Blogcoven

The Invention of the Illuminati

Of course, this is the line they want you to believe, especially as appear to be in the year when we finally immanentize the eschaton.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170809-the-accidental-invention-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy

The Dan Plan: Trying (and failing) at 10,000 hours of Golf

Injury goes from a risk, to a preoccupation, to a virtual certainty as age advances.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/the-dan-plan/536592/

The Body Language of Power

I often wonder how Dr. Merkel would have performed under other media and electoral regimes.

https://global.handelsblatt.com/politics/the-body-language-of-power-805824

Computer Security and Privacy in DNA Sequencing

Writing secure software is extremely hard. Part of the problem comes from the fact that the architecture we use for computing confuses data and execution. If we didn’t do that, then a huge amount of flexibility would be lost, but the cost is eternal vigilance.

http://dnasec.cs.washington.edu/

The Sum of Infinite Natural Numbers is -1/12

Mathematical Hocus Pocus of the first order

Hail Eris

Slight Street Sign Modifications Can Completely Fool Machine Learning Algorithms

Adversarial examples like this could also be used for interesting applications for steganographic applications

http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sensors/slight-street-sign-modifications-can-fool-machine-learning-algorithms

Document: The Symbolism Survey

I was very much turned off poetry especially in my youth by edicts telling me what symbolism occurred where, and being compelled to learn those associations as though they were immutable facts.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-symbolism-survey/

How United Weathered a Firestorm

Most of my US travel is out of a United hub to other United Hubs. There are basically no options for other flights.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/business/how-united-weathered-a-firestorm.html

Is the Study of Language a Science?

It’s a hard process, reverse engineering the human brain.

https://aeon.co/essays/is-the-study-of-language-a-science

Mangled Shakespeare

Two related mangled terms also annoy me: ‘beg the question’ to mean raise a question, and ‘refute’ to mean deny.

https://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/mangled-shakespeare/

Beatrix Potter-pinching and Žižekian swipes: the strange world of book thefts

As Bertolt Brecht puts in his Threepenny Opera: ”What is the robbery of a bank compared to the foundation of a new bank?’

— The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/24/strange-world-of-book-thefts-beatrix-potter-zizek

Billionaires’ catfight on the AI Apocalypse

https://hackernoon.com/a-blind-survey-on-who-techies-support-8bc79eac469d

The Data that changed the Direction of AI Research, and possibly the World

The data is very noisy, for example the pug data includes a calendar page and a number of other weird things. Current models are very narrow in their abilities, for example they don’t work with negative images.

https://qz.com/1034972/the-data-that-changed-the-direction-of-ai-research-and-possibly-the-world/

How Work Changed to make us all Passionate Quitters

There’s a feeling that the 40 year job is profoundly dead. People are now managing multiple concurrent streams of income. Two years is reputedly a long time for a spot at a company in Silicon Valley, some of that might include the lifespan of the companies.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-work-changed-to-make-us-all-passionate-quitters

WaveGrower

http://wavegrower.tumblr.com/

The Limitations of Deep Learning

Anthropomorphisation is doing significant harm to how machine learning and technology are perceived by society. This includes both general machine learning, and privacy-related areas.

https://blog.keras.io/the-limitations-of-deep-learning.html