The thought that disaster is impossible often leads to an unthinkable disaster.
The Titanic Effect
Intelligence in the Cloud
IBM Watson, the Jeopardy champion, runs on 90 IBM Power 750 servers, with eight 3.5 GHz cores per server.
Currently on Amazon EC2, eight extra large compute instances will cost you $2.40/hour. If you want to run 90 of them, you’re looking at a shade over $200/hour.
This brings up a couple of questions:
- For what tasks could artificial intelligence be as good or better as a highly trained person at $200/hour?
- What would this mean for society?
Thanks to David Patterson at UC Berkeley for bringing this to my attention.
Whatever the Client is Doing, Advise Something Else
People who are close to a problem tend to keep repeating what didn’t work the first time. If it did work, they wouldn’t have called in a consultant.
Make sure they pay you enough so they’ll do what you say. — Jerry Weinberg
It’s Always a People Problem
Even when it’s “really” a technical problem, it can always be traced back to management action or inaction. Even so, the experienced consultant will resist pointing out that it was management who hired all the technical people and is responsible for their development. At the same time, the consultant will look for the people who should have prevented this problem, or dealt with it when it arose.
Television
Not once during those months did there emanate from the screen a genuine idea or emotion, and I came to understand the medium as subversive. In its deceit, its outright lies, its spinelessness, its weak-mindedness, its pointless violence, in the disgusting personalities it holds up to our youth to emulate, in its endless and groveling deference to our fantasies, television undermines strength of character, saps vigor, and irreparably perverts notions of reality. But it is a tender, loving medium; and when it has done its savage job completely and reduced one to a prattling, salivating infant, like a buxom mother it stands always poised to take one back to the shelter of its brown-nippled bosom.
Stick to the Script. Don’t Ad Lib.
I’m at the Carl’s Jr. drive-thru, and in keeping with the time-honored fast food tradition of having the person with the worst command of the English language and/or the most unintelligible accent work the drive-thru, the guy says, “Welcome to Carl’s Jr. Would you like to try [unintelligible] patty [unintelligible]?”
“What?”
“Welcome to Carl’s Jr. . . .”
Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
Aside
You can’t tell which way the train went just by looking at the track.
If You Want to Be Great
If you want to be great, you need to learn about all the possible relevant ideas that have worked for others. You need to create new ideas, blend, adapt and prioritize them, and constantly test the best ideas to see which ones work for you. Only then can you fully implement — while continuously adjusting — the ideas that really work.
Speaking Ill of the Recently Deceased
This notice went out today from David Carson, the moderator of the Who’s Alive and Who’s Dead mailing list, which among other things, sends out an email to subscribers when a famous person (like Andrew Breitbart) dies:
Something I unfortunately have to remind everyone of once in a while is, if you have something uncomplimentary or unpleasant to say about the recently deceased, you don’t need to say it to me. (This is only an issue when someone conservative dies, by the way. I’ve never gotten any nasty-grams when a liberal, moderate, or any other kind of person has died. But a conservative? Every single time, including today. Make of that what you will.)
How to Make People Love You
- Let everyone know that you’re really glad to see them.
- Stay positive.
- Don’t offer unsolicited advice.
The next one is a little hard to explain. For example . . . in the morning, when my owner lets me out of my enclosure, instead of running to my food dish, I run and sit in front of the cupboard to say, “This is where the dog food is kept. Can I have some please?”
So . . .
- Don’t take anything for granted.
— Lightning 
World Record Paper Airplane Throw
Footnote: The “pilot” (the guy throwing the plane) is Joe Ayoob, who replaced Aaron Rodgers as the quarterback at Cal in 2005.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wedcZp07raE]
Keeping Up With the Kennedys
Why doesn’t this guy have a reality show:
The son of Robert F. Kennedy has been charged with harassment and endangering the welfare of a child for allegedly clashing with two nurses who tried to stop him from taking his 2-day-old baby boy from a Westchester maternity unit, NBC New York has learned.
According to a Mount Kisco, N.Y. police report obtained by NBC New York, Douglas Kennedy, 44, took his baby from the newborn unit of Northern Westchester Hospital on Jan. 7, against the instructions of hospital staff who told him the infant needed to stay there. He faces misdemeanor charges. . . .
While holding the child in his right arm, Kennedy kicked [a nurse] in the pelvis with his right foot, knocking her backward onto the floor, police said.
As he did this, Kennedy fell onto the floor with the baby in his arms. Kennedy then got up and ran “down the stairs with the infant until he was stopped by security and escorted back to the infant’s room,” the police report said.
This comes on the heels of a new book by a JFK White House intern “revealing” that Douglas Kennedy’s Uncle Jack used to pimp the interns to service presidential aides as well as his own family members.
At least the author lived to tell the tale of her sordid encounter with the Kennedys. Not everyone was that lucky.
You might also remember Douglas’s brother David, who died of a drug overdose in 1984, or his brother Michael, another in the family’s long line of alcoholics, who died by skiing into a tree, but not before distinguishing himself with a statutory rape allegation involving the family’s 14-year-old babysitter.
I could go on with this but you get the point: thugs, pimps, alcoholics, drug addicts, rapists . . . maybe calling Teddy a murderer is a little strong, but he did kill that girl. It’s hard to imagine a more appalling bunch of degenerates.
The Kennedys make the Kardashians look like America’s royal family.
As the Crow Flies
Let me tell you something about crows: Sometimes they fly in a big circle. Sometimes they fly every which way.
Whoever invented “as the crow flies” to mean “in a straight line” must have never seen an actual crow . . .
See You in Hell
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE]
Next year I’m going to live tweet the Oscar In Memoriam segment so I can tell you which celebrities are in Hell.
See you at the movies!
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him. — George Santayana
Dilbert: Anecdotes for Morons
David Foster Wallace’s Last House
Via Curbed LA on the occasion of what would have been DFW’s 50th birthday today.
What a depressing abode! I’m ready to drive out there right now and hang myself . . .
Things You Can and Can’t Do
Things You Can Do
Discriminate against Asians in college admissions.
Things You Can’t Do
Use “Chink in the Armor” as the headline for an article on the New York Knicks.