In the News

Via mind_hacks: Your thoughts become your password. Mind Hacks wonders, "Maybe this will lead to a new generation of hackers who train themselves to simulate others mental states in an attempt to forge 'pass thoughts'?"

Also, LiveJournal's moodswings make the news. Of course people are trying to come up with commercial applications, which I suspect will be amusing.

And MH also links to a longish article on The Trouble with the Turing Test.

Now, via languagelog, there's a series of posts about recent news reports that "European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) accurately recognize acoustic patterns defined by a recursive, self-embedding, context-free grammar." I'm not sure which post to link to, so maybe you can just read this one and follow the links. If you'd rather not do that, this post goes into most depth.

Before I read any more RSS feeds, I think I need some breakfast. See you all in a bit.

Quick memage

Taken from everybody:
Popstrology for 1969
It was a year of unparalleled importance in the self-written cultural history of the baby-boom generation, but self-written histories are always to be mistrusted, particularly when written in the medium of movie and television sound tracks. While 1969 may indeed have been the year of Woodstock, it was also the Year of the Fifth Dimension, who joyously proclaimed the dawning of the age of Aquarius, but whose popstrological rise marked the dawning of the age of Lite & White. There are those who call the founding of the constellation Lite & White by a group of African Americans ironic, but be that as it may, the formation of that mighty constellation in the final year of the sixties bestows upon the Fifth Dimension generation an ability to find islands of blissful calm in times of trouble. And while the line between blissful calm and stifling staleness may be a fine one, it's a line that anyone born in a year that saw the rise of B. J. Thomas and Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head is destined to walk.

My birth song: The Archies, "Sugar, Sugar."


Now that we know what bad pop music defines me, let's find out what bad book defines me--oh, and I'll throw in an interest cloud too.

( Read more... )