The party starts @ 7 PM Eastern/4 PM Pacific. Plussers can join the fun by circling +Atheists Studio or +Jennifer Hancock, or by visiting hangoutparty.com, where it will also be broadcast live to the public for those who don’t use G+ or who can’t get into the hangout.
Mark your calendars and spread the word!
Here’s a clip from Jen’s appearance on ITAS last year:
ITAS is now on Google+. You can join in the conversation and “hangout” by going to http://gplus.to/AtheistsStudio, or you can find the new icon in the social section of the sidebar!
Last week I was invited onto Thinking Unenslaved, a live podcast hosted by Synthaetica. We had some good discussion. One of my blog posts we discussed as about House MD, which led to a conversation about atheist characters (or lack thereof) on television. Now we have one more.
Kiefer Sutherland’s The Confession is a 10 episode web series, the first three of which debuted today, exclusively on Hulu. Each five-minute webisode stars Sutherland as a hitman relaying his stories to a Catholic preist, portrayed by John Hurt.
Sutherland’s character, listed only as “The Confessor” on IMDB in the credits, expresses an atheistic or agnostic view point in the first webisode. He goes on to paint himself as a sociopath seeking to understand good and evil, and forces the preist to help him through philosophical and theological discussion.
Now, I certainly don’t like that it reinforces the misconception that atheists lack moral integrity, but that’s more in the eye of the beholder. Someone with that belief will see a cause and effect relationship between his behavior an lack of faith. Someone like me will understand that he behaves badly because he lacks empathy—he could just as easily be a Catholic or Muslim sociopath. Though, it would be nice to get an atheist character someday that isn’t narcissistic, malevolent, or a social outcast.
That being said, I find The Confession to be very entertaining. The Confessor can be thought of as the anti-Jack Bauer. It takes a certain type of person to be able to torture and kill people, whether it be for the greater good or for a paycheck. Bauer and the Confessor both have the necessary traits to do similar jobs on opposite sides of the law. They differ completely in terms of empathy and values—Bauer cares deeply for those around him and is ashamed of some things he’s done to protect them, while the Confessor feels no guilt, no remorse—yet they use they same means to achieve their very different goals.
Well, that’s my take. You can watch the first three chapters right here if you’d like:
One of my favorite podcasts these days is Science… Sort Of. You should check it out now. Anyway, they are always looking for pictures of the elusive Brachiolope. I happened to find one on my facebook profile attacking another elusive character—the ninja. Here’s a photo:
I should mention that I can’t take credit fro creating any of the original art—I just photoshopped stuff together and made the fb layout.
Could Watson may be more than just a game show contestant? IBM thinks so.
“Watson, within seconds, will be able to search all recent medical research information and help the doctor make that [diagnosis] and perhaps most importantly, recommend the best practice in the world for that patient at that second.”
This got me thinking—what would the ramifications of this be for our beloved Dr. Gregory House?
Think of all misdiagnoses and wrong treatments that nearly kill every single one of House’s patients. This could all potentially be avoided.
Imagine House sitting at a table humiliating his staff and ordering them to break into someone’s house and treat their dying patient for cancer, then lupus, then sarcoidosis, then some vague desease simply referred to as “autoimmune,” before realizing it’s almost never any of those things even though they always guess them first, and finally having the correct diagnosis revealed to him, unwittingly, by Wilson.
Now imagine instead of underlings and Wilson down the hall, he has a terminal in his office linked to Watson. He punches in the symptoms and history of his patient and in seconds Watson speaks the correct diagnosis: “What is AIDS?”
So maybe there are a few kinks to work out, but you can see my point—poor Dr. House suddenly finds himself with a boring job, a seven minute television program, and way fewer epiphanic moments.
So WordPress is doing this PostADay/PostAWeek thing. I can’t commit to posting every day for the rest of the year, so I guess I’ll sign up for the weekly thing. Who knows, if I get more consistent, maybe someone other than myself will start reading this crap.
Last night aired the first of three Jeopardy! episodes featuring Watson, IBM‘s latest in their quest to make computers smarter than humans.
