Monday, October 10, 2011
Relentlessly Cheerful Americans
How I dislike the empty-headed cheer and undependable niceness of so much phony default American culture. Speaking as a life-long grump congenially partnered for a decade with another, I have long been sure that it is not so much negativity as negativity about negativity that gets so many Americans down. "Positivity" almost always conduces in my experience to credulity, complacency, insensitivity, vulgarity and uncritical anti-intellectual cluelessness more generally, and in the more spectacular forms American Establishment Media seems to celebrate in its celebrities it tends to look like the most rampaging bulldozing sociopathic narcissism imaginable. Also, the joy of a grumpy person when it occasionally arises is like a flower unfolding to warm the whole world.
Eric's and my own ego ideals.
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3 comments:
> "Positivity" almost always conduces in my experience to
> credulity, complacency, insensitivity, vulgarity and
> uncritical anti-intellectual cluelessness more generally. . .
Hey, dontcha know, the future's so bright, I may have to buy a pair
of shades.
"Stop us if you've heard this one before: In the near
future, we'll be able to build machines that learn,
reason, and even emote their way to solving problems,
the way people do. . .
Researchers have suspected for decades that real artificial
intelligence can't be done on traditional hardware, with its
rigid adherence to Boolean logic and vast separation between
memory and processing. But that knowledge was of little use
until about two years ago, when HP built a new class of
electronic device called a memristor. Before the memristor,
it would have been impossible to create something with the
form factor of a brain, the low power requirements, and
the instantaneous internal communications. Turns out that
those three things are key to making anything that resembles
the brain and thus can be trained and coaxed to behave
like a brain. In this case, form is function, or more accurately,
function is hopeless without form. . ."
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/moneta-a-mind-made-from-memristors/0
I do hope the memristor works out better for HP than
the Itanium did. (Hey, I really do! I'm not **that**
much of a party-pooper.)
HP and Hynix to produce the memristor goods by 2013
18 months to go, baby
By Chris Mellor
10th October 2011
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/10/memristor_in_18_months/
> HP and Hynix to produce the memristor goods by 2013
KIRK: All right Bones, in the language of the planet:
"What's your beef?"
MCCOY: Well I don't know how serious this is, Jim,
and I don't know quite how to tell you...
KIRK: Go ahead.
MCCOY: ...but in all the confusion, I...
KIRK: Tell me.
MCCOY: I think I left it in Bela's office.
KIRK: You left it?
MCCOY: Somewhere, I'm not certain.
KIRK: You're not certain of what?
MCCOY: I left my communicator.
KIRK: In Bela's office?
SPOCK: Captain, if the Iotians, who are a bright
and imitative people, should take that communicator apart. . .
KIRK: They will, they will. They'll
find out how the transtator works.
SPOCK: The transtator is the basis for every important
piece of equipment we have -- communicator, phaser. . .
KIRK: Everything, everything.
MCCOY: You really think it's that serious?
KIRK: Serious? Serious, Bones? It upsets the whole
percentage.
MCCOY: How you mean?
KIRK: Well, in a few years, the Iotians may demand a piece
of **our** action.
_Star Trek_, "A Piece of the Action" (1968)
> How I dislike the empty-headed cheer and undependable niceness
> of so much phony default American culture.
You should take a break from the Visconti and watch
_The Loved One_. ;->
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfTC5F2FkeI
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