Thought for the Dazed

I've had to give up that Distance Learning course as I was having trouble seeing the teacher.

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Thursday
Oct262006

Amazing 3D

I got this link from Rory Blyths blog. If you are into games and 3D you really must take a look.

Wednesday
Oct252006

Devil Wears Prada vs Cars

Went to see "The Devil Wears Prada" tonight. Even though I am of course the epitome of style, I thought it worth taking a look to see if there was anything I could teach the world of fashion.

Good film. Bit like the last film that I saw, which was Pixar's cars.

  • Both films had models in them with very shiny paintwork - none of which are actually real.
  • Both films are morality tales.
  • Both films have a baddy (of sorts) who actually gets what they want at the end (but at what cost to themselves? we are invited to ask).

Anne Hathaway played the young innocent seduced by the world of glamour rather well I thought. And Meryl Streep was wonderful as the editor in chief with a heart of granite.

In conclusion, I quite liked the movie, even though I was one of around three blokes in the rather full cinema.

The other good thing about the night was the trailer for the new Bond film, which looks like it is going to be a corker.

Wednesday
Oct252006

Working for the Borg

Just received a note about the Pay Modernisation framework the university is putting into place. One of the headings is "Assimilation Panels". Just what I suspected....

Tuesday
Oct242006

Horizon: The Rise of the machines eh?

When I was younger the summers were longer, grass was greener, beer was cheaper etc etc. And the BBC science program 'Horizon' was worth watching. Against my better judgement I watched it again tonight, mainly because the subject was Artificial Intelligence or how modern computer science, brain research and general stuff means that in precisely 22 years we will be downloading our consciousness into hyper intelligent machines to make a Human Vsn. 2.0 which will then wage a war with the remaining klutzes on the planet in which billions will be killed.

 What complete and utter rubbish.

Apparently, one of the reasons that this all makes perfect sense is that around 20 years ago a nutcase sent a bunch of bombs to people in America to stop it happening. Yeah, right.

I kind of lost it when the narrator mis-quoted Moore's Law. Then we had a bloke who had managed, by plugging wires into the brain of monkey, to capture and replicate the moment of the monkey arm. Apparently this was a big advance. Along the lines of "Hey, we've made a tape recorder. Now we understand music". Do we heck.

Then we were whisked to another laboratory, where another man with bad hair and a big vat of liquid helium told us how he could make computers which can do this and that at the same time. I used to have one of those but I scrapped it for a machine which actually worked.

Before they could explain what this meant we were sent off to see a bloke who is taking lots of pills and walking on a treadmill so that he can survive the next 22 years, whereupon he can download his consciousness into the machines we will be making by then. He was doing this with such smug assurance that I ended up hoping that he would get knocked down by a bus in 2028 on the way to get his brain recorded.

Then there was the chap who was taking rat's brains to bits so that he could put them into a pile of Sun computers. And the scientist using the Basic Stamp (in the shops for fifty quid folks) to remote control a rat.

 By now my own consciousness was making a valiant attempt to crawl out of my ears and reach the TV remote.

There was nothing here that made me more scared of the future, and quite a lot which made me scared of the present. If these are the kind of people we are giving money and resources to I can see trouble ahead.

I'm sure that I've missed the point (definitely Human Vsn. 1.0 me), and that all these professors and well funded genius types are going to succeed in making something with a higher level of consciousness. I for one will welcome the day. I'll give it a camera and put it in charge of making better science programs. Then again, I reckon the monkey could have probably done that.

Monday
Oct232006

Madness I tell you

If you go to the MSN home page at the moment you can see an advert for satnav for a Buick car. The tagline for Buick would seem to be "Beyond Precision".

What rubbish. How can you be more precise than precise? This sort of advertising really annoys me.  I really dislike it when people mess up with English. How on earth did they get to this?

Scene : Advertising Agency

Drone 1: "They say that this satnav is precise."
Drone 2: "And precise is good, right?"
Drone 1: "..and so more than precise would be even better?"
Drone 2:"I've always liked 'beyond'....."
Drone 1:"So, 'Beyond Precision' it is then. Send them a bill for fifty thousand as usual."

shudder