YouTube is an SEO snake pit, a place where Gresham's Law of content prevails with an abundance of intelligent, informative, and entertaining work buried by a limitless supply of derivative and often largely plagiarized rip-offs alternating with AI-generated crap. The algorithm is great at recommending videos I'm tempted to click on; it's terrible at recommending something I actually want to watch. To add insult to injury, a bad click is usually followed by more recommendations for the same channel. This makes me reluctant to try a new YouTuber without checking them out on Google or seeing if t ..read more

  A good Christmas can do a lot to take the edge off of a bad year both for children and their parents (and a lot of families are having a bad year). It's the season to pick up a few toys, drop them by the fire station and make some people feel good about themselves during what can be one of the toughest times of the year. If you're new to the Toys-for-Tots concept, here are the rules I normally use when shopping: The gifts should be nice enough to sit alone under a tree. The child who gets nothing else should still feel that he or she had a special Christmas. A large stuffed animal, a ..read more

Years ago we did a few posts on double-talk, the type of comic improvisation where a performer mimics the sound of a foreign language with gibberish syllables. Sometimes we talked about the practice itself. In others, we used it as a metaphor. Double-talk has fallen out of fashion for the very good reason that, when done badly it usually degenerates into racist caricature and it is almost always done badly. The best known exception was Sid Caesar, whose mimicry was reasonably nuanced and generally respectful, and who gets a bit of a pass for being widely considered a comic genius. Of course, t ..read more

Didn't do a great job with this the first time. The patches are in brackets. Wednesday, August 14, 2019 Agent-based simulations and horse-race journalism (This was never my area of expertise, and what little I once knew I've mostly forgotten. Since lots of our regular readers are experts on this sort of things, I welcome criticism but I hope you'll be gentle.) I tried a little project of my own back in the early 2000s. One of these days, I'd like to revisit the topic here and talk about what I had in mind and how quixotic the whole thing was, but for now there's one aspect of it that has bec ..read more

Sometimes, when I try to take on a really big topic here at the blog, smaller related topics start popping up. These tend to be right on the line between relevance and distraction. I like to give these side topics their own little lemma posts. Case in point, I'm working my way through David Donoho's latest and, though this is a minor point, invoking von Neumann is problematic in a way that points out deeper issues with the paper. So here's a little bit of background on one of the foundational myths of the singularity.    From Donoho's paper: [Ray] Kurzweil quotes one of the 20th c ..read more

To the delight of art directors everywhere, Galaxy, arguably the best science fiction magazine of the postwar era, is in the public domain (sort of) and is available on the Internet archive. The copyright situation is a bit complicated because most of the stories are very much not in the public domain, but the commissioned parts including the columns, reviews, and best of all, art are. From Wikipedia: Notable artists who contributed regularly to Galaxy included Ed Emshwiller, who won several Hugo Awards for his work, Hugo nominee Wallace Wood, and Jack Gaughan, who won three Hugos in the late ..read more

I've seen remarkably little coverage of this. [From the AP. Emphasis added.] Men were more likely than women to support President-elect Trump, the survey showed. That gap in voting preferences has largely remained the same, even as vote choice among men and women has moved modestly. Harris had the advantage among women, winning 53% to Trump’s 46%, but that margin was somewhat narrower than President Joe Biden’s in 2020, according to the survey. In 2020, VoteCast showed Biden won 55% of women, while 43% went for Trump. It's very possible I missed something. I haven't been following the postmo ..read more

The following is a standard collection of word problems but they havea most distinguished pedigree. Any guesses? (Answer below the break) A mule and an ass were carrying burdens amounting to some hundred weight. The ass complained of his, and said to the mule: “I need only one hundred weight of your load, to make mine twice as heavy as yours.” The mule answered: “Yes, but if you gave me a hundred weight of yours, I should be loaded three times as much as you would be.” How many hundred weight did each carry ? A father who has three sons leaves them 1600 crowns. The will precises, that the eld ..read more

    If you watch this and you could swear you remember Johnny and Mr. Carlson discussing Pink Floyd, you're not imagining things. Hulu uses the DVD edit which cuts out almost all of the copyrighted music. [The original link has gone dead, but I was able to find the relevant clip.] As for my favorite line, it comes from the Buffy episode "Pangs" and it requires a bit of a set up (which is a pain because it makes it next to impossible to work into a conversation). Buffy's luckless friend Xander had accidentally violated a native American grave yard and, in addition to freeing a ve ..read more

Phillip Marlowe's exchange with a private police officer guarding a gated community in 1942's The High Window raises some interesting questions.  Marlowe is always guarded in conversation and prone to sarcasm, so it's not a good idea to read too much into the "tovarich," Chandler himself was a critic of both capitalism and communism, something that certainly comes through here. The status quo is unfair and corrupt; the alternative is probably just as bad. It's a nihilistic message, but what do you expect from a hard boiled detective? Or it could have been a comment on this: Hammett devo ..read more