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Archive for the 'Life' Category
Animation: Simon’s Cat ‘Let Me In!’
Nice little animation about a cat that becomes more and more desperate to get indoors.
Somebody get the cat a key please…
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Comedy: Big Train Working Class
This is definitely one of “Big Train’s” all time classics.
In this sketch they are spoofing Hitchcock’s “Birds”…
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Joseph Weizenbaum is dead
Joseph Weizenbaum died yesterday in Berlin as a result of a stroke at the age of 85.
Throughout his life he has provided many outstanding contributions to computer science and AI. After he created the first banking computer in the world while working for General Electric he took up a position at the MIT as professor for applied and political science. In 1966 he published “ELIZA” – his best know work – and the first computer program demonstrating natural language processing. His academic contributions include the creation of the SLIP (symmetric List Processor) programming language and research on pointers, list structures and garbage collection schemes.
Over the years he also became one of the strongest critics of computer science and a society that blindly believes into technology. His influential book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation” displayed his grown ambivalence towards computer technology. Many concepts from this book have by now become common understandings like, for example, how programmers are seen by society or his critics of the promises by AI.
In one of his last mails “Joseph Weizenbaum” wrote: (translated from German)
“…our death is the last service we can provide to the world: Would we not go out of the way the following generations would not need to re-create human culture. Culture would become fixed, unchangeable and die. And with the death of culture humanity would also perish…“
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Humor: Batman sues Hollywood
It’s not easy to be a superhero. Everybody knows you wherever you go and expects you to act like one all the time.
This lifelong pressure has forced the true Batman aka Lee Philips to sue Hollywood for continuously misrepresenting his life and for its completely unrealistic portrayal of his person…
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Cartoon: Tales from the outsourcing industry
Another great Geek & Poke cartoon this one is about outsourcing based on an article from Forbes magazine last week that predicts an end to India’s cost advantage by 2015…
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Opinion: Rants and Raves
While we wait for the results to come in from Texas and Ohio take a moment, turn off and away from all the well shaped speaches you might tonight hear again. Today its 75 years ago that Franklin D. Roosevelt held his inauguration speech, his speech to seal the “new deal“. FDR’s “new deal” was [...]
