lol whut

Non Transitive Dice

Proceeding clockwise around the circle, the dice with the 6's and 2's on it, called the 6-2, will beat the 5-1, the next in the circle, which in turn beats 4-0, which beats 3-3... WHICH IN TURN BEATS 6-2! Your advantage is that you will win 24 times out of 36 - that is 2 times out of 3, or a 66% advantage. So whichever dice your opponent selects - and asking someone to choose first is part of the strategy - you take the next dice backwards in the circle.

Asset forfeiture

So, you can lose your property without ever being charged for a crime:

Over the past three decades, it has become routine in the United States for state, local, and federal governments to seize the property of people who were never even charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. Nearly every year, according to Justice Department statistics, the federal government sets new records for asset forfeiture. And under many state laws, the situation is even worse: State officials can seize property without a warrant and need only show “probable cause” that the booty was connected to a drug crime in order to keep it, as opposed to the criminal standard of proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, owners of seized property all too often have a heavier burden of proof than the government officials who stole their stuff.

As with the case a year ago involving the girl strip-searched for ibuprofen, that there's even a controversy about this indicates that America's experiment with self-government has finally failed.

Metal Monday

let's get a little... mellow.

people on the river are happy to give

Cyberdemons attack

the 3E website.

Who needs a radio?

Tip the driver

Tip the Pizza Guy

fruit

Past

If Back to the Future were made today, Marty would have travelled back in time to 1980.

Kottke

Also

getting strong now won't be long now

Lectures

If there's anything uniting faculty on different sides of the aisle nowadays it's disapproval of large lecture courses. To the Left, lectures are authoritarian; to the Right, they are lowbrow. Better the egalitarian or members-only atmosphere of the seminar, they say. To anyone who is just "agin' the guv'ment," lecture courses suffer the stigma of administrative approval, because deans and provosts love lectures as cheap and efficient ways to deliver information.

That is, if the courses succeed: many alumni remember only the professor's yellowing notes or the students' back-row shenanigans and not any actual learning. Nor is the future of lecturing bright, according to some experts, who say that nothing so prehistoric as a lecturer's voice could possibly penetrate the digital habits of Generation Net.

But that's not been my experience. Course evaluations--and I've read more than a few--show that students love pointed, provocative well-delivered lectures. They appreciate and respect a master narrative (the Left's bugaboo), if only to give them something to rebel against. They can see through a professor's bias and they don't even mind it, as long as the professor acknowledges it. They appreciate common touches such as references to popular culture (the bane of the Right) as long as they are up-to-date. They want their electronic images, but not without a commanding voice behind them.

I love teaching lecture courses, but then, when I was a student, I loved taking lecture courses. I was a sucker for lectures from my first day of college, because I was already infatuated with the beauty of words, and a good lecture is nothing if not an art form. Efficient communication it may be, but a lecture can no more be reduced to the delivery of information than a Ferrari can be reduced to fuel injection. A lecture aims at imparting not just what is true but what is beautiful.

In praise of big lectures

Cleverbot

User: I see a little silohouetto of a man.
Cleverbot: Scaramouch, Scaramouch, will you do the Fandango.
User: Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me.
Cleverbot: Galileo Galileo Galileo Galileo figraro magnifico-o-o-o.
User: I'm just a poor boy nobody loves me.
Cleverbot: He's just a poor boy from a poor family.
User: Spare him his life from this monstrosity.
Cleverbot: Easy come, easy go, will you let me go?
User: Bismillah! No, we will not let you go.
Cleverbot: Let me go!
User: Bismillah! No, we will not let you go.
Cleverbot: Let me go!

User: Can you play chess?
Cleverbot: Yes, would you like to play chess now?
User: Yes.
Cleverbot: 1. E4.
User: FACE COCK.
Cleverbot: Do you believe in god?

Cleverbot

Linus' thought for the week

Super Mario Saturday

And, best of all, a Chinese knock-off of Super Mario Galaxy.

The internet remains weird

1. Nic Cage as Everyone

2. Running from Camera

3.

Dying Languages

For many of these communities, the oral tradition is at the heart of their culture. The stories they tell are creative works as well as communicative. Unlike the languages with celebrated written traditions, such as Sanskrit, Hebrew and Ancient Greek, few indigenous communities – from the Kallawaya tribe in Bolivia and the Maka in Paraguay to the Siberian language of Chulym, to India's Arunachal Pradesh state Aka group and the Australian Aboriginal Amurdag community – have recorded their own languages or ever had them recorded. Until now. Turin launched the World Oral Literature Project earlier this year with an aim to document and make accessible endangered languages before they disappear without trace.

He is trying to encourage indigenous communities to collaborate with anthropologists around the world to record what he calls "oral literature" through video cameras, voice recorders and other multimedia tools by awarding grants from a £30,000 pot that the project has secured this year. The idea is to collate this literature in a digital archive that can be accessed on demand and will make the nuts and bolts of lost cultures readily available. As useful as this archive will be for Western academic study – the World Oral Literature Project is convening for its first international workshop in Cambridge this week – Turin believes it is of vital importance that the scheme also be used by the communities he and his researchers are working with.

The project suggested itself when Turin was teaching in Nepal. He wanted to study for a PhD in endangered languages and, while discussing it with his professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, was drawn to a map on his tutor's wall. The map was full of pins of a variety of colours which represented all the world's languages that were completely undocumented. At random, Turin chose a "pin" to document. It happened to belong to the Thangmi tribe, an indigenous community in the hills east of Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. "Many of the choices anthropologists and linguists who work on these traditional field-work projects take are quite random," he admits. "There's a lot of serendipity involved."

The Beckoning Silence

come on baby, bite that sucker

Rockets, space travel, space fighting, etc

The definitive website: Atomic Rocket. Warning: it will eat your afternoon.

Related.

Genius

Has any fake quote ever been more accurate?

Tuberville: But that’s totally what we’re going to run at least thirty times a game. Y’all know I don’t need an offense. We need 22 points, boys, and we’ll play football the way we always have. We’ll hold the ball for as long as possible. If I have to take knees in the third quarter, I will. We’ll get a safety or return a blocked extra point. Seriously, we’ll make no attempt to score whatsoever. There’s no telling what happens when you try to do that stuff.

Tommy Tuberville answers a few questions