In case you were wondering: The Technomancer Like druids, but with tech instead of nature. Technomancers are more than just skilled technicians. They are in tune with machines, connecting with them not only on an intellectual but a spiritual level. Note: A “machine”, for purposes of the technomancer, is any electronic system. A technomancer does not necessarily have any mechanical or structural engineering abilities or knowledge. But “electrical and electronic systems, computers, and artificial intelligences” is one hell of an awkward phrase. … Robotic Companion: A 1st-level technomancer may begin play with a robotic companion. This companion is one that the technomancer has built herself. Robotic companions can have up to 2 HD. Alternatively, the technomancer may have more than one robotic companion provided that the robots’ total HD don’t exceed 2. The technomancer can also cast AI friendship on other robots during play (see the spell description below.) I’m looking for a word to describe someone almost religiously devoted to technology, but I’d prefer a word that leans towards cyberpunk and away from D&D. I don’t like technomancer, and technomage is just as bad. I like server monk, but it wouldn’t make much sense to someone who didn’t know server. Technopriest is taken by the Catholics, and electroyogi and eVicar are just silly. So help me out, cyberspace.

From this collection, most of which is send ups or variations of rather tired internet memes. See also.

In an airport smoking lounge, two TSA officials take a smoke break with Sudoku books in hand. TSA 1: You know its just logic. If a computer had that puzzle, it could solve it in [pause] ten seconds. Just… poof [makes wild hand gestures]. TSA 2: Well, obviously I’m not a computer. [pause, smiles] If I were a computer, I’d have a real job.

So in the D&D thread on the Deep Blue article, I was getting a bit liberal with my misanthropist technophile rhetorical flourishes. This particular response makes me chuckle a bit: Not to attack you or anything, but you get overly dramatic over bizarre stuff. What do you mean by “This comparatively simple inert machine generated genuine panic and emotion in humanity’s best representative; in the face of the machine, we flinched first” exactly? It seems like you’re turning the frustration of one person into a species-wide defeat that we all felt — and on top of it, you really seem to relish it. It seems odd to me that you simultaneously place such great significance upon machines performing the tasks they were built to perform and such great satisfaction in humans “losing.” After I gave my colloquium on Friday, there was some discussion about how my intuitions concerning machines and technology didn’t align with most people at the talk. A certain Mr. Swenson suggested, via an illusion to Jane Goodall, that perhaps I had spent so much time around machines that I actually started to think like them . Well, if loving machines is wrong then I don’t wanna be right.

Its a few months late, but happy 10 year anniversary to Deep Blue vs Kasparov! To commemorate the event, Dennett wrote up a short, and I think painfully superficial, discussion in MIT’s Technology Review. Higher Games The verdict that computers are the equal of human beings in chess could hardly be more official, which makes the caviling all the more pathetic. The excuses sometimes take this form: “Yes, but machines don’t play chess the way human beings play chess!” Or sometimes this: “What the machines do isn’t really playing chess at all.” Well, then, what would be really playing chess? This is not a trivial question. The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess, except for one thing: computers don’t know when to accept a draw. Computers–at least currently existing computers–can’t be bored or embarrassed, or anxious about losing the respect of the other players, and these are aspects of life that human competitors always have to contend with, and sometimes even exploit, in their games. Offering or accepting a draw, or resigning, is the one decision that opens the hermetically sealed world of chess to the real world, in which life is short and there are things more important than chess to think about. This boundary crossing can be simulated with an arbitrary rule, or by allowing the computer’s handlers to step in. Human players often try to intimidate or embarrass their human opponents, but this is like the covert pushing and shoving that goes on in soccer matches. The imperviousness of computers to this sort of gamesmanship means that if you beat them at all, you have to beat them fair and square–and isn’t that just what ­Kasparov and Kramnik were unable to do? |via Reality Apologetics| I am personally convinced that humanity […]

I was linked to this study in the PLOS on the apparent spread of science denial and disinformation that has become symptomatic of the Internet Age. Below are my somewhat lengthy comments in response to Twinxor’s concerns in the D&D thread. For the Record, PLOS is a legit peer-reviewed scientific journal, but is licensed under Creative Commons, so it free and open to the public. What’s more, they allow commentary by readers. I am thinking of revising this comments and attaching them to the article, so any editing advice would be appreciated. Twinxor posted: I can live with the existence of wackos with silly beliefs. The trouble is their influence – widespread doubt of HIV’s importance is very bad, because it leads people to ignore safe sex practices and a lot more people die. As I see it, the big challenge is to demonstrate the reliability and correctness of science, which inoculates the public against conspiracy theory. This is a strange claim to make, because the job of science is to demonstrate the reliability and correctness of its claims, and at least in these cases science has already done an admirable job of justifying its conclusions. Moreover, this article demonstrates that science is already well inoculated against pseudoscience, so much so that it can incorporate pseudoscientific practice as part of its dataset. This suggests that science is not challenged by pseudoscience. Leaving aside the obviously huge problem of scientific funding, pseudoscience seems to present no epistemological problems for the status of science itself. If science is primarily an epistemological enterprise, then what’s the challenge? The answer, I think, is mentioned in the title of the paper, but seems relatively absent from the article itself: namely, the effect of the ‘Internet Era’ on scientific practice. Before internet, people were obviously free […]

I think this little snapshot of history is quite telling. How Do Post Office Machines Read Addresses?‘ Not until Christmas of 1997 did the USPS and the University of Buffalo’s Center for Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) deploy its first handwritten address-reading prototype, which rejected 85 percent of envelopes and correctly identified the address in only 10 percent of those it read with a 2 percent error rate. … Today, the large majority of letters sent through the post office are read and sorted entirely by computer. According to Srihari, current reading success rates are above 90 percent… the first human eyes to examine the envelope are those of the postal carrier approaching your mailbox.

Baka Robocup

If you haven’t been watching Flight of the Conchords’ show on HBO, you should be.