Comic Relief
Published on 16 Mar 2009Doctor Who Comic Relief Special starring Rowan Atkinson, Richard E Grant, Hugh Grant, Jonathan Pryce and Joanna Lumley.
December 15, 2017
Rowan Atkinson is Doctor Who | Comic Relief
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December 13, 2017
Coming way too soon
Charles Stross is a highly dependable source of nightmare fuel in his SF/horror writings. He’s just as disturbing when he points out real developments about to go mainstream:
AI assisted porn video is, it seems, now a thing. For those of you who don’t read the links: you can train off-the-shelf neural networks to recognize faces (or other bits of people and objects) in video clips. You can then use the trained network to edit them, replacing one person in a video with a synthetic version of someone else. In this case, Rule 34 applies: it’s being used to take porn videos and replace the actors with film stars. The software runs on a high-end GPU and takes quite a while — hours to days — to do its stuff, but it’s out there and it’ll probably be available to rent as a cloud service running on obsolescent bitcoin-mining GPU racks in China by the end of next week.
(Obvious first-generation application: workplace/social media sexual harassers just got a whole new toolkit.)
But it’s going to get a whole lot worse.
What I’m not seeing yet is the obvious application of this sort of deep learning to speech synthesis. It’s all very well to fake up a video of David Cameron fucking a goat, but without the bleating and mindless quackspeak it’s pretty obvious that it’s a fake. Being able to train a network to recognize the cadences of our target’s intonation, though, and then to modulate a different speaker’s words so they come out sounding right takes it into a whole new level of plausibility for human viewers, because we give credence to sensory inputs based on how consistent they are with our other senses. We need AI to get the lip-sync right, in other words, before today’s simplistic AI-generated video porn turns really toxic.
(Second generation application: Hitler sums it up, now with fewer subtitles)
There are innocuous uses, of course. It’s a truism of the TV business that the camera adds ten kilograms. And we all know about airbrushing/photoshopping of models on magazine covers and in adverts. We can now automate the video-photoshopping of subjects so that, for example, folks like me don’t look as unattractive in a talking-heads TV interview. Pretty soon everyone you see on film or TV is going to be ‘shopped to look sexier, fitter, and skinnier than is actually natural. It’ll probably be built into your smartphone’s camera processor in a few years, first a “make me look fit in selfies” mode and then a “do the same thing, only in video chat” option.
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December 10, 2017
Political hysteria as a tool of persuasion
David Harsanyi on the way the Democrats are reacting to the apocalyptic news that the Republicans finally managed to pass a tax reform:
Whenever passable Republican legislation materializes — a rarity these days — Democrats quickly warn that thousands, or perhaps even millions, of lives are at stake. Tax reform? Health care? Bogus international treaties? Internet regulations that were only instituted last year? It really doesn’t matter. Longstanding conservative ideas are not only wrong; they portend the end of America as we know it.
Why are liberals so apocalyptic and bellicose about tax reform (a rare cut that is, according to the sometimes-reliable Washington Post fact-checkers, only the eighth largest in history)? Well, everyone in politics tends to dramatize the consequences of policy for effect. A modern Democratic Party drifting toward Bernie-ism, though, is far more likely to legitimately perceive any cuts in taxation as a limiting of state control, and thus, an attack on all decency and morality. Taxation, after all, is the finest tool of redistribution. So it’s understandable.
But that’s not all of it. With failure comes frustration, and with frustration there is a need to ratchet up the panic-stricken rhetoric. It’s no longer enough to hang nefarious personal motivations on your political opponents — although it certainly can’t hurt! Good political activists must now corrupt language and ideas to imbue their ham-fisted arguments with some kind of basic plausibility. Many liberal columnists, for example, will earnestly argue that Republicans — who at this moment control the Senate, the House of Representatives and the White House, thanks to our free and fair elections — are acting undemocratically when passing bills. As you know, democracy means raising taxes on the minority. What else could it mean?
