June 10, 2018
June 10, 2018
February 15, 2018
An earlier draft of Descartes’ Meditations has been discovered, which will inevitably lead to a new round of unfunny jokes under the rubric of “Descartes’ First Draft.” I can’t wait :(
The draft is a big discovery. Camilla Shumaker at Research Frontiers reports that Jeremy Hyman, a philosophy instructor at the University of Arkansas, came across a reference to the manuscript and hied off to a municipal library in Toulouse … a gamble, but he apparently felt he had nothing left Toulouse.
And so it begins…
August 13, 2017
Inspired by fabulously wrong paint colors that Janelle Shane’s generated by running existing paint names through a machine learning system, and then by an hilarious experiment in dog breed names by my friend Matthew Battles, I decided to run some data through a beginner’s machine learning algorithm by karpathy.
I fed a list of cocktail names in as data to an unaltered copy of karpathy’s code. After several hundred thousand iterations, here’s a highly curated list of results:
Then I added to the original list of cocktails a list of Western philosophers. After about 1.4 million iterations, here’s a curated list:
Yes, we need not worry about human bartenders, cocktail designers, or philosophers being replaced by this particular algorithm. On the other hand, this is algorithm consists of a handful of lines of code and was applied blindly by a person dumber than it. Presumably SkyNet — or the next version of Microsoft Clippy — will be significantly more sophisticated than that.
July 27, 2017
April 20, 2017
Xpeditr has really overestimated the size of my wine cellar.
April 12, 2017
(An unauthorized, unapproved homage to The Cluetrain Manifesto).
A powerful global reaccommodation has begun. Corporations are rediscovering themselves in their muscular masculinity. For we are the makers, the takers, and above all else, we are the winners. Customers, employees, the needy, the vulnerable are, by definition, the losers. Each one of them would gladly trade their seat for one of the tufted leather chairs in our CEO’s office. Instead, make sure your pathetic seatbacks are returned to their upright position, your trays are stowed, and you’re buckled in. For this is your pilot speaking, and we’re ready to fly the friendly skies of “PUT YOUR HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM, MOTHERFUCKER!”
Markets are reaccommodations.
There’s the crew and there’s the screwed. Deal with it.
When jack-booted thugs rough up paying passengers and drag them from your plane, it’s time for the CEO to step up and declare that there’s two sides to every story.
There’s no customer need that cannot be met by a bag of off-brand peanuts.
Customers of course have rights. But only once they have lawyers.
Think of it like this: Boarding a airplane is like opening a shrink-wrapped product, an act that involuntarily voids all your rights. Except boarding a plane means also giving up the shreds of human dignity we didn’t already strip from you during the nudie scan, the TSA ritual ball or tit squeeze, the routine totally un-profiled examination of the darker-hued among us, the lack of sufficient seats in the boarding area, the unexplained delays, and the segregation into social strata announced over the PA. Also, I think we may have missed a spot in your rectum.
Costs have gone up while fuel prices and basic services have gone down, yet more and more people are flying. Therefore, passengers must love us more than ever. You can’t argue with math!
Virtually no other industry uses overbooking as a routine best practice because they don’t love their customers are much as we do.
“First they came for my free crappy meal, and I said nothing. Then they came for my carry-ons, and I said nothing. Then they just said ‘Fuck it’ and came for the guy sitting next to me and dragged him off the plane by the ankles. And I said something, and I video-ed it and I posted it.” Sorry, I couldn’t hear you. I’ve got a corporate reputation to maintain.
Every act of corporate brutality can be fixed by combining the power of euphemism with the audacity of neologism, catalyzed by a really expensive blue suit.
It’s great to know that we’re making our employees so proud! Right, gang? Gang?
Hey, it’s us against them, where “them” are the customers, right, gang? Oh, c’mon, gang, quit kidding around!
You know who’s the victim here? The shareholders. How about some sympathy for them, eh?
Y’know, it’d be a lot easier for us to fly empty planes and not have to deal with you all. You’re welcome. Ingrates.
Hey, catch! Here’s your guitar. Sorry-not-sorry for the crushing.
Have a bag of last year’s peanuts, on us.
1. No official affilliation with Cluetrain.
2. Thanks to Frank Scavo (@fscavo) and Alan Lepofsky (@alanlepo) for the prod and the idea.
3. Also posted at Medium
4. Photo posted to Pixabay by JayClark1. CC0 – Public Domain.
April 11, 2017
“There is nothing that has not already been said on the Internet” has zero hits at Google. Until now.
For I am the Destroyer of Paradoxes.
March 22, 2017
January 13, 2017
My conspiracy theory: The purported dossier on Trump says the Russians have been cultivating him for five years. Suppose they were pressuring him to run. As a true patriot, Trump knew how disastrous it would be to have a Russian puppet as President. So, Trump did everything he could as a candidate to make himself unelectable: in his announcement speech he called Mexicans rapists, he made fun of the disabled, he called McCain a loser for being captured. He just kept upping the ante. And then we elected him.
Put differently, let me pitch a movie idea to you. It’s The Manchurian Candidate meets The Producers.
The Manchurian Producers
No Puppet. No Puppet. You’re the Puppet.
Starring Seth Rogen.
with James Franco as “The Toup”
Opening nationwide on Jan 20.
October 3, 2016
I of course don’t know anything that you don’t about Game of Thrones. In fact, I know considerably less since I can’t keep any of the characters or backstory straight. Also, I have not read the books. And when there’s exposition explaining something like exactly why one of the guys with a scraggly beard is angry at the red-head who likes to take off her top, I check my email, see what’s up at DailyKos, and maybe get myself some Fritos.
Nevertheless, with all of the confidence of an ignorant man, I am quite certain of how it ends:
Blondie-with-Dragons mounts the Pointy Throne, frees the slaves and reforms Obamacare, and then dies, at which point the handsome dwarfy guy is given a boost and becomes the tiny perfect mayor of all of West Oreos.
Come back in a couple of years and be amaaaazed!