Welcome back. REM: November 8th, Election... November 25~27, LOSCON... www.loscon.org I've done this sort of thing several times now, each time from a different angle. Why? I have a dream ... of a time when we have the credibility matrix that I suggested publically in 1999 at ICANN https://forum.icann.org/iana/comments/03oct1998-10jan2000/msg00298.html Then, everything of public significance that happens at a venue such as LOSCON wil...
I'm going to try to supplement my aging bioram with a record of whatever brilliant - or not - spin-offs from material in "Scientific American" that I'm able to generate. 1> The article "Eggshell Education" in the June 2016 issue dovetails nicely with some thinking I've been doing about mockingbirds. The OC went through a major decline in the Mockingbird population when the crows moved in en masse about 20 years ago. Every evening brought rivers...
See http://www.kurzweilai.net/why-evolution-may-be-intelligent-based-on-deep-learning My comment there: "I recall coming to essentially the same conclusion in the late '60's after reading Koestler's "The Act of Creation," or perhaps it was "Janus." I think it was referred to me by the Nathaniel Brandon Institute. As I recall, Koestler did not believe in junk DNA, for good reasons having to do with basic information theory. I agreed, but, in part, my agreemen...
New AI breakthrough: One of the hardest jobs for AI has been natural language parsing. There are many examples of ambiguity that would stump most human recipients - and yet are perfectly valid, grammatically correct, etc. We humans resolve these situations by putting them in a context and/or by seeking further clarification. This task - translating a stream of symbols such as words into a meaningful mental object in our consciousness - has been partially solved to date ...
This blog is intended to be derivative of my blog "On Morals." Suppose you have the misfortune to be born to wealth, but with no apparent talent for greatness. If you have good examples to emulate, you may still do ok. However, as I demonstrated in "On Morals," the crucial impetus for consciousness - what drives it - is feedback of the form of reaffirmation of reality. It is seeing the abstract made concrete - "the Word made flesh" - that fuels our passions,&n...
Update 05-02-2016 One interesting note was the focus by the NASA reps on gender balance. (My estimate is that overall, of the ~60 participants, probably at least a third were women.) The large team immediately behind me that was working on an emergency person locator APP aimed at alerting first responders as to immediate emergencies was ~gender neutral, slightly less than half women. Their top coder, by universal acclaim, was a black woman. The NASA rep (this w...
10/09/16 More of the same. Tedious correction of product data with endless errors. Still no manual for the CMS stuff. I know how to do three or four basic operations - and my instructor on those operations got a good deal wrong. As I expected, the old website disappeared and/or was blocked from my access. This directly contradicted my own instructions as well as the job requirements, so I was finally given a new address to access what amounts to the verified so...
I find myself thinking in terms of Les Miserables a lot recently. Odd the twists and turns of the mind. Imagine, if you will, the following scenario: Our protagonist suddenly recalls committing a string of unrelated crimes of whim a long time ago - when he was a young precocious sociopath by default, his even younger childhood consisting of a series of betrayals and false accusations that ultimately overwhelm his innocence. Note that as an adult, he...
The Programming Grid is on fb: https://www.facebook.com/Loscon/ Or, go here: www.LOSCON.org My schedule as a panelist: FRI 11:30 am - 1:00 pm, Marquis 2: Virtual Reality: Making an Unreal Life Occulus Rift, etc, challenges, personalizing VR, ethics and morality of VR Panelists: Keith Henson, Trina Phillips, Gene Turnbow, Willard (Phil) Osborn My comments prior to the con In a way, this is recent history with the Repeat button jammed down. The MUDDs ...
Note: 12/12/2015 This blog was written shortly before the San Bernardino terror. Dylan Watkins, the founder (?), ramrod of OCVR kept telling me over the past year that my ideas were SOOOO close to this other writer that I HAD to check his book, Daemon. Finally I remembered to Google and the first thing that shows up is " Daemon and Freedomᵀᴹ comprise a two-part novel by the author Daniel Suarez about a distributed, persistent computer application, known as The Daemon, th...
So, everything appeared to be normal today at the library's public computer section. For once, even the perpetually Screaming Baby was quiet. (Perhaps GOD finally took pity on the rest of humanity and gave the kid a strep throat - or diverted a truck. Or perhaps it was some one's idea of a phone prank all along. I never actually saw the kid, but you couldn't escape the sound, every few minutes, full operatic volume. Maybe he or she matured?) And b...
12/03/2016: So... WHO spent the most $ (2 to 1)? WHO was elected anyway? Do I have to say it? ITYS And, to be fair, I figured that the election was probably in the bag for Clinton, anyway, regardless of funding, but the funding issue clearly did not make a difference. Trump could probably have spent a lot less and Hillary a lot more without changing the results. So, will all the experts who rake in the big bucks to help poor hapless politicia...
Remember "Firefly." That should be in the back of every programmer's personal perspective, like "Remember the Alamo," "Never again!," or the "Fermi Paradox," cosmic tweets conveying the essence of a haunting question or a meta-wrong still not set right, or, ... if you will, a battle cry! Look up "Firefly." Here's a reasonable source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(website) No doubt the reader has run into the Firefly algorithm on Amazon and elsewher...
12/19/2015 (This is where our medical coverage dollars are eaten by the system) See also my earlier blog on errors in billing as well as major screw-ups at Social Security regarding Medicare... http://philosborn.joeuser.com/article/464456/Medicare_FRAUD_-_1-800-633-4227 01/24/2016 What a NIGHTMARE! If Medicare, Blue Shield, and Anthem/Blue Cross are examples of our future, then good bye, homo-sap. I have spent averaging two h...
The Morals and Rights Issues Regarding Vaccines Phil Osborn August 9, 2015 See also: http://www.sb277.org/ http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160SB277 http://lulapilgrim.joeuser.com/article/304336/Vaccinations---Pros_and_Cons I suppose I should be happy. More to do to set the world straight, right? Except that this one is a doozy, a potentially Sisyphean task, tail-eating and self-referentia...