Comment Little death (Score 1) 71
"Orkut" is Finnish slang for orgasms (the singular is "orkku").
Comment Re:Just so everyone knows, he's talking about peni (Score 2) 37
Interesting -- while I was aware of this meaning of "junk", it didn't occur to me to equate "treasure" with "family jewels". However, "One man's penis is another man's penis" is still a little weird, or at least Siamese.
Comment Re:Banjos...not a fan... (Score 1) 101
On the plus side, you can use the disabled parking space if your banjo is clearly visible.
Comment Re:Surgeon General's warning. (Score 1) 532
If someone is drinking a large coke near you, you're not going to have to smell it on your clothes for the next 4 hours
Not necessarily, but it is much easier to spill a large drink by accident, so they should be banned as a safety measure.
Comment Re:Let them drink! (Score 5, Funny) 532
It isn't harming anybody else.
It is when the centre of mass of Earth is drifting towards North America. Won't somebody please think of orbital nutation?
Comment Re:Does it work on movies? (Score 1) 32
Yeah, because action is synonym for good. In case you feel like scoffing at the altitude of my eyebrows, consider the penis joke in the latest Silicon Valley episode -- all talk, a few diagrams, and hardly (pun intended) any action. (I almost used "epic" there, but even with this high point (pun intended) in recent TV topography, I doubt there will be Vikings writing sagas about it in the next 1000 years.)
Comment Re:now with hardware acceleration (Score 1) 32
Perchance the future advancements in AI will enable the distillation of audiovisual gobbledygook back into text.
Comment Re:In the future... (Score 1) 380
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
Comment Re:You've obviously never met my mother (Score 1) 86
Every cloud has a silver lining, except the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of iridium and strontium.
BTW, in my native language version, clouds actually have golden linings -- we either think the diffracting sunlight looks yellowish enough, or that we are worth more for IT investors (Google has set up shop here at a place called Summa, meaning sum, how's that for map-reduce?). I also wonder about the implications for thunderstorms, given the excellent conductivity of silver...
Comment Re:Oblig xkcd (Score 1) 86
I guess I might actually fuck them, depending on how my pattern recognition circuits feel about their appearance.
Comment Re:Now ... (Score 1) 86
Being a computer is great, but we don't have emotions, and sometimes that makes me sad.
Funding for iFind Kickstarter Suspended 104
An anonymous reader writes As of approximately 9AM PDT, funding for the iFind project at Kickstarter, the one with the bluetooth tags that have no battery and that harvest energy from WiFi and other radio sources, has been suspended. No word yet on how this came about.
Not an unexpected outcome since their claims of harvesting enough energy for a Bluetooth beacon from ambient wireless signals looked pretty far-fetched.
Human Language Is Biased Towards Happiness, Say Computational Linguists 86
KentuckyFC (1144503) writes The idea that people tend to use positive words more often the negative ones is now known as the Pollyanna hypothesis, after a 1913 novel by Eleanor Porter about a girl who tries to find something to be glad about in every situation. But although widely known, attempts to confirm the hypothesis have all been relatively small studies and so have never been thought conclusive.
Now a group of researchers at Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont have repeated this work on a corpus of 100,000 words from 24 languages representing different cultures around the world. They first measured the frequency of words in each language and then paid native speakers to rate how they felt about each word on a scale ranging from the most negative or sad to the most positive or happy. The results reveal that all the languages show a clear bias towards positive words with Spanish topping the list, followed by Portuguese and then English. Chinese props up the rankings as the least happy. They go on to use these findings as a 'lens' through which to evaluate how the emotional polarity changes in novels in various languages and have set up a website where anybody can explore novels in this way. The finding that human language has universal positive bias could have a significant impact on the relatively new science of sentiment analysis on social media sites such as Twitter. If there is a strong bias towards positive language in the first place, and this changes from one language to another, then that is obviously an important factor to take into account.
Now a group of researchers at Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont have repeated this work on a corpus of 100,000 words from 24 languages representing different cultures around the world. They first measured the frequency of words in each language and then paid native speakers to rate how they felt about each word on a scale ranging from the most negative or sad to the most positive or happy. The results reveal that all the languages show a clear bias towards positive words with Spanish topping the list, followed by Portuguese and then English. Chinese props up the rankings as the least happy. They go on to use these findings as a 'lens' through which to evaluate how the emotional polarity changes in novels in various languages and have set up a website where anybody can explore novels in this way. The finding that human language has universal positive bias could have a significant impact on the relatively new science of sentiment analysis on social media sites such as Twitter. If there is a strong bias towards positive language in the first place, and this changes from one language to another, then that is obviously an important factor to take into account.
Match.com, Mensa Create Dating Site For Geniuses 561
mpicpp writes in with news about a new dating opportunity for Mensa members. It takes a special person to join Mensa. For one, the elite society only takes individuals with IQ scores in the 98th percentile, meaning just 1 in 50 Americans is eligible. This exclusivity — some might say snobbery — is part of Mensa's lore. Early Mensans in Britain walked around with yellow buttons, organizational publications once referred to non-Mensa members as "Densans," and last year, a top Mensa member and tester called anyone with an IQ of 60 a "carrot." In short, you don't always join Mensa because you think you're smart. You join to be set apart from most people, who are, as one member put it: "mundane." But a new partnership between American Mensa and online dating giant Match.com offers a new, enticing reason to join the society of geniuses: true love. Beginning this week, members of the brainiac group can connect through a separate, exclusive dating service called Mensa Match. In addition, Match.com members can add a special Mensa badge to their profiles, signaling a specific interest in connecting with a single person with a confirmed genius-level IQ score.
Comment The SmartWatch is here to stay (Score 1) 427
I already have a smartwatch, but if I didn't these would be the reasons today I would get one:
(These are all real, existing apps.)
App that
or "new post on your blog", etc.
