taking owls to athens

I knew a lot of the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder were allegorical and depicted the foibles and follies of human conventions and his Nederlandse Spreekwoorden—translated by turns as the Flemish Proverbs or The Blue Cloak (for that shock of colour in the middle of the scene, where a woman is shrouding her cuckolded husband so he doesn’t see her adulterous ways—pulling the wool over one’s eyes) is no exception. I was unfamiliar with the fact, however, that some one hundred ten idioms were represented in the painting, many with near equivalents in English, like swimming against the tide, to be armed to the teeth, killing two birds with one stone or banging one’s head against a brick wall. Some of the bawdier sayings also captured have fortunately become outmoded.

motherboard or decision-tree

Applying the most advanced and universally accepted principles of neuro-science (arising out of the hubris that computational powers could begin to map out every possible neural daisy and we’d soon understand how the brain works) to a system that humans (as inventors) understand better by degrees, the microprocessor yielded some fruitfully disappointing results.
The failure of the model of a sophisticated neural network (not a neural network itself but the parameters by which one is made) to understand arcade games—despite the demonstrations that machine-learning was able to give with little to no supervision—illustrates, I think, that despite the mechanical and philosophical differences between brains and circuits perhaps we still don’t have the framework and the context to glean meaningful, correlated results. What do you think?  Perhaps we cannot analyse the system we are in with the quiver of tools arising from the same.

skyfall ranch

BBC Future shares the story of the unassuming retreat called Drumintoul Lodge in the Scottish highlands that during World War II was covert host to an international commando school under the auspices of the Special Operations Executive for resistance fighters from all countries threatened by the Axis powers, defectors and spies.
The campus was particularly a good training ground to its contingent of Norwegian guerrillas that matriculated on this estate in the Cairngorms as the barren, wind-swept plateau was a lot like the native homeland that they sought to protect. The Norwegians trained in sabotage techniques which proved vital in ultimately preventing the Nazis from developing a nuclear bomb. Deuterium (heavy water) is needed to moderate fission reactions (it being less prone to strip away neutrons and enable a run-away reaction) so the detonation could be controlled and only one hydro-electric plant in the world was capable of producing heavy water at the time—in Nazi-occupied Norway. Raids that operatives trained for in Drumintoul were launched against the facilities at the base of the Rjukan waterfall in Telemark, which stopped production capability.

kwyjibo

We discover, through the work of faithful chronicler Doctor Caligari, that among many things, The Simpsons had aired its pilot episode on this day in 1990.
The episode, Bart the Genius, was written before Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire which was considered a special and not to many a canonical instalment, and therefore doesn’t include Santa’s Little Helper, and is the first one to include the opening sequence. Having cheated on an intelligence test, Bart finds himself sent to a school for the gifted and talented, although quickly discovered, he found himself inspired to turn the phrase “eat my shorts” and classify a kwyjibo as a dumb, balding North American ape with no chin.