Monday, November 26, 2012

Techno Babble



Because Google's speech recognition is so terrible (and maybe because of Craig Ferguson's accent), the "interactive transcript" for the Youtube video "Best Of Craig Ferguson Moments With Ladies Compilation Vol.7" (above) reads like a poem by a nihilistic narrator in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that governance has fled. In other words, the transcript reads more like the lyrics from Godspeed You Black Emperor's "The Dead Flag Blues" (below) than a verbatim account of a talk show host flirting with actresses by tricking them into uttering double entendres.


I've separated the wheat from the chaff in the transcript only by deleting words and adding punctuation plus capitalization so that you can more easily see the hidden poet lurking in the code at Google Headquarters. There is a server somewhere in the recesses of the dungeon basement at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California that came up the source material for the poem below. All I did was edit it down to a more manageable length.

Senator laws about the media beat.
The other way of knowing?

Anti-tank poetry at sidebar.
Hateful kids in the country
Sitting in weird blood spots
You know I know
A dog searched 
(I was there)
Was easy for dogs for months
Cigarette companies have fun 
Trade conflict suggests it may be
The interests of the peace at heart.
Medicaid spots are booking.
Is that what candidates to Mexico
decided not to waste?
God is like an icon
In all my breasts
The left claimed
I was for a while with friends with compromise
Spit on
Well I'm not going to be doing anything about it
All hunters like trying to help you
Since we're using all
Everywhere handed down
Next year degenerated into state religion
Brain leaving backstage
With your words
You know they were like the roadside unanimity in Virginia
Infected and getting older
That was a physics applied
Health care
Gray hair
Seeing how it fits in there
Too few building incidentally,
Everyone in the combined room
Because I'm not charismatic
I can't handle it.
President on holiday
Your citizenship has married him
Here's the thing: 
It would never work; 
It is going to.

My impulse to seek meaning in the gibberish spewed out by youtube's terrible interactive transcript feature reminds me of the way some users of the computer program ELIZA became very attached to the advice that chatterbot software was manufacturing for them. ELIZA was a program written in the mid-60s so the code had to be simple. Consequently, the programmers choose to simulate a Rogerian psychiatrist, i.e. a doctor that responds to any symptom reported by the patient by asking a meta-question about it. For example, if the patient reports a bad relationship with his or her spouse then the program/doctor responds by asking why the patient has a bad relationship with his or her spouse using simple pattern-matching. Some people would quickly see through the artificiality of this but others got caught up in the exchange and treated it as a real conversation with a human and not a machine.
The lesson, as always, is that we are still a long ways from the technological singularity but the human impulse to anthropomorphize is a strong one.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Uhhhh...

I can watch a movie and identify a minor actor in his first appearance onscreen despite makeup, costume, and actorly affectations. I can even list earlier movies he was in with a rough timeline. But if you plop me down at a party where I have to identify someone I've encountered a couple times before in a different social setting I have no chance of recognizing their face, let alone putting a name to it or remembering where we've met. This results in conservations littered with a lot of mumbling and generalities as I try to figure out how this person knows me. I think its a condition called aphasia or agnosia or something, I can't remember.


Saturday, November 17, 2012

The Little Mongrel



Look at this dog
Isn’t she fat?
Wouldn’t you think that her diet’s complete?
Wouldn’t you think she’s a girl,
A girl who has everything?

She’s got treats, and snacks, and biscuits.
She’s got big and small kibble galore.
Peanut-butter cranberry pills?
She gets plenty!
But who cares
She’s a dog
She wants more

She wants to be where the people are
Sitting at the kitchen table
Using her front paws to – what’s that word again?
Oh yeah – eat!

Begging at feet, you only get scraps
Thumbs are required for lunching, munching.
Scarfing down a big hunk of – what’s that word again?
Meat!

Up where they sup, up where they feast
Up where they spend all day crunching treats
Wish I could be
Part of that world


Thursday, November 15, 2012

Petraeus's Private Part Proves Peter Principle

Former CIA director David Petraeus resigned a week ago because of an affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell.  Apparently Broadwell broke into Petraeus's Gmail account when she suspected Petraeus was having a second affair with a third woman, Jill Kelley. Then she sent Kelley e-mails telling Kelley to stay away from her man. Kelley reacted by contacting her friend in the FBI, triggering an investigation that forced Petraeus' hand.

Petraeus's inability to conceal his affair may be a blessing in disguise for America. He made three major mistakes that betray a lack of crucially important characteristics the head of the Central Intelligence Agency should have.

