I recently read a comment on a Hacker News post that really struck a chord with me. To summarize, schools try to cram mastery into a particular allotment of time, instead of letting students work as long as they need to until mastery. In a system without this restriction "high aptitude" children would be able to reach advanced subjects without having to do it externally, and receive the support and structure which is the whole point of formal schooling. Simultaneously "low aptitude" children wouldn't be pressured and rushed. Those who have different learning modalities and would otherwise slip through the cracks would have the time to figure this out before being spit out of the school system feeling bad about themselves and not having found their optimal learning methodology.

If he's still alive, a single teeny tiny tape sent to Al Jazeera would utterly destroy whatever credibility the US maintains in the world's eyes. There is no way the US government would risk such an embarrassment. Thus, I conclude that the kill must be genuine. I wouldn't put it past the US government to fabricate evidence, but in this case there is too much to lose.

Additionally, I think the burial at sea (but with Muslim rites) is just disrespectful enough while not being insulting to Muslims. It also prevents any sort of pilgrimage site from being created. Bin Laden would not become a Shahid.

Atlas Shrugged, it seems most folks either love it or hate it. Except there's a secret underground of folks who follow a golden middle path. Those who can't stand Ayn Rand will decry you as a heartless bastard who couldn't tell good literature from a boiled sock. While those who love the book see your slightest disdain for either its literary stature or its message as weak-willed bleeding-hearted drivel.

In reality, Atlas Shrugged is a passably written but powerful polemic. Rand could out-write Dan Brown on a good day, and maybe stand up next to James Patterson but even Stephen King is rather far ahead. However, what she wrote has a strong impact on many people and dismissing it as nothing but fodder for egotists is willfully ignorant.

In my youth Atlas Shrugged was helpful in presenting an individualistic alternative that for whatever reason I wasn't exposed to. For many who grow up with ideals such as pulling yourself up by your bootstraps as cliched caricatures the book offers nothing but more of the same. Myself, I've always leaned towards approving of such things but before reading Atlas Shrugged in high school there was never a crystallized idea that this was a path one might follow. That is, although I thought I followed a meritocratic ideal I had always pictured it as a sort of technocracy instead of the more distributed ad-hoc system where your value to others is measured directly by them and not some external agency. Atlas Shrugged really opened my eyes not just to how I could be appreciated but how I should appreciate others--directly, personally, and for the sake of their own labors.

However, I was mature enough to quickly abandon the book's (over-)simplifications, straw men, and other problems. Holding Rand's improbable men of marble in ultimate regard is pretending much of what makes us human doesn't exist. The book's lessons are reacting to a context where the negative extremes it riles against are reality--e.g. the Russia Ayn Rand escaped. Its ideas are not templates for direct realization, for they are just as extreme and unreasonable.

We tend to assume that just because we may not appreicate someone else's endeavors they are somehow willfully blind. Paradoxical as it may seem Atlas Shrugged helped me find a new sort of compassion--most people see themselves as striving towards a personal ideal of some sort, not as corrupt goblins.

Just because you may see Atlas Shrugged as an extreme part of a view you consider prevalent, consider that it may be a shining beacon for those on the other side. It can also be a bible for zealots who take its words literally and can find no flaws in its stilted prose. So, let's not dismiss this important work but nor should we revere it.

(Oh and I saw the trailer for the movie and it was incredibly painful. Megan McArdle compared the movie to Tommy Wiseau's The Room so I guess I'll wait for the Rifftrax!)

Much of the early optimism about Artificial Intelligence was crushed by what is now called Moravec's Paradox: it turns out that it's often substantially harder to replicate the lower-level sensorimotor skills of humans and animals than higher reasoning tasks. Students of embodied cognition see intelligence arising from a necessary interplay with our senses taking this even further, higher-order theories of consciousness--which I've recently become a fan of--have consciousness as a higher order layering on top of mere intelligence. Thus, we're adding a few more layers to the layer cake of supervenience (similar to what scientists often call "emergence", not used in Philosophy that way because the term has been claimed by a distinct usage).

I would love to see more work on complete end-to-end AI systems that have increasingly deeper levels of feedback. That's the only we'll see better AI. That and neural modelling which is getting reeeal interesting. I think I'll start posting links to some fun papers soon.

