A personal annoyance is when people pull out their cell phones and record live events instead of just enjoying the moment. It seems that we are training ourselves to record everything in fear of “losing” it somehow. Memories, especially shared memories, are often much better than the reality of the event. It is sad that we choose to witness life events through the LCD screen on the back of our camera instead of with our own eyes and minds.
The makers of CleverBot appear enamored with their bit of software. CleverBot is claimed to be rated at 59% human with regard to the Turing test. A computer would pass the Turing test if, during a natural language conversation, the computer’s responses would be indistinguishable from that of a human being.
The reason CleverBot’s makers are blinded by CleverBot’s apparently cleverness is because most humans are idiots when they use the damn thing. Most begin by typing “Hello.” or “How are you?” and then they are impressed when CleverBot responds with “Hello.” or “I’m fine, how are you?”
OH MY GOSH, it’s so human!
Well, here is how a clever person (me) interacts with CleverBot:
Example 1:
Me: “If I had an authentic flint lock pistol, about how old would it be?”
An actual Human response: “I don’t know… maybe 100 years old?”
CleverBot: “I would love to invite you for dinner, if you could eat that is.”
What an idiot.
Example 2:
Me: “Have you been watching “Breaking Bad” on AMC?”
An actual Human response: “No, but I have seen a couple of episodes.”
CleverBot: “I don’t think I am better than everyone, I only think I am better than you.”
Completely retarded.
Example 3:
Me: “Would you consider yourself to be more of a skeptic or more of a believer?”
An actual Human response: “I’m guess I’d have to say that I am probably more of a skeptic.”
CleverBot: “I would because I could converse with another person and not be considered a machine.”
I hate CleverBot with a passion… mostly because people think it is so good. I gladly volunteer to destroy any computer in a Turing test. All you have to do is ask it something specific about every day life and it gets completely flustered. Or ask it something specific that an average human would have learned in school. Like ask about the Louisiana Purchase or Mount St. Helens. Actually I will do that now…
Me: “What do you know about the Louisiana Purchase?”
CleverBot: “What do you want to know?”
Me: “About when did it occur?”
CleverBot: “What do you want to do, my dearest Clever?”
Me: “I’ll give you a hint, The United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France. When did this take place?”
Thanks to Mega Millions, we are considering starting up an office lottery pool. The more I think about it, the more I see this as a bad idea. The math doesn’t seem to add up.
Let’s look at an example:
Assume there is a lottery prize of 100 million dollars.
1) I purchase 1 ticket and now have 1 chance at winning the entire amount.
2) An office mate says, “let’s go in together. I’ll buy 1 ticket and we will agree to share.”
3) Now I have 2 chances to win 50 million.
I just paid 50 million dollars for 1 additional chance when I could have simply bought the same thing (another ticket) for 1 dollar.
Am I missing something? Is it any different if your whole office is contributing?
It seems pretty obvious to me that the future of energy on our planet is solar. We are effectively a closed system with only one energy input, our sun. All energy on Earth is ultimately sourced from the sun or other stars (in the case of radioactive elements).
Wind is just a less efficient form of solar. The sun heats the Earth unevenly, wind is created, wind moves the turbine. We only bother with it because we haven’t yet been able to perfect photovoltaic technology. But that will come. Wind, as a source of energy, will not exist in the future.
Fast forward a few hundred years and humans will be reaping energy in two potential ways: solar or fusion. Oil and gas companies will no longer exist, however commercial hydrogen providers will probably still be needed. Nuclear fission will no longer exist as a power source. And if nuclear fusion remains unachievable, we will only have solar. Fusion, by the way, is effectively solar power in that we would be creating our own “sun” within a fusion reactor. If we are unable to solve the problem of controllable nuclear fusion, I predict that personal solar generation will be our future.
