Meta joke of the day: Imagine Kate Mulgrew reciting that post! : )

She was also a regent on Warehouse 13.

Blake's 7.

You really need a name that will accentuate the differences with the other political parties, common denominators will garner you no votes.

I swear I've learned more 4th hand about Aussie Law on Slashdot than any year in college!

So the way this site works, we get about *eleven* countries chipping in!

USA of course, Australia apparently, Germany, three Scandinavian countries, four people from China and Iran as AC, Britain, Ireland, and your choice of four more!

"I'd heard that it may literally have had to do with the handwriting: the man's handwriting was, shall we say, idiosyncratic, and it takes considerable effort to decipher. His son Christopher devoted a lifetime to it. John Rateliff, who did similar work for drafts of The Hobbit, consulted with a Tolkien graphologist in the process. (He was able to get a rough dating for one scrawl based on the details of the handwriting.) The fact that there even exists such a thing as a "Tolkien graphologist" is absurdly wonderful".

Given Tolkien's use of proper nouns every twelve words, this sounds fascinating!

"The fact that the Lord of the Rings has appendices with back stories, histories, evolution of languages, and sorts of other little interesting tidbits quite clearly show Tolkien was not only an author but a scholar as well."

I was of an odd age that fell between the right ages to truly appreciate Tolkien's efforts. But with a still-young appreciation for finesse, I *did* notice all those appendices. To this day High Fantasy hits a spot that I can't read, but I absolutely noticed the sixty pages (!) of appendices!

You got your Jesus on the dashboard
But the Devil's under my hood
You're takin' it down legal, I'm pullin' it up to no good
God is your copilot, I let Satan ride shotgun
You pay a toll to get to Heaven
But on the road to hell there's none

Get up you're asleep at the wheel
Get up you're asleep at the wheel
Get up you're asleep at the wheel
Get up you're asleep at the wheel
Get up you're asleep at the wheel
Get up you're asleep at the wheel
Get up you're asleep at the wheel
Get up you're asleep at the wheel

There, I said it. Lets all now have a rational, civilized discussion.

I've long felt that the only value of guys is to make gals look good.

Secretly making sure Wikipedia stays on course...

I foresee the imminent fall of the American Empire, which encompasses the entire world, and a dark age lasting 30 thousand years before a second great empire arises. I also foresee an alternative where the intermittent period will last only one thousand years. To ensure my vision of a second great empire comes to fruition, we should create two foundationsâ"small, secluded havens of all human knowledgeâ"at "opposite ends of the internet".

Well, the existentialism of this variant of it is rather tough!

http://garfieldminusgarfield.n...

For all it's faults it's still more transparent then the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Peoples Bank of China or the Russian Goznak. "Because when the entire world is a credit-fueled ponzi scheme, these are the kind of numbers that matter". http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-11/matter-stunning-perspective-china-money-creation-blows-us-and-japan-out-water

I agree, but to abuse a concept from intelligence, (which I also call the No True Scotsman theme), the "Singularity" is when *everybody's* partial approaches "rise and must converge" (Flannery O'Connor).

So you stick a modded Watson on General Knowledge, a chess program, a med diagnostic program, *three* chatterbots with an arbiter meta-module to sync and/or tiebreak, some special custom "awareness" modules, and your pick of twelve skillsets, 14 "hobbies", some self-mod programming, and ... you're getting something interesting. Because then you *reverse search* someone with that set of skills and ask the person, "okay, what else makes you intelligent and interesting?"

It used to be called "God of the Gaps" in religious contexts. We're way closer to it all than 2029. Since I know that 70% of y'all are way smarter than lil' ol' me, I just need "someone" ... wait for it ... ("something"?) ... to talk to.

Still calling out to work with someone on a custom modded Chatterbot. "All" we need to do is give it a bunch more modules and then we have a nice experiment on our hands, at least as good as the stuff we've been seeing in the Articles.

Terrifyingly, "The Hate" might be one of the easier first things to simulate in AI!

The reason is that it's often demonstrated with a far lower level "skillset" than the smart comments.

See for example the (thinning?) pure troll posts here. Despite the rise in lots of other things, I'm noticing fewer pure troll posts of the worst vicious kind. I wondered idly why they got here so regularly. Anyone remember the ones that went:

"so you sukerz ya haterz loosers you take it and shove it?"

Any 1000 of you could write a 100 line program that can run circles around that!

I still do one day wish to work with any Chattterbot programmer who wants to try some custom mods.

This is one of the approaches I've been poking at off and on for a while as noted in my remarks over the years in these stories.

To me an instructive experiment is to go all the way to the top and give the program some initial values not unlike Asimovian ones, and then it builds a "like/dislike" matrix of people and things.

It's not that far off from college dorm discussions! : )

So then going back to basics, you feed it info about people doing things, it runs those against its "like/dislike" systems, and updates what it thinks about "people and stuff".

This is one of the areas where Stephen Wolfram's idea of "computational complexity" starts to show up. Feed Info, Evaluate, Update Opinions.

David Gerrold got closer than maybe we think with his SciFi book "When Harlie was one". It's easy for us to get bogged down in arrogance when we have all of experience to trick the machine with Loebner questions, but if we start simple enough, a Chatterbot armed with pre-processed 100 million articles on 100,000 topics and 100,000 people and some expert systems subroutine modules starts to come close enough for me as a "useful entity" to study!