Hamish Harvey writes about "What's Wrong With AI."#

The AI debate tends, like so many debates, to entirely miss the point, and it misses the point in a very common way. While the arguments rage over whether we should or should not be striving to create intelligent life and over whether there is any likelihood such a goal might be achieved, humans continue to be reduced on a daily basis to the level of machines, in order to get things done.

[...]

Work on simulating aspects of intelligence has made and will continue to make invaluable contributions to our understanding of the nature of intelligence. This understanding is important, and the simulations, as well as enhancing it, may prove to have practical applications in their own right (Artificial Neural Networks, for example). The real value of improved understanding of intelligence, however, is not in being able to recreate it, but in being better able to magnify it.

AKMA writes about liberalism and terrorism.#

Could it be that "terrorism" manifests the bad conscience, the [necessary] blind spot of the combination of liberal democracy and market capitalism? I'm just ruminating here — but it seems, in certain regards, as though terrorism is what you get when you solemnly assure people that they'e the ones in charge, as long as they don't violate the social compromise that puts them in charge.

That's still not clear. Liberal democracy and market capitalism derive their admirable qualities and their overwhelming political prominence to their offer of freedom and choice — all to the good. But freedom and choice don't simply subsist in an unentangled way. In the modern [North and] West, the experience of generations of religious warfare convinced law-givers that freedom could effectively be obtained by setting apart some topics on which constituents could agree to disagree, "religion" being one of them. After the Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, and various groups' emigrations to North America, the dominant population determined that most people's faiths were congruent with one another to the point that they would exchange the option of establishing binding norms of religious observance for the general welfare that came with defining these religious as a matter of indifference for civil purposes.

We can't assume we know what everyone wants and that they want the same as "us."

Strange Women Lying in Ponds honours soldiers who recently died and talks about how goals of the occupation of Iraq - How do we measure success?#

Military people expect to take casualties, but they view casualties through the lens of whether military objectives are being achieved. Casualties at Antietam, Spotsylvania, Normandy and Bastogne were all terrible, but what we remember about those engagements now, more than the losses and suffering, is whether or not the soldiers who fought achieved their objectives.

Whether we are meeting the objectives of occupation and reconstruction may be more difficult to see than the results of a battle, which one way or another must eventually end when one side has either withdrawn or been defeated. The media brings us news of the horrors, and of the losses, but the day to day gains are apparently too mundane to notice. Like the California wildfires, where stories of the millions of Californians who went to work every day, went home and had dinner with their families went unreported, stories of Iraqis finding normalcy may not be viewed as headline material.

Mathemagenic writes about reading weblogs in an aggregator or a browser.#

However, what makes me wondering is not how many people use one or another way, but why do they use it and what does it change.

For example, using news aggregators for reading weblogs

is more efficient

focuses on content rather than "decoration"

makes much easier doing all kinds of "analytics" with weblogs: going back, rearranging, tracing connections, posting

can be superficial (e.g. scanning through headings to see if there is something important) - in this case weblogs are likely to be treated as news sources (=I'm interested in links and ideas)

can provide a feeling of "getting to know someone better" with making regular reading of a few weblogs easier - in this case weblogs are likely to be treated as personal stories (=I'm interested in people behind weblogs)

commenting in original weblog is less likely (because extra click or two are needed to comment)

And there are many other questions as well:

how use of RSS readers changes our relations with authors of weblogs we read (makes establishing connections easier? helps staying updated? creates an overload?)

how use of RSS readers changes our writing style? commenting style and place?

how reading preferences are correlated with weblog designs? (e.g. may be RSS readers think that blogrolls are obsolete and weblog-in-browser readers don't understand the value of full-text RSS and don't care about providing it)

I use my RSS aggregator as basically a post notifier and a way to scan through blogs I want to read. As I go through my update list I open all the entries in new browsers and then go through the open pages. This works wonders for me: I see comments, style, but have the speed and efficiency of a news reader.

Later adding:

I wonder if aggregation kills personal voices.

Think of a simple scenario. You start blogging, you find several blogs you like, you discover news aggregator and start reading these blogs regularly. It creates a sense of connection with the authors of these weblogs, sense of knowing them. It creates a context for interpreting posts.

Then upscaling comes: you have hundreds of weblogs and no time to read everything. You scan for interesting titles and jump back and forth. It's convenient, but your pay less attention to any specific weblog and you don't get to know its writer well.

I read about 800 weblogs and that number is constantly changing. Based on merit there are certain authors who I can't wait for when they update and I just feel them coming as I'm going through my update list. Others said something profound once and have sort of faded away. I don't think it's a real problem - think about books, you've probably read a lot of books and you may not remember the authors of the not-so special ones. But the ones you loved you'll never forget.

The Yeti is giving up the NotDating lifestyle!#

The problem with NotDating™ is it's a construct. It's an escape, and ultimately, it's not competitive. It ignores human nature, and as I've noticed a lot lately, if you're not competitive, you're not alive.