As far as I know Christian Louboutin--maker of the sexiest heels--has never done a reverse heel. I came up with reverse heels totally independently a couple of weeks ago while contemplating crazy things to do to women's shoes. Alas, I found out I was soundly beaten to this concept by others and several versions of it have already been made. Basically, a reverse heel is a heel that juts horizontally towards the back from the front part of the shoe rather than straight down from the heel.

So, I decided to mock up what a Louboutin might look like with a reverse heel, whilst maintaining its original lines, curves, and sexy look. It turned out... ok. I think with some tweaking it could turn out to look quite nicely! In particular I would elongate the support past the heel, while making it thinner and more deadly--Louboutin shoes are famous for looking like dangerous weapons.

Just a random exploration, we'll see what Christian does :>

(download)

Click here to download:

Reverse_heel_Christian_Labouti.zip (55 KB)

If you take public transportation you've indubitably encountered someone playing music using their cellphone as a boom box.

If you're an ethnomusicologist perhaps you're delighted at the developments in treble culture. If you're not, chances are you found it rather annoying, and perhaps the young turk or turkette partaking of the tinny notes seems rather too set in their ways to be berated by you in public.

So, I've come up with a passive-aggressive and mildly vandalistic (yes, vandalistic) method to curb this! Instructional pictograph stickers!

What you're looking at is a prototype for a design. The dimensions are those of a bumper sticker. I'm not perfectly satisfied with the wording, nor with the NO pictograph, but it's getting there. Would appreciate comments and suggestions! Once I've finalized, I will provide these TO THE WORLD!

You'll be able to deploy them at your favorite public transportation venue, or just anywhere else affected by this scourge!

1. Copy the file away
2. svn revert FILENAME (in case you have local changes)
   
3. svn rm FILENAME
4. svn ci -m "Fixing checksum mismatch"
5. Copy the file back
6. svn add FILENAME
7. svn ci -m "Fixed checksum mismatch"

Upon opening the envelope you find a paper in standard Letter
dimensions, with what looks like a photocopy of an ad, complete with
the characteristic ink fading and smudging. Several parts of the ads
had the same kind of fake blue pen marked up as if with notes by the
kind sender. Although throughout the short interaction between myself
and the letter I was quite aware it was just advertising, the
anti-branding just drew me in. As far as I can recall, the AT&T logo
was only visible in one place, and even there it was understated and
quite small. Maybe it was just my fascination with the thinking behind
such an ad, but I felt drawn in against my will, my disbelief
suspended just a tad.

We live in a word saturated with brands. Also today, I saw a pack of
Duracell batteries at Safeway that included a horrible plastic
screwdriver shaped like a Duracell battery, clearly with the primary
purpose of adding the brand to your life even though it's obvious
almost no one would actually use the dinky screwdriver; it would lay
discarded somewhere, ready to anchor the brand when you least expect
it.

So, we seem to have developed powerful advertising ignoring skills.
Some studies have shown that advertising we pay less attention to
tends to have even greater effects, but I find this spam masquerading
as a personal letter to be proof that we've gotten too good at
discarding the useless brochures and pointless offers clogging our
mailboxes.

Perhaps once we get good at discarding these, they'll be able to
return to the gaudy spam of old.

• Is running on Shabbes considered a violation? Or does that count under Pikuach Nefesh?
• How do you circumcise? Drop the least significant bit?
  
• Do you have to switch to a UPS for Yom Kippur?
• Is an MP3 of a Shofar good enough?
• Where should the Tefillin go? The boot sector?
  

A common problem. I've often seen it mentioned in collections of trivia and cool facts that monkeys and apes open their bananas from the "bottom", often accompanied by a suggestion for us to do the same. Following a recent reminder by a fellow named Mahdroo, I started doing just that! It has proved to be far superior to the traditional human choice.

As you can see on in the image to the left, a banana has the little "tail" on top, and a small nub on the bottom. Commonly one may bend the tail backwards against the banana's natural curvature, until it tears. Then you peel the banana. But sometimes, the banana isn't quite ripe, or just extra hardy. In those cases the skin doesn't tear as easily and you mush up the top of the banana. Here's the solution:

Turn the banana upside down! Use your fingers to squeeze the nub. It should start opening in the middle as you squeeze (careful not to squeeze the flesh of the banana), then just use your other hand to peel the two (or more) sections apart! Voila! You have peeled a banana from the bottom! Feel free to discard the little part that's now at the top of your banana, though I know some folks who enjoy eating that part.

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