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December 9, 2017
The unique culture that is Quebec
Paul Wells on the latest blow struck in the never-ending battle against the English language in La Belle Province:
This is the thing about language politics in Montreal. It’s a game with many participants but few spectators. It’s addictive fun to play and unbearable to watch. If you’re not arguing about the state of the fragile equilibrium — standoff? Cold war? — between the local francophone majority and the continental anglophone majority, then you’re just living your life. And living your life is almost always very different from whatever the current argument is about.
The latest argument is so stupid I have avoided it for a week. Probably you have heard anyway. Quebec’s National Assembly passed a unanimous resolution urging merchants to greet customers with a hearty “bonjour!” The unstated subtext was that they should stop there and not add an incriminating “Hi!” in English. In fact, in the motion’s original wording, as presented by the Parti Québécois leader Jean-François Lisée, it wasn’t even unstated. The frequent use of “Bonjour-hi” by Montreal merchants was described as an “irritant,” until Quebec premier Philippe Couillard sat down with Lisée and haggled over the motion, line by line, eventually removing the bit about “hi” being an irritant.
Thus amended — essentially, Say ‘bonjour!’ to customers, because the English language is… well, you know — the motion was adapted unanimously by the National Assembly.
Unanimous motions of the National Assembly are believed, by its members and by about three staffers at Le Devoir, to carry a particular weight, because they mark occasions when the representatives of the Québécois nation put aside their differences to speak with one voice in sacred defence of the besieged descendants of France on American soil. Unfortunately, the rush of passing such a motion must be intense to the point of addiction because for many years now, the members of the National Assembly have been passing so many that by now the effect is ruined.
Here is a partial list of unanimous motions going back to 1960, including 15 so far this year alone. Five in November. On Nov. 14, the representatives of the Québécois nation put aside their differences long enough to demand a share of federal subsidies for electric-car recharging stations proportional to Quebec’s share of Canada-wide electric car sales. Come on. I’m a big fan of the National Assembly, but these days, it’s precisely at its most solemn moments that it’s the biggest farce.
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December 8, 2017
But what about “whataboutism”?
Megan McArdle on the folks who automatically resort to “what about x”:
Last week, as you may have noticed, Republicans passed a tax bill. As you may also have noticed, Democrats were aghast. Passing a bill like that on straight party lines! Using a parliamentary maneuver to push through something that could never have survived a filibuster! How could Republicans be so brazen, so immoral, so fiscally irresponsible?
Those of us who remembered saying many of the same things during the passage of Obamacare had to beg them to stop. I mean, we could have been seriously hurt, laughing that hard.
But when I pointed this out, the good citizens of Twitter informed me over and over that this was mere “whataboutism.”
Whataboutism is defending some indefensible action by pointing to some equally indefensible action that was supported, or at least not condemned, by your opponents. (Whataboutism is usually defined as a version of the tu quoque fallacy, attacking the questioner rather than answering the question. It’s also a red herring.) After lobbing a few “What about you?” grenades, you use the resulting chaos to duck uncomfortable questions.
It is a favorite tactic of our president, whose campaign platform was “What about her emails?” Every time someone brings up the FBI investigation that is creeping closer to the highest echelons of his staff, he is fond of asking, apropos of nothing, why Hillary Clinton’s not in jail.
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December 7, 2017
Frankenstein: Radical Alienation – Extra Sci Fi – #6
Extra Credits
Published on 5 Dec 2017What draws us to Frankenstein, and to sci fi as a whole? As the novel wraps up and our time with its characters draws to an end, Mary Shelley lays out the final theme which shaped the identity of science fiction as a genre: radical alienation and the search for a place to belong.
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December 2, 2017
Great Movie Fighting Techniques as illustrated by Helen of Troy
Lindybeige
Published on 31 Jan 2014This video played fine within Sony Vegas Studio, but very oddly in Windows Media Player. On YouTube it seems to be part way between the two. I just wish my videos would look and sound the way I set them in the editing software. No matter – this will have to be good enough. I have delayed uploading it too long already.
This feature film (also broadcast as a mini-series) has I think enough commentable material in it for one more video.
