Undead Astronauts

Funny story about a hacker having his laptop stolen and its recovery, it starts around 5 mins in. It is less about outright hacking since he had root access to the machine (it is his laptop after all), but it shows some of the stages of having your machine compromised.

1. Tyrese tweeted this msg yesterday: “Ladies and Gentleman proud to say we just closed our K-Town Deal!! Who and what is K-town?? I’m glad you asked standby..” So K-town is going to happen. Let the debauchery, histrionics and shamelessness begin!
2. The Huntsville a capella group Committed has won The Sing Off. Catch their performances here.
3. Steve Sailer put up a graph of how the 4 major US ethnic groups did on PISA compared to the rest of the world. Asian Americans outscore every nation, but are still behind the Shanghai kids.

1. Opera, both Beijing and classical European, is booming in China due in part to the “build it and they will come” mantra. I find the last paragraph particularly interesting: “They are all looking to China for the survival— the only hope for growth — for all classical music, frankly,” said Shirley Young, chairwoman of the US-China Cultural Institute. “The future of classical music is here.” It’s a little ironic that so few Westerners appreciate their own high culture anymore that it has to find a new home in the East to survive.
2. Razib summarizes a study on time preference across nations. It’s interesting to note that testing a four year-old with the marshmallow test can predict where the kid’s average SAT score will be with a 210 point difference between those who could wait and those who couldn’t. The difference is equivalent to the difference between rich and poor kids and greater than the difference between kids w/ grad school parents and those whose parents didn’t finish high school. There’s a cool graph which I’ve copy/pasted here. The college kids were asked if they’d prefer $3.4k now or $3.8k in a month. I don’t think the graph takes into account per capita income or social trust, but interesting nonetheless.

Google has a cool new tool up. The tool makes use of Google’s scans of university libraries. Just type in a word and see how often it’s been used.

here’s our namesake:

various permutations of Asian.

I encourage you to try a few words out for yourselves. Who would have thought nerd, geek, and gamer have been around for so long? I find some of these numbers suspicious. Has pwn really been around since the mid-1600s?

finally the showdown! and it’s good too. i almost creamed myself in the middle of part 2 during demetia‘s tutting solo. omg it was sooo sick. he might even have mr wiggles beat out on tutting skills now. mike song from kaba modern makes a cameo! i love it.

early next year, IBM’s supercomputer “watson” will take on the two best jeopardy players in the show’s history, ken jennings and brad rutter (the guy who beat jennings in the jeopardy tournament of champs). we know computers can win or draw against master players in competitions requiring brute force calculations when the game complexity is low enough.

but playing in this format is something different. how well the comp does will depend greatly on the quality of it’s database obviously, but the structure of the clues requires more than simple brute force calculations. to find the correct replies, contestants have to parse the sometimes intentionally opaque grammar of the clue correctly,  place it in the context of the category, understand various subtle references, puns, ironies, double entendres, and relationships (near/far, little/big).

imagine trying to come up with the algorithm that could provide the question to this recent clue in the category “hmm… pronoun trouble”:

A sovereign may use the “royal” this pronoun in formal speech; are you not amused?

(more…)

not very much exposition. seems like filler while they figure out how to move the main story arc forward.