Randy McDonald, and probably others, seem to have found the Afzal Amin piece baffling, so I thought I’d draft a brief explainer as follows. Afzal Amin, potential Tory MP and ex-army officer, tried to incite the EDL to stage a provocative demonstration in his heavily Muslim constituency during the campaign, while also inciting a group…
Read More More questions on the Biryani Project.Dan Lockton would probably be interested in this… The robot is this Bristol Robotics Lab project; both people in the thread at Jamie Zawinski’s I saw it in, and everyone I’ve shown it to, immediately think it looks like a cat. In fact, in a sense, they do recognise it as a cat – it’s…
Read More we’re building robotic creatures – we decided to start with the ratThere is a fascinating paper here on how people believed that there was a link between Iraq and Al-Qa’ida. Essentially, if you give people enough free-floating emotional energy, they are likely to decide that if you care so much, then there must be an explanation for the holes in your logic. It’s called inferred justification,…
Read More they told me over a drink we have ways of making you thinkIs neurogenesis perhaps the most interesting scientific discovery of the times? I rather think it is. The government minister’s version: until quite recently, we thought that once you passed a certain early age, that was it for your supply of neurons, and you would only lose them. Paradoxically, that wasn’t incompatible with learning, as ones…
Read More insane in the membrane, insane in the brain!What have we here? Via Spencer Ackerman: David Wurmser, trying to sketch the wiring in his head on a really big piece of paper. The spider chart was meant “to create a strategic picture, and that strategic picture is the foundation of policy change,” Wurmser said. “It helped you visualize, because if you saw, say,…
Read More All day long I think of things but nothing seems to satisfyI liked this comment from Chris “Chris” Williams regarding Arthur C. Clarke: What future? A better one than we’ve got: a worse on than we’d have had without him. Several million fanboys and girls grew up exposed to clear prose, opposition to nationalism, scepticism about organised religion, faith in technology, faith in humanity, and some…
Read More Appreciating ClarkeIt’s been bloody difficult to see anything of this year’s championship play-offs; apparently there’s some sort of rugby union event going on. But I did manage to see Hull and Wigan last night. Which posed a problem – which of them do I hate more? I still get abusive comments on this post from time…
Read More Blogging Rugby League: Hull 18 Wigan 21