Author: admin

When we last left off this topic, we were looking at the sequence “Four”, “Twelve”, “Thirty three”, “Thirty six”. The pattern here comes from the number of letters in each entry: 4, 6, 11 and 9, respectively.

And that gives us a pattern: 4/4 = 1, 12/6 = 2, 33/11 = 3, 36/9 = 4.

So what might come next in the sequence? I managed to find two answers:

Thirty
Forty five

In the first case, 30/6 = 5. In the second case, 45/9 = 5.

I wonder whether it is possible to prove whether these are the only two possible answers. Also, I wonder whether it is possible to prove anything about the sequence in general.

It is difficult to know what the impact would be of AI combined with neural implants, as a universally available capability. But as a mental exercise, suppose we were all augmented by AI so that every bit of trivia that we can find in the Wikipedia were instantly accessible in our thoughts.

In such a world, you would not need to look up the time, place, or other details of any event in human history. You would already know those things, right off the top of your head.

Would such a capability have any meaningful impact on human existence, other than completely ruining games of Trivial Pursuit? In other words, would we be more effective as humans if we already knew everything, or would that skill by itself amount to nothing truly important?

My guess is that such a capability would not have the transformative effect that some might imagine. I suspect that all the facts in the world at our fingertips are worth less than even a little bit of old fashioned wisdom.

If you know just a little bit of programming, it is amazing how much power is at your fingertips. This is because many talented people have written incredibly useful and brilliant things for the computer, and have put them out there into the world under an open-source license.

If you do a bit of searching, you can find many of these wonderful pearls of capability, usually in a github repository. And then you can download them and make use of them.

But here’s the rub: You can’t do any of this if you don’t know how to program. To be clear, you don’t need to understand how everybody’s code works. But you do need to know enough to at least put different pieces together.

I wonder whether there should be a computer science course just on this topic — learning how to mix and match code from different sources and make it all work. If there were, I would encourage all of my students to take it.

In Florida, newly updated guidelines for teaching history include a requirement that students learn how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.

In Florida, newly updated guidelines for teaching history include a requirement that students learn how the thousands of Cherokees brutally slaughtered in the “trail of tears” of the 1830s developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.

In Florida, newly updated guidelines for teaching history include a requirement that students learn how the many thirteen year old Korean girls (euphemistically called “comfort women”) who were raped by Japanese soldiers in WWII developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.

In Florida, newly updated guidelines for teaching history include a requirement that students learn how the the millions of Jews exterminated by Zyklon B gas in German concentration camps developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.

Tony Bennett, who passed away this morning, was more than a hero to me. In my mind he was a downright miracle.

I saw him in concert several times, and each time was an astonishment. In addition to being the most sensitive and emotionally intelligent interpreter in our time of the Great American Songbook, he had incredible vocal power.

I remember him, during a recent NYC concert, telling the audience how wonderful the acoustics were there at Radio City Music Hall. Then to show us what he meant, he asked the tech crew to turn off all the amplification.

He then proceeded to belt out an a cappella rendition of the Bart Howard classic In Other Words. His unamplified voice easily filled that cavernous space. And this was when the man was already in his nineties.

Until today, the romantic in me had managed to convince myself that Tony Bennett would continue to live forever. But in a way, he will. Like the man said:

      Let the music play as long as there’s a song to sing
      And I will stay younger than spring

About a week ago I posed the following lexical math challenge. Given the following sequence:

Four
Twelve
Thirty three
Thirty six

I asked what is the pattern, and what might be the next number in the sequence?

To answer the first question, note that “Four” contains 4 letters, “Twelve” contains 6 letters, “Thirty three” contains 11 letters, and “Thirty six” contains 9 letters. Dividing value by letter count, we get a linear sequence:

1 = Four / 4
2 = Twelve / 6
3 = Thirty three / 11
4 = Thirty six / 9

Given this pattern, can you figure out what might come next in the sequence?

Don’t let anyone talk you into getting “smart vegetables” for your urban garden.

They might turn out to be part of a plot.

Yesterday I talked about computer graphic systems that are able to synthesize realistic faces of people who don’t exist. They do this by looking at large numbers of real peoples’ faces, and computing all sorts of statistical data from those faces.

When faces are analyzed this way, each real person’s face ends up being represented in the computer as a single point in a high dimensional mathematical space. If two data points are near each other in that space, then they will tend to produce faces that look similar, but not quite the same.

Once this framework is set up, then to create a new realistic face you can just choose a new point in that high dimensional space. The face that you create will end up looking more like some real people and less like others, but it won’t look exactly like the face of anybody who actually exists.

To me this raises an interesting ethical question: If you are training this model on the faces of all people, then are you violating anybody’s privacy or ownership over their own appearance? Or are you just doing what we all do every day inside our heads — building a model of what a face looks like based on the people we see around us?

And if that is the case, do you then have free license to use that data to create any new faces you want? And if not, then why not?

I am confused as to why some Hollywood studios attempted to gain ownership of the likenesses of extras. The topic is timely because it is one of the issues that led to the current actors’ strike.

As I understand it, studios wanted to insert a clause into contracts that would allow them to scan the likeness of actors hired for the day — and then to retain the right to reuse that data in perpetuity.

The reason I find this puzzling has nothing to do with the ethical considerations, as large as those are. What stumps me is this: Anybody in my field of computer graphics will tell you that it is totally unnecessary.

For quite a few years the technology has existed to synthesize an extremely wide variety of highly realistic human faces. Many technical papers were published showing how to do this, long before the recent A.I. craze.

Didn’t anybody at those studios do even a little research? If they had simply talked to their own effects people, they would have learned all about these existing techniques.

I’m starting to think these studios might not be all that well run.

Bar hopping in Manhattan is more expensive than you drink it is.