After learning about some clever entrepreneurs’ plan to partner an open all hours chain of diners with parcel delivery services for the sake of more convenient pick-up and drop-off—and just after hearing of a single US hotline number to order anything from pizza to a horse-drawn carriage ride around Fantasy Island, I must say, while clever and enterprising—and possibly well-connected, I don’t know about this middle-man economic model. Sim salabim!
Friday 27 February 2015
cross-promotion or courier-new
catagories: ๐บ๐ธ, ๐ฑ, ๐บ, transportation
pious fiction or brother's keeper
This thoughtful essay from รon magazine, which hangs the chief friction between faith and science on the transition of God from being a dissembler and a Noble-Liar for our own good to one incapable of deception, reminded me very much of a thin but engrossing book by Portuguese writer Josรฉ Saramago called Cain that I read recently. Unflinching to the last, the author tries to answer that same paradoxical quandary that’s plagued philosophers and theologians (a subset of theodicy) since the beginning: why did a perfect and all-powerful God need to mislead or test his creations? Cain, an ostensible victim of one of those trials (others including the expulsion of his parents from Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah, Job’s suffering, Noah’s deluge, etc., etc.) condemned to wander the Earth for the act of killing his brother—which arguably was not unprovoked, confronts God directly over this and other injustices perpetrated seemingly by a petty deity who was far from omnipotent, and doesn’t relent.
Neither side can afford to give in, nor really—kind of tenderly, is either willing to accept the argument that that business was all Old Testament or that God’s ways are mysterious and inscrutable, and the standoff echoes through the ages. In seeking to reconcile these founding inconsistencies, God, who was and is ever present, was made a bit mute and aloof and it was argued that was ever the case. In hardly something to pin one’s faith to but illustrative, Descartes posits that the feeling of being forsaken or deceived is akin to one suffering from dropsy (funky cold ลdema), where one is retaining too much water but is nonetheless constantly thirsty. Our faculties are generally configured to drink when parched and one person’s unfortunate condition isn’t universal, invoking Ockham. A little strangely, Descartes also supposes that in the heavenly-sphere that God were to erase a star but still perpetuate the sign of it, it’s similarly a self-delusion that we ought not to project—though looking to the skies, we are looking to the past, which is a quandary that the philosopher could not have known, scientifically at least. What do you think? Has God stepped back after setting things in motion (as the re-discovered writings of the Greek classics that led to the Renaissance and Enlightenment revealed), have we gone deaf or is it something else that the troubled old folks have failed to question? I’d like an answer—and would even wrestle an angel for one.
catagories: ✝️, ๐, philosophy
Thursday 26 February 2015
octopus’s garden
When I first saw this feature as the frontispiece of a rather venerable and unfailing website, I had a moment of misgivings—wondering if they had surrendered to those catch-penny walls of copy-pasta when one strays too near the lower bounds of a webpage.
catagories: ๐ฑ, ๐ง , networking and blogging
positronic-reinforcement
The New Yorker has a nice, succinct piece on the recent demonstration of the artificial intelligence DeepMind, whose talents draw from two sources, a deductive network of filters and positive-reinforcement.
The program—instructed with only the protocol that winning was good and losing bad—dazzled the human audience with a stellar progression on a platform of classic arcade games with some very masterful and unexpected strokes. It is not that DeepMind is inside the game, like when one challenges the game, but separated like a human player, and quickly devised a sure strategy. The program, however, did not perform quite so well with certain games—like Ms. Pac-Man, and the handlers weren’t quite sure why. Some disparaging voices checked their enthusiasm, as milestones like Deep Blue beating a chess grand-master or Watson winning against Jeopardy! quiz-masters. These achievements, though not coddled and not insignificant, came about, however, through extensive coaching, whereas DeepMind is learning on its own. What do you think? Is growth going to be exponential and get very quickly out of human hands?
catagories: ๐ค, philosophy, technology and innovation
five-by-five
neat, petite: Agent Scully posing as Morticia Addams
dog and butterfly: some beautiful photography of an unlikely pairing
geisterstadt: there is a growing website of abandoned places and ghosts towns all over the world
de stiji: a print or tee-shirt of the TARDIS in the style of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian
a great rodd of birch: a character called Whipping Tom (with several copy-cats) terrorised Londoners in the 1600s, beating their hinders and shouting, “Spanko!”