First, Petraeus could not resist a compromising affair despite all that was at stake: his career, his marriage, national security, his relationship with his two children, etc. In other words, he let his sex drive jeopardize everything that could possibly mean something to him. Any man with as much power as the head of the CIA should have mountains more self-control.

Second, Petraeus chose to associate with someone who demonstrated an abject failure to act discreetly. Apparently, Broadwell had started acting like "a shameless self-promoting prom queen," following Petraeus around and photo-bombing his pictures. She followed that up by sending those e-mails to Kelley which lead to them getting caught. The director of the CIA absolutely must be a better judge of character than that. He (or she!) must be able to tell who can keep a secret. If someone can't be discreet then you shouldn't be working with them, let alone having sex with them.

And third, Petraeus had little to no proficiency with computer-based espionage which is kind of a big deal now that ALL information is on computers. I mean, the man was the chief spook in America and he used a Gmail account to arrange his clandestine romance! That's not someone you want knowing state secrets.


Let's go over the losers and winners of this scandal:

Losers
  • Foreign intelligence agencies: They missed an opportunity to blackmail an elite-level intelligence chief because they didn't clue in to Petraeus's affair first. Now some spy is back in Russia getting tortured by Putin for failing to exploit this American weakness.
  • David Petraeus: Lost his job, wife, and high status. The best he can hope for now is a Cialis endorsement like Bob Dole had with Viagra where he talks about having the "energy" to keep up with a 40 year-old in his sixties <wink wink nod nod cash money>.
  • The reputation for discretion of American Generals working in Afghanistan: Two years ago General Stanley McChrystal couldn't get his aides or himself to keep their mouth shut about how loony Joe Biden is when talking with journalists from noted hippie magazine Rolling Stone. Naturally this resulted in him losing his job. Petraeus ended up being named as McChrystal's replacement and now he's lost his job, too. And the guy who took over in Afghanistan when Petraeus moved on to the CIA is currently being investigated for romantic e-mails with the same Kelley who reported Broadwell's threats. What's with these high-level American military commanders failing to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour?
  • The Pentagon Brain Trust: Petraeus was the Pentagon's wunderkind, attracting glowing praise from a broad swathe of commentators for restoring some level of respectability to American military efforts in the Middle East. But now the poster boy is gone and with him the only brain to run a semi-successful counter-insurgency campaign since armies could get away with mass genocide. The Peter Principle is the concept that your merit eventually causes you to get promoted to a job you can't handle. That may have happened here with Petraeus moving up the ladder until he was doing intelligence and not the military stuff he was best at, then having that blow up in his face when he couldn't handle the change in lifestyle and turning to an affair as consolation. At least his incompetence wasn't exploited by America's enemies (as far as we know).
Winners
  • The FBI: Finally America's internecine institutional squabbles produced something of merit for once. I'm sure the agents at the FBI involved with the Petraeus investigation exchanged many a high-five over the fact that they were going to embarrass their archrival but the result was good for American even if the Bureau's motives may have been ulterior. The FBI leveraged their good fortune by waiting until election day to tell the White House about the impending scandal to curry favour with the President.
  • Gmail: If it's good enough for the CIA, it's good enough for you. And there's no such thing as bad publicity.
  • Whichever major arms producer hires Petraeus as a consultant: He can share insider information with his new employer about what the Pentagon is going to be looking to buy in the future and/or provide the latest on corporate counter-espionage techniques.
  • The British tabloids: The UK media is so good at covering scandals, especially sex scandals. They beat a lot of American papers to the punch by gathering juicy "insider accounts" from hangers-on trashing the main actors in this mess then blending those quotes with dozens of photos of Petraeus and Broadwell smiling while sitting next to each other. You just know this is going over great with their readership at home since British people are so perverted.
  • Paula Broadwell: Now sales of her Petraeus biography are going to go through the roof so that people can comb through it to look for double entendres, foreshadowing, and hidden meanings. "All In: The Education of David Petraeus" is still out in hardcover and available in paperback starting December 11, 2012, just in time to make the perfect Christmas gift for your mistress! And Broadwell was already retired from the army anyway. Maybe she knew what she was doing when she sent all those angry e-mails to Jill Kelley. After all, why send threatening e-mails to a potential "other woman" when you already are another woman? Isn't that just inviting scrutiny? Is the position of mistress that coveted that you need to stake out your ground even if it risks bringing a national sex scandal down on your heads? Methinks Harvard grads like Broadwell aren't that stupid.











