Here’s your Easy Offense Studies major for today:
Rashaad Thomas is a husband, father, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, poet and essayist.
No reference to holding down a job requiring physical effort? Color me stunned.
#Learntomine
Artificial intelligence takes “butterface” to level 9,000.
Nobody would be fooled into thinking that this is actually a real Steve Buscemi-faced Jennifer Lawrence answering the sort of hard-hitting questions that Buzzfeed is justly famed and successful for. For starters, it’s not a photographically perfect blend; for seconds, it’s just too horrifying. But it *is* pretty close to being a successful blend, especially given that it was created by just one guy in his spare time. So…*how* much did Warner Brothers spend to digitally remove Superman’s ‘stache?”
The story seems to be that around 2 AM Monday morning in Chicago, a gay black actor by name of Jussie Smollet went out to grab some food and got beaten for his troubles. But it wasn’t just your run of the mill mugging:
Ummm… ok. I have no idea who this guy is. He’s apparently a minor actor on the TV show “Empire,” which I gather is a show aimed at the black TV-watching demographic. Which is fine… but what are the chances that white MAGA supporters would know who this guy is, so that they would have sent threatening letters in advance and were waiting for him at 2 in the morning during a polar vortex? And if it was 2 AM, 10 degrees below zero wind chill and they were wearing ski masks, how would the victim know they were white?
Given the injuries reported by a hospital and the cops, clearly the guy took a thumping. But the particulars of the incident read like a bad 1980’s cop drama had a baby with Trump Derangement Syndrome. I would be less surprised if this turns out to be an actual honest-to-Odin false flag than what’s it’s being reported to be. There is, of course, a Middle Way: a bog-standard mugging, with some embellishment becomes something more… sellable. After the Covington Catholic nothingburger incident in D.C. got All Blowed Up Real Good into the Great Racist Incident Of 2019 by just sprinkling in some out of context vids and some manufactured outrage, I think it’s safest to cast a skeptical eye at all such claims these days.
. . .
Somehow I suspect that the below story won’t garner as much attention and outrage as the above:
UPDATE: According to CNN, a dozen detectives are working with the FBI and after reviewing many local security camera recordings have so far failed to find a single image of either the attack or the alleged assaulters. Additionally, the police report that Smollett did not report the “MAGA”aspect of the story to them, and that they only heard about it after he went to the press. Hmmm…
Hypothesis: he went out at 2 AM during the polar vortex to get some food… and slipped and fell on the ice, cracking a rib and smacking his face. An idea about how to garner sympathy and simultaneously score political points begins to percolate…
Auditory stimulus reconstruction is a technique that finds the best approximation of the acoustic stimulus from the population of evoked neural activity. Reconstructing speech from the human auditory cortex creates the possibility of a speech neuroprosthetic to establish a direct communication with the brain and has been shown to be possible in both overt and covert conditions. However, the low quality of the reconstructed speech has severely limited the utility of this method for brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. To advance the state-of-the-art in speech neuroprosthesis, we combined the recent advances in deep learning with the latest innovations in speech synthesis technologies to reconstruct closed-set intelligible speech from the human auditory cortex. We investigated the dependence of reconstruction accuracy on linear and nonlinear (deep neural network) regression methods and the acoustic representation that is used as the target of reconstruction, including auditory spectrogram and speech synthesis parameters. In addition, we compared the reconstruction accuracy from low and high neural frequency ranges. Our results show that a deep neural network model that directly estimates the parameters of a speech synthesizer from all neural frequencies achieves the highest subjective and objective scores on a digit recognition task, improving the intelligibility by 65% over the baseline method which used linear regression to reconstruct the auditory spectrogram. These results demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning and speech synthesis algorithms for designing the next generation of speech BCI systems, which not only can restore communications for paralyzed patients but also have the potential to transform human-computer interaction technologies.
Translation: we’re living in the future and machines can understand your brain. I included a 500-year more advanced version of this in my “Zaneverse” stories; easily installed implants can understand your brain and hook you up to a facility comm system (ship, station, building, whatever). The result is that you have “electronic telepathy” built into something like a cell phone system so two people can “think” to each other and it comes through much like speech. A handy system for easy comms, as well as just the thing for chatting quietly without other people noticing or listening in.
Of course, what they’re shooting for in the scientific study isn’t a useful plot device for science fiction stories but a way to give voice to people who have functional brains but non-functional vocal systems. If I understand it correctly, the system would read your brain waves patterns as you think “dog” and understand that you are thinking the word or concept “dog,” but would instead understand the *sounds* you are trying to make, and thus it spits out the sound “dog.” As a result the results are apparently a bit incomprehensible at times, but 75% understandable is a hell of an improvement for someone who can’t speak *at* *all.*
This technology would of course be extremely valuable to many handicapped people. It would also be very handy to interrogators.
The Internet Archive has a *lot* of stuff. One thing there is a scan of the French-language aeronautical magazine “L’Aeronautique” covering 1919-1921. It is available in a number of formats, including PDF, here:
https://archive.org/details/la02b9eronautiqu03pari/page/n2
Included in this is a design for a truly gigantic aircraft with a wingspan of 110 meters, produced by Professor Junkers, presumably Hugo Junkers of Junkers Flugzeug- und Motorenwerke AG.Hugo was an innovator in the field of all-metal aircraft construction, including the first practical all-metal aircraft the Junkers J 1 from 1915. The giant aircraft would have a wing area of 1,400 square meters and a gross weight of 60 tonnes; 12 engines would produce 4,000 horsepower and drive six propellers. Two tractor props would have a diameter of 6 meters, while four pusher props would have a diameter of 3.7 meters. No performance data seems to be given, but it can be assumed that it was meant to be a long range passenger or cargo transport.
