…Has been an American pastime from the very start.
Immediately post-Columbian Figurine :
Zena Kruzick identifies it as a “shaman vessel”, but I suspect it’s more of a political cartoon.
I discovered this while reviewing the slides for Clayton Cramer’s history class.
Girl voice from about four feet off the floor:
Mommy, this opened itself by accident.
First I saw this:
[Click for full-size]
Amusing and dead on, some of them — except the best ones aren’t actually libertarians at all, just authoritarians looking for an excuse to misbehave while ordering other people around.
And the actual libertarian summary, “no first use of force”, aka “Oh noes! The libertarians are in power, and they refuse to tell us what to do!” doesn’t make an appearance.
Then I found this over at House of Eratosthenes:
24 Little Hitlers
[aka "authoritarians" or, let's face it, "socialists"]
[again, click for full size]
And the interesting thing here, of course, is that none of these guys are betraying their principles; this is the socialist paradigm, straight up.
One small tweak to the socialist version, although this doesn’t work if they’re labeled “authoritarians”: the last frame should stay the same: “stoned”.
[update]
AAAaaarrrrrrrgggghhhhh!
I just read the last chapter — and it’s not finished yet! I have to wait for Yukowsky to write more chapters!
I hope he’s doing more on a regular basis. Do not start reading this unless you are a masochist.
Yudkowsky, please stop wasting your time doing stupid stuff like trying to figure out how to give AIs a sense of ethics.
Finish the damn story!
[/update]
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Via Eric S. Raymond. It’s useless quoting from the story itself, so let me just give you Raymond’s review:
Oh Thoth Trismegistus, oh Ma’at, oh Ganesha, oh sweet lady Eris…I have not laughed so hard in years!
Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the brightest people I’ve ever met in a lifetime of seeking out gifted- to genius-grade thinkers because people who aren’t usually bore me pretty quickly. Eliezer has spent years studying the deep structure of rationality and probably understands the systematic sources of bias and irrationality in the shared architecture of the human mind as comprehensively as anyone alive. I have previously commented on some of his writings.
Usually Eliezer thinks about questions like how to build human-compatible ethical reasoning into AIs. Serious, deep stuff. When he turns the vast and imponderable force of his intellect to writing, of all things, Harry Potter fanfic, a quite unexpected degree of hilarity ensues.
Read it and laugh. Read it and learn. Eliezer re-invents Harry Potter as a skeptic genius who sets himself the task of figuring out just how all this “magic” stuff works. The science is real – it really would be a lot harder to explain transformation from a human into a cat than mere levitation, for example. When Harry, confronted with a magical time-travel device, is immediately terrified that he might be holding an antimatter bomb, this is actually a more justified fear than many readers may understand.
But the characters are not slighted. Eliezer is very good at giving them responses to the rather altered and powered-up Harry that are consistent with canon. The development of Minerva McGonagall is particularly fine.
Strongly recommended. And if you manage to learn about sources of cognitive bias like the Planning Fallacy and the Bystander Effect (among others) while your sides are hurting with laughter, so much the better.
It helps if you have some familiarity with the Potter cycle, but since that is itself a mish-mash of traditional child’s fantasy, you probably will recognize most what’s being built on here.
And it’s what’s being built that you need to read anyway. Gods, I wish I’d this when I was twelve.
No, wait: one quote from the story:
…It is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.
Uncle admonishes us to “Be Safe”.
Gah! I think, and then I ran into this:
… and as I say in his comments,
and I realized, this year, no, be safe, because the time may come when safety is not possible, and we will need all the fingers and eyes we can get, because there will barely be enough to start with.
So, yeah, while the crisis lasts:
Be safe. Enjoy. Celebrate our freedom, but remember what the fireworks symbolize, and treat them accordingly.
Practice hurting your enemies, not yourself.
Hewlett Packard, take a bow. So we can kick you in the ass.
And remember, kids, The Supreme Court agrees you can fix your printer using the same maintenance technique. Just be sure of your backstop.
[update]
Thanks to Bob Belvedere for the link, and the lovely company.
I especially like the “Jerry Bruckheimer’s Wizard of Oz 2” poster.
here I am, staggering through the briefing room in search of a coffee pot when my Sergeant lays a fatherly arm across my shoulders.
“‘Dog,” sayeth that worthy, “I just received a grievance from TDC.”
I blink at him, muzzily.
“Seems like one of our prison-bound inmates has complained that the deputy who transported him to durance vile provided him with an actual child’s Happy Meal from McDonalds for lunch on said trip.”
I can smell coffee. It’s here. Somewhere.
“According to the inmate, when he protested, this deputy confiscated the toy from said Happy Meal, hooked it into the partition between the seats, and … I am quoting here … ‘Made it talk smack’, unquote, to the inmate for the rest of the trip.”
Coffee. Coffeecoffeecoffee.
“In a high, squeaky voice.”
If only we had, like, a Constitution or something, I dunno, that would prevent abuse like this.
Possibly by allowing intended victims to carry firearms so as to preempt the misery of would-be perpetrators.
Not even going to try to describe this. I promise — and this is necessary when pointing at anything from Japan — this is in fact work safe, even child safe.
If you recognize any of the characters here, you are helplessly geeky.
Update:
Side-by-side Nipponese/English lyrics
English:
An 85 cm radius is as far as my hands can reach
I’m going to show you now, so please stand back
It was fun just to spin, and I wanted to stay that way
When I just kept spinning I forgot how to stop
My pals around me spun much better than me
So I muttered, “Oh well,” and pretended to give up
A 250 cm radius is as far as my hands can reach
I’m going to start moving around now, so please stand back
It was fun to spin aimlessly, and I wanted to stay that way
If I kept on spinning aimlessly, I believed something could come of it
My pals around me could spin so much higher than me
So I pretended to sulk when my neck grew sore from watching from below
A 5200 cm radius is as far as my hands can reach
I’m going to start flying around now, so please stand back
What do you think? If my former self could see me now, would she be proud?
Though I’m growing dizzy and losing my balance
The streets of the town, observed from a 23.4 degree tilt [1]
Suddenly became a color I’d never seen before
A 6300 km radius is as far as my hands can reach
I’ve realized that I can do it now, so please stand back
An 85 cm radius is as far as my hands can reach
When I someday grow tired of spinning, please stay by me
—
[1] The tilt of the Earth’s axis. She’s flying up and viewing everything from above.
===
Ya know, I’ve seen a couple of other translations, and they don’t anymore sense than this one does.
Was he really this good all through the Bush years?
Jon Stewart traces the Presidential campaign to reduce dependence on foreign oil all the way back to Nixon.
Watch all the way to the very last word, which will take your breath away.
And is the complete and total truth.
I thought Stewart attacked Bush because he was just another leftist hater. No, actually, it turns out he was just doing his job, and mercilessly attacking the Man in the Oval.
It took him a bit to find his stride with Obama, but he was one of the first to find true satire about the one, and to step up fearlessly.
There are many, many leftist commentators out there who have my contempt for only just now realizing what a god awful disaster Obama is.
Stewart’s not on my list; he understands what a god awful disaster the American Presidency is.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| An Energy-Independent Future | ||||
|
||||
via Charles at Little Green Footballs.
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