I was impressed. Without giving too much away to those who have yet to see Watson compete against Jeopardy! giants Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, let me just say that watching a computer break down, analyze, and interpret the metaphor and pun filled nuances of human language in Jeopardy! questions was nothing short of awe-inspiring.
This goes far beyond the accomplishment of Deep Blue, IBM’s computer chess champion of the late 90s. While chess can be boiled down to following the straight-forward (though complex) logic of mathematics, something that computers have always excelled at, Jeopardy! requires an understanding of language, something that computers have been notoriously bad at. Computation vs comprehension.
Perhaps the most impressive part is that Watson does it all with the knowledge stored in his “brain” just like his human competitors—no internet access. He also must physically press the buzzer just like everyone else.
Although Watson is a large set of bundled IBM servers represented by a non-humanoid avatar on a screen, you’ll notice I keep using the pronoun “he” when referring to—him. That’s because his ability to compete at something so exclusively human personifies him. I feel like Alex, Ken, and Brad must have fought the urge to include Watson in their after-show conversation. Imagine if Watson looked like a person and was able to see and hear! (At one point Jennings incorrectly answered a question after which Watson buzzed in giving the same wrong answer.)
It lets one’s mind open up to the possibility of ideas once relegated to the imagination. Could a more sophisticated version in the future contain enough information and learn well enough to simulate human emotion? How would we handle such a development—give robots rights? Sounds crazy, but let’s be honest, we all grew pretty attached to Data, did we not?
So maybe I get a little carried away. We are, of course, still in the very early stages of artificial intelligence and Watson is designed very specifically for analytics, but it makes you think.
Watson continues his battle tonight. I suggest you all tune in.
So I’m off to another wedding tomorrow. I didn’t go to any while I was in Japan so I’m a bit out of practice. I thought this would be a good time to dust off an old Facebook note and review some of my own advice. Perhaps this will be useful to some of you as well!
Many of my friends have gotten married over the past few years and so I’ve attended my share of weddings—usually stag. I’ve learned a few things and thought I’d share a few tips on how to avoid feeling like a total loser when in this situation.
When introduced to a person you’ve already met, always be slightly less sure of your previous encounter than the other person.
This will make the other person feel less important than you. Remember, the goal is to have a higher self-esteem than the rest of the room; by lowering theirs, you lower the overall level of crowd.
You’re probably sitting at the losers’ table; make a friend–quick.
Choose only one. Whomever you choose will likely be more than willing to chat with you, given they are also alone. By being the only two at the table that seem to know each other, you effectively make the rest of the table feel like even bigger losers than they already do. Of course, you will also be raising the self-esteem of your new friend. This is easily remedied by offering to get them a drink from the bar, then forgetting theirs, returning with only your own.
Tip generously.
Let’s face it—the open bar is the main reason you decided to show at all. When getting drinks, be sure to loft your singles into the fishbowl for everyone to see. People will think you make more money than them. Alternatively, you can make this point on a more intimate level by standing just out of reach of the tip bowl and handing your hefty tip to the guy next to you so he can put it in. Don’t worry too much about the money; you’ll still spend less than you would have sitting alone at the Copper Penny, which is what you would have been doing instead.
Get drunk enough to get freaky on the dance floor, but not drunk enough to get freaky with the bride’s 17 year-old sister on the dance floor.
When you have a good buzz going on, you’ll let loose a bit. People will think you are cool and fun. Just don’t end up like the groomsman peeing in the bathroom with his pants around his ankles.
Don’t laugh at the best man’s speech.
This will make others in the room think that your sense of humor is more sophisticated than theirs. Besides, he’s really not that funny. But be sure to grin somewhat smugly at the one or two truly funny parts. You don’t want people to think that you have no sense of humor whatsoever.
Leave early.
By this point you’ve already established yourself as one of the better people at the party. Finish things off by leaving once the major activities have ended. You want to show everyone that you have better things to do and they don’t.
Hope this helped. Have a good time!
Ah yes. I feel much better about the situation now. Oh, and eat some babies.
