Monthly Archives: January 2017

The new face of the GOP

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I’m ten weeks in on my TV news fast and I’ve dropped 50 pounds in psychic weight. No, I’m not living in a cave. I check the New York Times a couple of times a week (I even have a paid subscription), and I visit the BBC World News page for a more global perspective. Turns out there’s important stuff happening in other pars of the world. So I do get some news about American politics but now I’m controlling the spigot.

Early days for the new president but I’m wondering if it’s going to be as much fun as he thought. Time will tell. Of greater interest to me is to what extent Trump will become the new face of the Republican party. I’m sure this analogy has been worked hard because it’s so apt. After a night of Jägermeister shots the GOP wakes up to discover that dream about the tattoo parlor wasn’t a dream. Going to be hard to call yourself the Party of Reagan after a four year kegger at Sigma Tau Trump.

But who knows. That Trump tat might be good for free drinks for a long time. If so, party on! But if The Donald shits in the punch bowl, it’s gonna be hard to say it wasn’t his party.

Bots are a new medium

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Kevin Kelly points us to an interesting piece on bots by John Borthwick. Turns out bots are a bigger thing than I realized, and they’re gonna get a lot bigger.

“Most researchers estimate that during the election cycle, bots made up approximately a quarter of all the online chatter on a particular issue or meme. […] As people understand that accounts aren’t necessarily human, they will start to trust platforms and networks less.”

Mr. Borthwick make reference to Dexter which is (I think) a service that will help you develop a bot for your business (or whatever). You can see my chat session with their demo below. And if you’re feeling a little lonely…

Chat bots are going to become a thing in 2017, as Clem the CEO of Hugging Face, an awesomely interesting chat bot company says, “everyone, one day will have an AI friend”.

 

Safe Shorts

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“A German company recently sparked controversy after launching a line of women’s underwear that it claims can protect the wearer against sexual assault. Called ‘Safe Shorts’ the underpants are made of a slash and tearing-resistant fabric and feature a combination lock and a loud alarm system that goes off when the pants are tampered with.”

“Short Pants feature three different forms of protection against assailants. First, the pants’ drawstrings are made of a very tough material that makes them almost impossible to cut or tear, and the combination lock prevents the attacker from untying them or pulling off the underwear without first untying the drawstrings. Then there is the soft protector in the crotch area that prevents assailants from tearing the Soft Pants between the wearer’s legs.”

“And finally, there is the alarm system that produces a loud acoustic signal (130 decibels) when it detects that the pants are being tampered with. The wearer can also trigger the alarm voluntarily by by sharply pulling the drawstrings to scare off the attackers and as a call for help.”

“The jogging model costs $160 and the everyday use one are $107.”

Smart buildings predict when critical systems about to fail

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“Imagine a building that tells you – before it happens – that the heating is about to fail. Some companies are using machine learning to do just that. It’s called predictive maintenance. Software firm CGnal, based in Milan, Italy, recently analysed a year’s worth of data from the heating and ventilation units in an Italian hospital. Sensors are now commonly built into heating, ventilation and air conditioning units, and the team had records such as temperature, humidity and electricity use, relating to appliances in operating theatres and first aid rooms as well as corridors.”

“They trained a machine learning algorithm on data from the first half of 2015, looking for differences in the readings of similar appliances. They then tested it on data from the second half of the year – could it predict faults before they happened? The system predicted 76 out of 124 real faults, including 41 out of 44 where an appliance’s temperature rose above tolerable levels, with a false positive rate of 5 per cent.”

New Scientist

Would a bot ask you to show it your underpants?

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Since retiring, I’m occasionally asked if I’d consider working part-time. Uh, no. But this afternoon I thought of a job that I might find interesting. If such a job exists. If some company/business/service was doing one of those “is it human or is it a bot?” things, that might be fun. Sort of a half-assed Turing Test kind of thing? But I’d want total freedom in my responses.

Q: You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a…
Me: Did you think Ernest Borgnine was better in Airwolf or Escape from New York?

Yeah, I think I might do that for an hour a day. My friend David Brazeal had a similar gig for a while. He was the human behind the Barrel Bob Twitter account for the Missouri Department of Transportation. I think he lost the account when the suits couldn’t handle his insanely humorous tweets.

Why does time seem to move faster as get older?

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“The “associated theory” states that between the ages 15 and 25 the most formative experiences of our life take place, such as our first kiss, first car, first love, and so on. This creates a “reminiscence bump.” The farther we move away from the bump, the quicker time seems to move.”

“William James in his 1890 book Principles of Psychology, described it this way—that fewer and fewer novel experiences pop up as we grow older, and this is why life seems to pick up speed.”

More at Big Think

Am I alive because of the atomic bomb?

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I’m about halfway through Genius, James Gleick’s biography of Richard Feynman, considered by many the most brilliant American physicist of the 20th century. Feynman was probably the smartest of the scientists working on the Trinity Project (America’s atom bomb program). The first (and only test) of the bomb took place July 16, 1945. American bombers nuked the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few weeks later (Aug 6-9). Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945.

My father was in the Navy from May, 1943 until March 9, 1946. He served on the USS Mount McKinley; USS Appalachian; USS New Jersey; USS War Hawk; USS Iowa; and one or two others. All of which saw action in the Pacific.

According to Gleick, building the atomic bomb dramatically affected the lives of the scientists who created it. The Japanese lives lost to this terrible weapon have always been balanced against those that would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. Like my father, for instance. Japan surrenders, they turn the ships around and head home. Discharged March 9, 1946 in St. Louis. Meets and marries my mom (March 23, 1946) who was living in St. Louis. Happy ending. For some.

I’ve been sitting here for a few minutes trying to boil down some meaning from this bit of history. But “what if this event hadn’t happened” is a pointless game. It did happen.

“Nothing can happen unless the entire universe makes it happen. A thing is as it is, because the universe is as it is.”

Joseph Mays (circa 1955)

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Joseph Merrel Mase; Born 1863, Ithaca, NY; Died: 9/12/1959 (96 years). Only Joseph and one of his brothers chose the Mays spelling. And of Joseph and Nancy’s children, only Vernon and one of his brothers chose to revert to Mase. John Mays (standing) with sister Reva (top, left) and cousins.