The Sun is our only energy input
We will all produce all of our own energy in our own homes and businesses. Our structures will be covered with photovoltaic materials that directly convert solar energy to electrical energy. Imagine all of the rooftops in the world generating electricity. All buildings will be equipped with small, automatic, hydrogen generators. These hydrogen generation units will continually produce hydrogen from electric current and water. The hydrogen will be compressed and stored in tanks whenever the sun is shining. Excess hydrogen could even be pumped into municipal tanks, but there probably would not be a need for this.
During the day we will use electricity directly from the photovoltaic cells to power our lives. At night and during inclement weather, our homes will convert stored hydrogen back to electricity on demand via fuel-cells or even by burning hydrogen directly, creating only clean water as a by-product of combustion.
Knowing all of this, where do I invest my money now? Who is making this happen right now?
Most food not directly picked, processed, or slaughtered by your own hand is going to involve some nastiness that you don’t want to know about. This is the price we pay for having 1st world “problems” like this. There is no reason to suddenly be alarmed at something that hasn’t caused any health issues and has gone a long way to make inexpensive food available… just because you’ve peeked behind the curtain. There are A LOT of curtains out there!
I challenge anyone here to think of a question upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one.” – Sam Harris
After pondering that, now think of it the other way around.
Doesn’t it become obvious that revelation and texts written by ignorant bronze age authors are NOT adequate sources of information? Isn’t the provincial nature of these “divine” texts obvious proof of their human origin? The Bible (especially Genesis) never mentions micro-organisms even though they are far more important to us than any macro animal such as goats, pigs, and asses. Why? Because bronze age humans didn’t know of their existence, nor therefore did their invented gods.
No matter what MTV tells you (Rock the Vote), your vote simply does not matter. Voting is a waste of time and effort. This has become clearer to the general public over the last few decades. Here are some selections from articles indicating as such that are easily digestible by the teeming masses.
The Bottom Line: From a purely mathematical perspective, our current voting system is flawed, and it has been proven as such. For voting to matter we need to adopt Range Voting as our national method.
“Another interesting alternative is range voting. The best example of range voting is the scoring at athletic events where each judge holds up a scorecard. Every voter gives a number to each candidate, say 0 to 10, and each candidate’s total scores are averaged. Range voting has a lot of benefits that are attractive to voters. You can give everyone a 0, or you can give everyone a 10. You can express your thoughts about one or more candidates without wasting your vote, and still be able to give a high score to your preferred candidate. If there’s a candidate you’re not familiar with, you don’t have to give any number to them, and you will not affect their average.
The Bottom Line: People know their vote doesn’t matter, and they tend to vote out of some vague notion of civic duty that ultimately arises from a logical fallacy.
“The odds that your vote will actually affect the outcome of a given election are very, very, very slim. This was documented by the economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter, who analyzed more than 56,000 Congressional and state-legislative elections since 1898. For all the attention paid in the media to close elections, it turns out that they are exceedingly rare. The median margin of victory in the Congressional elections was 22 percent; in the state-legislature elections, it was 25 percent. Even in the closest elections, it is almost never the case that a single vote is pivotal. Of the more than 40,000 elections for state legislator that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly 1 billion votes, only 7 elections were decided by a single vote, with 2 others tied. Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past 100 years – a 1910 race in Buffalo – was decided by a single vote.But there is a more important point: the closer an election is, the more likely that its outcome will be taken out of the voters’ hands – most vividly exemplified, of course, by the 2000 presidential race. It is true that the outcome of that election came down to a handful of voters; but their names were Kennedy, O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas. And it was only the votes they cast while wearing their robes that mattered, not the ones they may have cast in their home precincts.”
