August 25, 2020
đ¶ So long đ and thanks đ© for all 𩼠the treats đâđŠș
It's National Dog Day (previously).
Dogs are one of the best parts of the animal kingdom. Their young are adorable.
They were faithful companions, hunters, guardians, waste collectors, and maybe even healers in ancient Mesopotamia.
Their already-impressive communication with humans is being amplified by technology.
Humans devote their lives to rescuing them, even during a pandemic (WaPo).
They can help people cope during lockdown (WaPo).
Their most-common cancer may provide clues to treating human cancer.
Did I mention they're adorable?
Test yourself to find out Are You A Cat Or Dog Person? [N.B.âthese are my own results, so the accuracy of this test is in dispute.]
A Dog's Guide To Its Human, an edifying graphic.
And we grieve when they leave us. (from Jenny Jinya)
And we grieve when they leave us. (from Jenny Jinya)
Post AI Go
Impact of Go AI on the professional Go world by Hajin Lee: "At the time, which is not a very long time ago, no one questioned that Go was a path you walk for a lifetime. The life of a Go player was considered similar to a philosopher, a scholar, an artist, or a monk...The term âdivine moveâ is used as a metaphor for an ultimate level of play. With AI, however, we all realized that the best way to reach the highest possible level of Go is not through thinking about it for a lifetime. Itâs actually to buy more powerful GPUs and a well-trained deep neural network and have it play Go. So, suddenly, we players felt an enormous sense of loss." A response.
An alcoholic can run out of booze or money. You can't run out of mind
One day, when she was five years old, Daya Bharj told her brother she didnât want to play with him any more. She wanted to play with her imagination. Daya lay down on the sofa in her family's living room and stared at the ceiling. She imagined a little boy, about her own age, running through a field. He came across an airplane that had crash-landed, then climbed inside and sat in one of the cockpit seats....Thirteen years on, the daydream is still going. [more inside]
Computer vision is the easy part
Rutherford Falls: meet the sitcom creators decolonizing Hollywood
Navajo writer and showrunner Sierra Teller Ornelas has teamed up with her former Brooklyn Nine-Nine colleague Mike Schur and actor Ed Helms to create Rutherford Falls, an NBC Peacock sitcom set in a small town that borders a reserve. Helms plays a "local legend and town namesake" who fights plans to move a statue of the town's founder. The cast will include Toronto-based Plains Cree actor Michael Greyeyes, Lakota Sioux writer and actor Jana Schmieding, and Schitt's Creek alumnus Dustin Milligan. Five of the twelve writers are Native American, making it one of the highest proportions of Indigenous writers on an American sitcom. CBC's Rosanna Deerchild interviews the Indigneous writers decolonizing the Hollywood sitcom. [more inside]
The Grass is no longer greener on the other side of the fence.
Banning Lawns. "Lawns occupy approximately three times more space than corn and
twice as much as cotton, and consume up to sixty percent of potable
municipal water supplies in Western cities and up to thirty percent in
Eastern cities." It's time to give up the great American Institution of the
Front Lawn.
Why is a mile 5,280 feet? (Why is a nautical mile different??)
We fucking did it bois, the fortâs ours!
Holdfast is a Napoleonic-era roleplaying shooter game with âenjoyably uselessâ weapons and a âwonderfully silly but vivid class systemâ that rewards players for standing in line, listening to nearby musicians, and generally following orders from officers. Thanks to a viral video by an excited Scottish lad, itâs exploded in popularity, although public servers can suffer from âcatastrophic toxicityâ.
The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots.
Iâve discovered that almost every single article on the Scots version of Wikipedia is written by the same person - an American teenager who canât speak Scots (Single link reddit post)
Itâs Time to Abolish Nursing Homes
"If three out of four Americans want to spend their final years at home, why do so many of us end up in institutional care?" A brief history of eldercare and the challenges faced by those seeking to "age in place."
The inhumanity of Ofqual's algorithm
The inhumanity of Ofqual's algorithm is a deep dive into the fiasco where British high school students were awarded grades by algorithm with exams cancelled due to COVID, until the government reversed course under pressure. But what happens to universities now?
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