I’d hate to distract you from all the goodies in our Gülen-flecked July issue, but you may be interested to know that our man in France Profonde, Tim King, has kicked his Prospect blog back into life just in time for the beginning of the French presidency of the EU. He’s writing regularly on defence, Sarkozy, Europe and other such matters over here. And check out intermittently amusing Onion-style news spoofing over at new site Newsbiscuit—I particularly enjoyed this report, on Gideon Gono, head of the Bank of Zimbabwe, being forced to write a letter to Robert Mugabe explaining why the country has yet again failed to meet its inflation target of 1,000,000%.
Archive for the 'Elsewhere on the web' Category
Radar magazine investigates how much having a famous parent can help you by, among other experiments, trying to arrange a political internship for a fictional daughter of George Lucas. Interestingly, George Lucas’s non-fictional daughter Amanda is a martial artist.
How the web was won—a history of the internet by the people who invented it.
Even Garfield cartoonist Jim Davies enjoys Garfield minus Garfield.
Luc Sante has many books, including, he says, “no fewer than five copies of André Breton’s Nadja, not even all in different editions” and “books in three languages I don’t actually read.”
How to win the New Yorker cartoon caption contest. (Sadly, only Americans can enter.)
101 movies to avoid watching before you die, from Crooked Timber.
Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines, likes to think of himself as the scourge of Westminster; his blog is replete with examples of villainous or shameful behaviour by members of what Staines sees as the inherently corrupt members of Britain’s political classes. Today, however, Staines himself has become the story; the Independent’s Pandora diary reports that last week Staines found himself up in a magistrates’ court on drink-driving charges. It appears that Staines had over-indulged at a reception hosted by the free-market think tank the Adam Smith Institute, where, he says, “The booze is usually pretty good.”
Staines is no stranger to the sauce, as any visitor to his blog will soon learn. But Guido Fawkes, whose tireless cynicism and fierce plague-on-all-your-houses libertarian independence used to make his site one of the most entertaining and essential reads in the British political blogosphere, has in recent months become little more than an attack dog for the Tories, and has become far less interesting as a result. Might all that Margaux have dulled Guido’s instincts? Meanwhile, one of Guido’s main rivals for the most-read British political blog, politicalbetting.com, goes from strength to strength.
Funnily enough, as I write not a single commenter at Guido’s site has brought up the Independent story; this is not a group usually renowned for its reticence. It may simply tell us something about the lack of crossover between the Independent’s readership and the increasingly partisan Guido Fawkes’s constituency.
It’s been doing the rounds on the internet this week, but the comic genius that is Garfield without Garfield is such that we’d be doing you a disservice not to link to it.
The idea is simple—Garfield comic strips with Garfield removed, leaving us just with the images, words and thoughts of Jon Arbuckle, a man who in the absence of his pet cat is revealed to be a desperate loner, a crazed psychopath—or possibly even a Zen master.
Putting in an early bid for the “putting the parodists out of business” blog post of the year award comes this entry from Melanie Phillips, decrying the west’s recognition of Kosovo’s independence. The money quote comes in the very first sentence:
The decision by Britain, America and certain other European countries to recognise Kosovo as an independent state is mind-blowingly stupid and suicidal and of a piece with their obvious determination to capitulate in the war for civilisation.
… but the rest’s not half bad either.
What was I thinking? Humans! So damn irrational. Elizabeth Kolbert explains.
Life in Mono. In one of life’s cruel ironies, music critic Nick Coleman has lost the hearing in one ear—and with it his ability to listen.
Valentine’s day is over for another year, but just as single women were breathing easily again, I’m going to have to bring up Lori Gottlieb’s article, Marry Him!, from the March 2008 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Since Gottlieb’s article appeared on the magazine’s website last week, it has triggered the type of howls of wild rage from female bloggers usually reserved for mommy-wars combatant and fellow Atlantic contributor Caitlin Flanagan.
Gottlieb’s thesis is that single thirtysomething women shouldn’t hold out for Mr Right. “My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection,” she writes. “What I and many women who hold out for true love forget is that we won’t always have the same appeal that we may have had in our 20s and early 30s.” And “ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and… most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).” In other words, don’t leave it too late girls!
Despite high-profile success stories like Deep Blue’s chess victory over Garry Kasparov in 1997, the artificial intelligence project has been a tale of failure ever since its inception in the 1950s, at least when judged by the high standards that AI pioneers set themselves in the early years: witness Marvin Minsky’s famous declaration, in 1967, that “Within a generation… the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved.” (The field has had much more success in creating “domain-specific” intelligences, of which Deep Blue can be seen as an example, and has also contributed greatly to the revival of mind and consciousness as central philosophical concerns.)
A fascinating article in Wired tells the tragic story of two young AI pioneers who during the 1990s and 2000s attempted to kick some life back into the ailing field. In 1996, a young researcher named Pushpinder Singh (who happened to be working under Minsky) published a paper called “Why AI Failed,”which called for a return to the integrated approach to building intelligence that had driven the field in its early years, and away from piecemeal, domain-specific research. Bill Gates, among others, commented approvingly on the essay. Singh went on to create “Open Mind Common Sense,” his attempt to harness open-source methodology to build a huge database of “commonsense” propositions that could be used as the foundation of a new form of artificial intelligence. Singh was set to be appointed a professor at MIT to move the project on—but early in 2006 committed suicide.
Four weeks earlier, the disturbed maverick Chris McKinstry, the second subject of the Wired piece, had also killed himself. McKinstry, an outsider who had a history of mental illness and suicide attempts, was behind an AI project called Mindpixel which used a similar approach to Open Mind Common Sense. Spurned by the academic establishment and a laughing stock for many in the online community, McKinstry had nevertheless proved himself a serious and original contributor to the AI field, and his project eventually garnered 1.5m submissions.
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