I would suggest practicing the principles if you're just recently brokedm up, young and not looking for commitment, looking to learn more about yourself or the other gender, or hopelessly burdened with issues. But if you have what it takes, you have to step into the arena and put yourself at risk. Men and women are different. We want different things. Women want men to be Men, and Men want women to be Women. This doesn't mean there aren't exceptions, but for the majority of us, we want the man to pursue a woman and convince her he is willing to work for her and needs her by his side to truly be complete. This is no matter what we type in our journals are talk about after watching bad movies. Myths aside, we want to be ourselves. Maybe it's our society, and maybe it's our genetics — but I've seen less than a half-dozen happy people who don't stay true to this mentality. Even the happy gay couples follow this rule. Yin and yang. Male and Female. Fire and Water. We know the benefit of two complementary parts, and even if you don't believe it was God's will, you have to then believe that religions were created because they made sense of rules for good living.

Richard doesn't like competition.#

here's this though, which reminds me of why online dating still sucks: "you have competition (ratio is definitely still in the ladies' favour, at least for now)". That means that there are more men than women participating, or at least participating actively. Lots of reasons for this, I suspect, and it no doubt partly has to do with the stigma of male online daters as not being able to get a date in the real world if their life depended on it. That bit, though, shows that females are the valuable commodities, and that we men have to compete for women, and not the other way around. [...]

I just want a girl who likes me on my own terms, who likes me for who I am. "Standing out" and being honest, which is part of the advice, are mutually exclusive for introverts, and that applies to online dating just as much as it applies to bars .

Nova Spivack writes about his father, Mayer Spivack, and his new blog. On the third entry, Mayer writes something amazing about writing:#

I think that no one can be a writer unless they first love reading wonderful writing by others. That is not a sufficient criterion by itself, but it does ensure an occasional artistic warmth and generosity among otherwise often crusty competitors. Necessary for the 'natural' or real writer is a compulsive need to remember and refine, by means of 'writing it down', thoughts that come in waves, often in storms of waves, threatening to swamp and drown one another in foamy confusion leaving nothing on the beach for the next day. Writing, my own included, is therefore narcissistically not very generous (that is not to imply it is un-generous), and self-inventing. What can save a sinner like me are intellectually and artistically generous friends who are fine writers and who will ungrudgingly read one's work. So for the first time, when I write, I imagine the eye and mind of one who will read and comprehend, whereas before I always wrote into the abstracted impersonal void. I never imagined an audience. Maybe my writing will become simpler and more personal for this favor—and personal writing demands more courage than writing impersonally.

Richard links to the Bush Boys of British Columbia.#

Born in the wilderness, the brothers claim they were raised in complete isolation by their mom and dad, who call themselves Mary and Joseph Green. They believe they were born in Canada, but that their parents are American.

They say they have never been to school, seen a doctor, watched TV or made a childhood friend.

Their mother taught them to read using books she bought during occasional trips out of the wilderness homestead.

Tony Pierce is writing a novel. It will be murder.#

first it will be a novel of complete smut. it will be the dirtiest thing i have ever done and will probably ever do. it will include everything that i am scared to do as a writer and im terrified of future employers, lovers, friends to find out about me. of course it will be fiction but many times we write and are afraid that people will think that what we write is in the slightest bit true and then wont want to employ us or be our pals.

fuck that.

this is going to be the equivalent of Tarantinos Kill Bill which has been so critically and monetarily lauded that i even saw him on The View having his ass kissed by women who you wouldnt think would normally asskiss a guy who killed maybe 200 people in a film. mostly by sword.

at least that many people will be having sex in my novel.

and there will be drugs, satanism, drunk driving, people sending spam, cursing, poor dressing, unmade beds, lesbianism, indoor fireworks, bad grammar, dirty words, pop music, virgins losing their virginities, wild orgasms, orgies, alcoholism, petty politics, gun slinging, parallel parking, and double entendres like nobodys business.

Doug Miller is unclear why The Semantic Web Research Group's OWL Site is the "first site on the Semantic Web."#

It is because everything on the page - the content, the structure, the search algorithms, etc - are all defined in terms of OWL and work on a database of RDF files. You can go look at the RDF files (by clicking the "View RDF" on every page) and possibly build your own application out of them. Part of the point of the page is to show the Semantic Web looks like the old web but works better under the covers and is more powerful if you want it to be.

Jerome Doolittle has a Bad Attitude but good content. Great content.#

In what looked like brotherly backscratching a recent episode of Fox Entertainment's The Simpsons showed the family watching — what else? — Fox News.

Hold on, though. The messages on the crawl at the bottom of the screen were, "Do Democrats cause cancer? Find out at Foxnews.com … Study: 92 percent of Democrats are gay … JFK posthumously joins Republican Party."

Roger Ailes's response was fairly unbalanced, to judge by what Simpson creator Matt Groening said an interview on NPR. In fact Fox News hinted at legal action. "We called their bluff," Groening said, "because we didn't think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. We got away with it."