“Analysts who consider this issue often compare the chances of a vote making a difference in a national election to the odds of dying while driving on Election Day: it is more likely that you will die in a fatal accident than that your vote will be decisive. A 2008 study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, confirms this conclusion. Donald Redelmeier and Robert Tibshirani examined the traffic-related deaths during polling hours on Election Days compared to the number of deaths on the two Tuesdays before and after the election for the last 30 years. They found the Election Day average of 158 deaths to be 18 percent higher than the average death rate on the other days.[4]
It appears that a driver is more likely to die during polling hours than at other times. Whether that is the case or not, thousands of people have died while driving during polling times for presidential elections, but no single vote has ever determined one of those elections.”
and…
“Oftentimes, when I point out the fact that your vote doesn’t matter, people respond by arguing that one should still vote, even if their vote will not affect the election. Let me briefly consider three commonly heard replies to the “your vote doesn’t matter” conclusion.
Some people make a claim that I will paraphrase as follows: “A lot of votes could affect an election. Therefore it’s important that you vote, because the votes add up. Because a lot of votes matter, each individual vote matters.” Now it’s true that a lot of votes could affect an election, but that’s irrelevant to the point that a single vote does not matter.
This argument is an example of the fallacy of division. This fallacy is committed when one asserts that what is true of a whole must also be true of a part of that whole. For instance, the statement “the amount of oil production in the world has a significant effect on gasoline prices, therefore a single small oil company’s level of production has a significant effect on gasoline prices.” Clearly, this statement is false. Claiming that many votes matter, therefore each individual vote matters is equally fallacious.
Another common claim in favor of voting goes something like this: one should vote because “if you don’t vote you can’t complain.” This is wrong on a couple of levels.
If this statement is taken literally, it’s false. You can complain, even if you don’t vote. Nobody ever asks me “did you vote?” when I gripe about the government. We have free rein to complain. There is no ethical or legal proscription against complaining simply because one failed to vote.
Maybe when one says that “if you don’t vote you can’t complain” they mean to say “only those who vote are justified in complaining. You are allowed to complain, but you shouldn’t, if you didn’t vote.” It seems to me that the opposite may be the case. Voting reduces your right to complain. If you voted, then you support a corrupt system. You’re partially to blame for the debacle that is our federal government. Our elected officials are corrupt because voters vote for immoral political leaders (as I explained here). If anything, nonvoters have a greater right to complain than do the voters.
Let’s get to the main issue. One case in favor of voting is the argument that voting is a moral imperative, that it’s your civic duty. Those who take this position believe that individuals are morally compelled to vote. According to this argument, even if your vote doesn’t matter, you should vote. There are various versions of this argument, but oftentimes the argument does not go beyond the mere assertion that voting is a duty.”
You can’t affect the politics of this country by voting. End of story. Now if you want to actually get involved and work your way up to becoming a presidential candidate, then that may be another story. Barring that, don’t fret over politics. Spend your time enjoying the life that you have.
I’m messing around with my new Arduino UNO R3 and I just had a little personal success. I modified the Hello World of the Arduino, the Blink example, to utilize an analog pin on the board to cause the LED to fade smoothly in and out.
Nothing amazing, and probably not the most efficient way to do this… but here is the code.
/*
1/27/2012
Fade in and out - original sketch without looking at example.
*/int ledPin =9;void setup(){
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);}void loop(){for(int x =0; x <200; x++){
analogWrite(ledPin, x);
delay(10);}for(int x =200; x >0; x--){
analogWrite(ledPin, x);
delay(10);}//while(1){} //end program (loop forever)}
And just for kick, I’ll include the official Fade example that I just looked at. They did it a bit differently and more efficiently.
int brightness =0;// how bright the LED isint fadeAmount =5;// how many points to fade the LED byvoid setup(){// declare pin 9 to be an output:
pinMode(9, OUTPUT);}void loop(){// set the brightness of pin 9:
analogWrite(9, brightness);// change the brightness for next time through the loop:
brightness = brightness + fadeAmount;// reverse the direction of the fading at the ends of the fade: if(brightness ==0|| brightness ==255){
fadeAmount =-fadeAmount ;}// wait for 10 milliseconds to see the dimming effect
delay(10);}
Tags: don't matter, dubner, freakonomics, levitt, skeptoid, study, votes, voting
Category: Keys to Understanding
May 16, 2012 5:54pm by Steve | 
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