Pictures of a long dead prophet and caricatures of top officials and warlords. Versus images of real sexually victimized children.

One image is political speech, the other are sexual scenes with those who cannot give consent.

Both are images of course, but images can capture all manner of human experience, from the banal to the brutal.

As with everything in international relations, you have to look at the actions of international actors, and not their words. Because talk is cheap, and action costs money and lives.

It's about power. The fact that Muslims - Sunni Muslims - are slaughtered in great numbers by the jihadis shows it's about something other than defending Islam or Muslims.

Government and religion are ancient and potentially competing power centers. The convenience of Islam to a potential king is that it combines the two power centers into one. So, the wannabe king can rally followers by saying "Fight for God and religion!" instead of "Fight for me, a narcissistic psychopath!" In failed (or decapitated) states, the most effective of these power-hungry actors wins the prize of the throne.

To paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr.: "[There are those] who claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views."

Government subsidies just jack up the price for everyone. It benefits the poor, harms the middle class, has minimal impact on the wealthy.

FYI: That is what Mumia Abu Jamal did to the wounded Danny Faulkner, but with a less efficient shot.

For those Mumia fans.

And this is all good of course, in terms of deep learning. But how does the average person then use that system to do something useful?

It seems to me that trying to come up with interfaces that are easily understood while allowing us to translate our algorithms into instructions that the computer can execute (in the context of the formal system that it is) is the best way to make the device as useful as possible to as many people as possible.

Thinking about new paradigms in computing is great; doing the Big Think is essential for technological progress; but in the meantime, how to maximize the productivity of the typical programmer? Are those "woolly" interfaces then so bad?

Creating the "woolly" interface between the human and the formal system is a quite amazing and useful feat. All hail the compiler / OS writers?

This has to do with Dijkstra's rejection of trying to learn new concepts with analogies to existing concepts we already know. I'd read an essay of his on the same subject some years ago. From the linked Dijkstra essay:

"The above tried to capture the most common way in which we seem to cope with novelty: when faced with something new and unfamiliar we try to relate it to what we are familiar with. In the course of the process we invent the analogies that enable us to do so.

It is clear that the above way of trying to understand does not work too well when we are faced with something so radically new, so without precedent, that all analogies we can come up with are too weak and too shallow to be of great help. A radically new technology can create such circumstances and the wide-spread misunderstanding about programming strongly suggests this has happened with the advent of the automatic computer.

There is another way of approaching novelty but it is practised more more rarily. Apparently it does not come "naturally" since its application seems to require a lot of training. In the other way one does not try to relate something new to one's past experience - aware of the fact that that experience, largely collected by accident could well be inadequate. [...] To ease that process of liberation it might be illuminating to identify the most common metaphors and analogies and to see why they are so misleading.

I think anthropomorphism is the worst of all. [...]

I skip the numerous confusions created by calling programming formalisms "languages", except a few examples. [...]

And now we have the fad of making all sorts of systems and their components "intelligent" or "smart". It often boils down to designing a wooly man-machine interface that makes the machine as unlike a computer as possible: the computer's greatest strength - the efficient embodiment of a formal system - has to be disguised at great cost."

12,125 PSI pressure at that depth. Surface pressure is 14.7 PSI.

1) Source for ocean depth pressure at 8145m.
2) Source for atmospheric pressure at earth's surface

It's totally dark down there. No light except the occasional bioluminescence. It's like an off-world environment. Makes me wonder where else life can exist.

It's fascinating but it's not C. elegans. It doesn't reproduce. It doesn't die. It's not alive.

The sensors are implemented in large, electro-mechanical hardware. Not biochemical systems. It has no telomeres. No cells.

Humans have several subsystems: digestive, endocrine, pulmonary (pneumatic and hydraulic), muscular, skeletal, nervous. If they manage to create an electro-mechanical system to mimic the nervous subsystem, it's just that - mimicking the subsystem. It would be an amazing feat, and what's been done here is fascinating, but we're still quite some distance away from stating that a human - or C. elegans - is 2^n nand gates.

Is something that mimics a nervous subsystem via an electro-mechanical system equivalent to the nervous system? Be it the 302 neurons of the C. elegans or the approximately 100 billion of the H. sapiens? It might become very intelligent... more intelligent than us... and then we'd have a problem... Frankenstein didn't appreciate being locked in his form...

Would it really feel emotions? Pain, rage, joy, fear, ennui? Or is it just mimicking them?

Fascinating stuff.

Bjarne Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language", updated for C++11 (4th edition). Seriously. His books are surprisingly easy to read, yet information dense. Because it covers the standard template library and the current paradigms, the information will apply to the interpreted languages. This is if you know the basics of programming, and it really helps have done a bit of C++. He's got another book that's an overview of C++, if you're completely unfamiliar with the language.

For books "about" software, try 'Joel On Software' by Joel Spolsky. I liked it.

I have "JavaScript The Definitive Guide" by Flanagan, but I keep hearing "JavaScript The Good Parts" by Crockford is an easy an informative read. The Definitive Guide is great but it kind of reads like a textbook. I've not read 'The Good Parts' but that's the impression I got from this site.

"Code Complete", "The Mythical Man Month", "The Psychology of Computer Programming" are the standard "about programming" books which are commonly recommended.

"Computer Networks" by Tannenbaum is interesting, although it can get a bit dense at time. It is a textbook.

Animated gif of the probe's path, from launch to rendezvous.

Maybe in the rec. or comp. hierarchy for the more staid groups, but in the alt. hierarchy, especially in the controversial areas, definitely not. It simply wasn't done. Also, I was able to pick an anonymous login when I got my school account. Maybe later, people were assigned firstinitial_lastname@school.edu (probably mid to late 90s when computer accounts became more common), but then one would have to be much more judicious about which groups one posted to.

Making a credible threat against someone's life ought not to be treated like a prank. I've frequented the deeper sewers of Usenet, before the web came to universities, and that simply was not done. Nor was posting anyone's personal information. It was crossing a line. Granted people were much more guarded about their personal information as it was considered folly to post it. But the online world has changed and so has access to information.

Secondly, holding individuals accountable for making credible death threats against other individuals and posting others' personal information online has little in common with political opposition to a totalitarian government.

1) There is the concept of physical attraction. Looking at a woman's breasts or thighs or buttocks and being attracted. Versus looking at a man's buttocks, biceps or chest and being attracted.

2) There are simple measurable physical tests for both attraction and arousal.

For a bisexual, he can probably be aroused by another man and get an erection. For a pure heterosexual, this is simply not going to happen.

I'm sure there are porn stars who have such will and control over their erections that they can generate an erection on demand. But my suspicion is most mail porn stars are bisexuals. Ron Jeremy said, "At any given time there are about 24 reliable woodsmen, guys who keep good erections in the American porn scene. You know, myself, Randy West, Peter North, Tom Byron." But let's say they are pure hetero - that's 24 people he's talking about in the 300 million strong US population.

You're right in that there is a lot of variation in sexuality. Serial killers are aroused by murdering the objects of their attraction. I've seen estimates of up to 50 active serial killers in the US at any one time.

I'm sure there is pretty much any variation of sexuality out there one can imagine. In tiny numbers. Focusing on those instead of the larger groups is an inability to see the forest because of the trees.