The Real America can be found in this Social Security Administration waiting room. The lady in the leopard pants talks exactly like the Gary Oldman character in True Romance.
Pooper: Never pick up your dog’s poop again
My first thought was… hoax. But this looks like a real thing. (So don’t tell me there are no jobs out there to be had.) With two big Goldens, picking up poop is a daily ritual for me. One that I enjoy. I have good tools and a little plastic bucket. One swing around the yard and I have made the world a better place.
But paying someone to pick up my dog’s shit? No. Wrong. If you’re not willing to pick up Fido’s load, you don’t deserve to have a dog. The end.
Goodbye Windows, hello Chrome
My friend John has a desktop Windows computer that is infested with malware and update demands. He asked my advice on cleaning it up and I suggested he junk it and get a Chromebook. He agreed and asked me to help so (with the assistance of +George Kopp) I ordered an Acer Chromebook 14. This week I’m headed south to deliver and help make the transition from Windows to Chrome OS.
I signed up to test the early Chromebook from Google and they sent me one to play with (and keep). This was in 2011? It was a good box and had I not already purchased a MacBook, I could have been happy with the Chromebook. The new hardware and software is even better.
He asked me to get him a new printer and George recommended a Brother HLL2360DW wireless laster printer. Again, very impressed and only $150. For less than $500 my friend is getting a new laptop and printer. Not bad. And the printer does Google Cloud Print. Nice.
No more malware. No more constant updates (automatic in the background). Thank you Chrome OS.
Questions an AI might ask
“She wanted to know whether a person could die by spontaneous combustion. The odds against a letter slipped under the door slipping under the carpet as well. Ishmael’s real name. Who this “Reader” was, and why he rated knowing who married whom. Whether single men with fortunes really needed wives. What home would be without Plumtree’s Potted Meats. How long it would take to compile a key to all mythologies. What the son of a fish looked like. Where Uncle Toby was wounded. Why anyone wanted to imagine unquiet slumbers for sleepers in quiet earth. Whether Conrad was a racist. Why Huck Finn was taken out of libraries. Which end of an egg to break. Why people read. Why they stopped reading. What it meant to be “only a novel.” What use half a locket was to anyone. Why it would be mistake not to live all you can.”
Galatea 2.2
“After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2—Richard Powers—returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing.” — Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
I began to see the web as just the latest term in an ancient polynomial expansion. Each nick on the timeline spit out some fitful precursor. Everyone who ever lived had lived at a moment of equal astonishment. Continue reading
And happiness will creep in
Found this on Twitter (@amyhoy). She thinks this might be the best internet comment she’s ever read.
John Cleese on Stupidity
Google Reminders from the browser
Google has a million little shortcuts like this but I’m damned if I can remember to use them. Key in “my reminders” in the search box and Google pops ’em up.
Bad Lip Reading: Cruz Talks Trump
Doonesbury: 2016 Republican National Convention
