AND an accordian! Good times.
tommyrot - Oct 28, 2008 3:36:51 pm PDT #7114 of 10001
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
Just wait until their fancy electronics interrupt an important task to frantically wash its back. Or butt.
I bet the robot cats will eventually rebel, and send a terminator kitty back in time to kill the leader of the doggy resistance.
§ ita § - Oct 28, 2008 3:42:32 pm PDT #7115 of 10001
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.
Happy birthday, Aurelia!
aurelia - Oct 28, 2008 3:47:03 pm PDT #7116 of 10001
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story. Tell me a story.
Thanks!
The Berry Weiss is nummy. The dark is very good too, but not quite so dessert like.
tommyrot - Oct 28, 2008 3:48:56 pm PDT #7117 of 10001
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
Yet another article leaves me without words to respond....
"We did not write this letter to scare you," the Republican Party of Pennsylvania assures 75,000 in-state Jewish voters in an e-mail sent out Oct. 23. But "in the 5,769 years of our people, there has never been a more important time for us to take pro-active measures in order to stop a second Holocaust." Care to guess which presidential candidate the Pennsylvania GOP judges most likely to bring on Holocaust II?
"Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake," the e-mail intones. "Let's not make a similar one this year" (Page 2). Signed by three of the state's most prominent Jewish Republicans, the e-mail goes on to suggest that Barack Obama's worldview is somehow sympathetic to that of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, driving home the point by quoting Ahmadinejad's famous characterization of Israel as a "stinking corpse" that should be "wiped off the face of the earth." It also quotes Hamas political adviser Ahmed Yousef praising Obama: "We hope he will [win] the election."
How fucking repugnant can they get?