Imre (Friedman) (p45) + (Brian) Bergamaschi (p34)
Coincidence? I don't think so.
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My kids and I have been having a lot of fun with our Kick N' Go, a $100 scooter that's propelled by a chain-driven lever you press with your foot. Unlike Razor-style scooters, which send you flying over the handlebars whenever the tiny wheels hit a pebble, the Kick N' Go's wheels are big enough to roll over small obstacles without a mishap or the ensuing application of Hello Kitty band aids to skinned knees. Link
They're everywhere. They're multiplying. Several thousand cameras are now capable of sending live pictures into a room - the operations center at the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communication.Someone needs to come up with a name for this fallacy, the "untouched by human hands" fallacy: "the computers are impartially finding the bad behavior -- there's no human bias or prejudice at work -- we just program it and then it proceeds with perfect platonic precision to catch all the bad guys." Link (Thanks, Ryan!)There's no way that human beings can effectively watch all those feeds, so enter video analytics. By programming algorithms, you give the camera intelligence.
"We actually can tell the camera, 'This is precisely what we're looking for.' The camera will watch for that circumstance, and when that circumstance occurs, comes back to the human being whether they're watching that camera or not - with an alert," said OEMC director Jim Argiropolous.
From “Stories from the Near Future,” the 2008 New Yorker Conference -- Yoky Matsuoka, the director of the neurobotics laboratory at the University of Washington, discusses how brain signals can control prosthetic limbs, and other advances in the hybrid field of neuroscience and robotics.
Link | Subscribe to all New Yorker Conference videos on iTunes
Thought I’d post a snippet from my fantasy novel Dark Caravan that I’m rekeying/rewriting. This is from Chapter Three and the young prince, desiring to discover what the princess he’s betrothed to is truly like, has arrived in the guise of the foppish Sir Kip.
“This is bullsh**t. This is malarkey. This is outrageous. Outrageous for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, sit in the Knesset…and make this kind of ridiculous statement,” Biden said angrily in a brief interview just off the Senate floor.
“He’s the guy who’s weakened us. He’s the guy that’s increased the number of terrorists in the world. His policies have produced this vulnerability the United States has. His intelligence community pointed that out not me. The NIE has pointed that out and what are you talking about, is he going to fire Condi Rice? Condi Rice has talked about the need to sit down. So his first two appeasers are Rice and Gates. I hope he comes home and does something.”
He quoted Gates saying Wednesday that we “need to figure out a way to develop some leverage and then sit down and talk with them.”

Customer: What flavor is it? Man: It's a bird mate, it's a bloody bird, it's not any bloody flavor. Albatross!LinkCustomer: It's got to be some flavor, I mean everything's got a flavor. Man: All right, it's bloody albatross flavor, it's bloody sea bloody bird bloody flavor. Albatross!
Customer: Do you get wafers with it?
Man: Course you don't get bloody wafers with it, it's a bloody albatross innit. Albatross!
This unidentified man was told by a 32-year-old Frenchman that if he mixed the real cash with blank bills and then marinate them in a special liquid for one night, he would have double the amount of the cash.Link (via Arbroath)The gullible Vietnamese believed the Frenchman's story and gave him 180,000 kroner (35, 000 U.S. dollars). But when he prepared to collect his money the next morning, both the cash and the Frenchman disappeared.
The excellent folks at io9 do me a solid and link to my AMC column on Speed Racer today, but some of the folks commenting there don’t appear to have actually read the column before commenting, because a fair portion of the comments boil down to “John Scalzi is completely wrong about this because [insert point actually discussed in the column].” At least one of them was nice enough to note he/she didn’t read the column before trying to disprove my point using information I specifically note in the column, though.
Lesson: It’s always a good thing to read what you’re commenting on. Just sayin’.