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Bonus: A helicopter design from one Douglas Shaw. This would have failed entertainingly.
The title of this post is hardly a new sentiment. Still, add this one to the list:
Written by Todd May, a professor of philosophy at Clemson University, this opinion piece argues that because humans screw up the ecosystem and the climate, and farm animals for their tasty, tasty meat, we are a plague on this Earth and all the other critters would be better off without us. This line of argument is not new, and at a *certain* level makes some *small* amount of sense. But it is manifestly wrong, ultimately.
Go to that op-ed, and hit Ctrl-F. That will bring up a little box in which you can type terms to search for within the text of the piece. Do a search for words such as “space,” “asteroid colony,” “Mars,” “terraform,” “Oort cloud.” Guess what: you won’t find them. And that is why geniuses like professor May are dead wrong in their conclusions. Yes, humans mess things up on earth. But Earth is not the sum total of the universe. The universe is a *vast* assortment of resources that, as far as we can tell, are going completely unused. Even if you think it’s a tragic evil to turn a chicken into nuggets, it’s unlikely (though not impossible) that you will find it tragic to turn a dead asteroid into a series of O’Neill colonies with the effective surface area of a continent. We can pummel dead Mars with a few thousand dead comets, sprinkle it with bacteria and algae and lichen and seeds, and make that dead world bloom. We could even terraform the *Moon* with some effort, and, eventually, plant fusion engines on an asteroid out in the Oort cloud, accelerate it to a good fraction of lightspeed and plow it into Venus, blowing that planet up and creating a dandy asteroid belt ripe for plunder. We can create so much life that the eventual and inevitable loss of the earth and all life on it will be minor blip, of no greater consequence than a brushfire burning out a termite mound in Africa somewhere. We can build habitats around red dwarf stars: a million times the surface area of Earth around stars that will last ten thousand times longer than the Sun.
*Humans* can do this. Not deer, not bunnies, not cats, not dogs, not chimps or whales or ducks or cows or pigs. HUMANS. A failure to understand this is common among the human extinction promoting idiot class.
And I found this line especially entertaining:
To be sure, nature itself is hardly a Valhalla of peace and harmony.
If you are going to culturally appropriate religious concepts such as “Valhalla,” perhaps you should spend a few seconds actually learning about them. Valhalla ain’t about peace and harmony, buddy. It’s about daily slaughter, followed by partying and consuming vast quantities of things like fresh boar.
The good professor does not call for actually wiping out humanity. What he does seem to call for is the cessation of breeding. Not having kids, in his view, is no great tragedy and imposes no suffering, and would lead to the end of humanity and the end of humans endless evils perpetrated on the critters. But here again we see a failure in logic. His goal is *already* underway: the western world – the world of high-tech and relatively clean environments, of enough free time and freedom to ponder the philosophical ramifications of humans disappearing – is already well under replacement rates. We are selecting ourselves for extinction. But the species as a whole is not. The west will disappear and simply be replaced by people who don’t think twice about having a whole bunch of kids, environment be damned. If and when our replacements cultures evolve to be similar to ours in terms of philosophical navel-gazing, they are unlikely to be as suicidal as we were as they will have our recent example of smart idiocy to look and laugh at.
A magazine ad from 1966 depicting a lifting body in space. The design seems reasonable 9sort of a cross between the M2and the HL-10) but could very well be a product not of engineers but of the art department. The angle is not the most informative, but it appears that this design has something of a squared-off nose. Note that the cockpit canopy is exposed, something that very few small lifting body designs had… for the simple reason that the windows would likely melt during re-entry, and that would defeat the purpose in making the thing recoverable. As vehicles get bigger, such as the space shuttle, the windows get further away from the nose and can be made survivable. But little designs like this? not very likely with 1960’s tech. Otherwise, though, it is an attractive illustration.
One of the more admirable features of the common housecat is their ability to make themselves comfortable ona level humans can only dream of.
All four of them on a bed. Fingers, Buttons and Speedbump are all curled up together while Banshee is a little away from the group. She doesn’t tolerate physical contact with the others, but at least she’s calmed down from her days of screaming bloody murder if another cat was in the same room with her.
The two below show the result pf adding a bit of dried catnip to a small plastic shoebox. Buttons has always ignored catnip (supposedly only about half of cats really react to it). But this time he decided to fill the boxes volume.
And Banshee shows us how it’s done.
“I should buy a boat.”
What more evidence of a Trump-Russia collusion do you really need?
A Tu22M3 backfire bomber crashed on landing in the Murmansk region. Reportedly 4 crew, two killed on impact, one died later. Seemed to come in a little fast. Looks like it had a Kh-22 anti-ship missile under the port wing root.
Clearly the problem was that the front fell off.
If you ever somehow needed more evidence that “hate speech”laws are inherently stupid… here ya go. Police time and resources spent on intimidating British subjects because they simply “liked” a limerick.
Britainlanders… it’s getting about time y’all took your country back.