Sunday, November 11, 2012

Better Days

I took these pictures today (November 10, 2012) at my local sporting goods store. Do you notice anything odd about the products pictured?





To me, what jumps out is the lack of "CLEARANCE 70% OFF" stickers on them. Considering recent headlines like "Lance Armstrong's stripped seven Tour de France titles will go vacant, global cycling body rules", "The Lance Armstrong doping scandal: What's next?", and "Effigy of drugs cheat Lance Armstrong is burned at the stake after being chosen as celebrity guy at bonfire party," isn't it time to consider putting Livestrong merchandise on sale? I mean, it's not like they're still trying to sell Michael Vick jerseys at dog pounds in and around Atlanta for exorbitant prices like this.

Let's face facts: $34.99 is a lot for a simple grey t-shirt. You could put God's Own Truth on the front of a grey t-shirt and I still wouldn't pay $34.99 (plus tax) for it. If instead you put a link on the t-shirt to someone who was called a "serial cheat who led the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen" by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) then I'm going to be willing to pay even less. Why would I pay extra to walk around dressed up like an ironic advertisement for disgrace?

You'll notice the Nike logo is on the Livestrong merchandise too. If I'm Nike, I'm trying to blot out any societal memory of the Lance Armstrong/Nike link ASAP. Nike should be paying retailers to burn this stuff. The company's whole image is built around the concept of training hard to be better, not consuming drugs to be better. E.g., you'll notice no one gets a syringe filled with horse testosterone stabbed into their ass in this ad spot:


That's because Livestrong isn't short for "Live strong thanks to the power of steroids!"

The best before date on the Livestrong brand was when the USADA banned Mr. Armstrong for life and stripped him of all his titles. That happened back in August. Any leftover merchandise should have been shipped to Africa with the "New England Patriots - Super Bowl XLVI Champs" hats by now. Instead, it's being hawked shamelessly at a premium.

What has happened to our nation's favourite Corporate Blood Machine when it lets itself be smeared by association like this? Just because it took the USADA 14 years to figure out Mr. Armstrong was cheating doesn't mean it should take Nike that long to react to the news. Indeed, they should have found out first; their private investigation division is probably much more well-funded than the USADA. I just don't get it.

P.S. If you need the XXL then you might only be "Living Strong" in the most figurative of senses

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Bills After-Action Report - 2012 - Game 8

That felt generic. Like the best word to describe that game would be "nondescript".

The bad team lost in pedestrian fashion to the good team. (Naturally.) The good team was favoured by 11 points at home and won by 12. (As expected.) The stereotypical bad team had to settle for field goals, faded at the end of the game, and lost the turnover battle. (Of course.) The stereotypical good team controlled the clock, recorded more pass and run yardage, and converted more first downs. (As anticipated.) The next day the sun rose.

The home fans got to cheer and were home in time for dinner. They didn't fight in the parking lot and no snow was in their weather forecast.

Sure, it was close for a while in a meh sort of way, but the beat writers could have written 90% of their game story before kickoff if they wanted. [Ed. note: They do that anyway. They probably had a couple paragraphs down on Wednesday afternoon already about Houston spoiling Mario Williams's return blah blah blah Ryan Fitzpatrick still struggling with accuracy blah blah blah uninspired play-calling blah blah blah failure to convert on third down blah blah blah breakdowns in the secondary blah blah blah moral victory against an elite team blah blah blah taking stock at the halfway point of the season blah blah blah playoff hopes fading fast blah blah blah next game is against archrival etc etc etc. God I hate writers.].  When Buffalo "stormed back" with those two field goals to be within one going into halftime it was the most forgettable and then quickly forgotten of rebuttals.

Even the Texans seemed to have a strong sense of ennui about the whole thing, like they were only there because of contractual obligations and not because they had any intrinsic desire to defeat the Buffalo Bills at a game of American football. The Texans didn't put more into that game than was really necessary and they knew what was necessary was not very much. If you don't beat yourself when playing the Bills then you don't have much to worry about and we got to enjoy a game plan built around that concept. It was a statement game for the Texans if a yawn counts as a statement. Or maybe it was a trap game for the Texans but someone on the Bills sideline forgot to actually set the damned trap. Probably Chan Gailey since he couldn't play the "Nobody Believes In Us!" card if his meager life depended on it.


Next week the Bills are on the road again as double-digit underdogs. Let's hope they can at least lose in an entertaining fashion.