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Reaching the limits of the “Burleigh effect”
ESR on the recent wave of news about sexual misdeeds of powerful politicians and prominent members of the media:
So, John Conyers now hints that members of Congress have been covering up widespread sexual assaults and workplace harassment from within their ranks for years, and that if he goes down lots of others will go down with him.
This is credible. We already know Congress has been paying out hush money to the tune of $17M to keep a lid on such allegations. That figure suggests that if there’s full disclosure, the carnage is going to be terrible.
But…Democrats will get hurt a lot worse than Republicans.
Why do I say this? Because Republicans have already been through a media hostility filter. The same J. Random Reporter (and Reporterette) that will manufacture chin-tugging excuses for the likes of Bill Clinton or Al Franken positively slavers at the thought of catching some old white conservative dude with his pants down. It is therefore likely that the really egregious Republican cases are already over.
Democrats, on the other hand, have been protected by what I’ll call the Burleigh effect. You remember Nina Burleigh, who said in public she’d give Bill Clinton a blowjob if it would protect abortion rights? Yeah, that.
The sewage the press has been not covering (Cokie Roberts said every female reporter in DC knew not to get on an elevator with Conyers) is likely to bust loose now. Especially because the hard-left faction of the Democrats obviously sees this as a way to purge the Clintonites.
I predict it’s going to be a grim time to be a Democrat in the next three months. Republicans will doubtless try to prolong the agony into the 2018 election season, and might succeed. In any case their campaign to stop the odious Ray Moore is looking pretty doomed,
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December 1, 2017
“Maybe Trump’s voters aren’t angry enough yet”
One of the most disturbing phenomena of modern American political discourse is just how badly Trump’s critics are doing their jobs. It’s almost as though they’re collectively trying to get him another term in office. ESR has a bit of a rant:
I have more and more sympathy these days for the Trump voters who said, in effect, “Burn it all down.” Smash the media. Destroy Hollywood. Drain the DC swamp. We’ve all long suspected these institutions are corrupt. What better proof do we need than their systematic enabling of rape monsters?
As a tribune of the people Trump is deeply flawed. Some of his policy ideas are toxic. His personal style is tacky, ugly, and awful. But increasingly I am wondering if any of that matters. Because if he is good for nothing else, he is good for exposing the corruption, incompetence, and fecklessness of the elites – or, rather in their desperation to take him down before he breaks their rice bowls they expose themselves
Yeah. Is there anyone who thinks all these rocks would be turning over if Hillary the serial rape enabler were in the White House? Nope. With her, or any establishment Republican, it’d be cronyism all they way down, because they’d feel a need to keep the corrupt elites on side. Not Trump – his great virtue, perhaps overriding every flaw, is that he doesn’t give a fuck for elite approval.
Maybe Trump’s voters aren’t angry enough yet. It’s not just a large number of women our elites have raped and victimized, it’s our entire country. Our infrastructure is crumbling, our debt is astronomical, our universities increasingly resemble insane asylums, our largest inner cities are free-fire zones terrorized by a permanent criminal underclass. And what’s the elite response? Oh, look, a squirrel – where the squirrel of the week is carbon emissions, or transgender rights, or railing at “white privilege”, or whatever other form of virtue signaling might serve to hide the fact that, oh, look they put remote-controlled locks on their rape dungeons.
It’s long past time for a cleansing fire.
November 30, 2017
“[W]henever I visit a newsroom these days, I instinctively feel unhealthy, like a 19th-century Lake Poet visiting an especially polluted part of London”
Colby Cosh goes well out of his way to rub salt in the wounds of daily commuters, while basking in the glories of working from home:
When Statistics Canada puts its big brains to work on measuring the time devoted to commuting, and the various ways in which people drag their butts to work, I always read the results with the particular interest-fascination-horror of a permanent non-commuter. I am well into my second decade of working full-time, pretty much exclusively, from home. I’m dragged out of the house very occasionally for assignments and broadcast appearances, but most of what I do for a living happens a few feet from my bed.
None of it, I should specify, actually happens in bed (and relatively little of it involves actual writing). As most people who have to physically travel to a job seem to suspect, working remotely gives you a scary, even nauseating freedom to customize your working arrangements. I suppose most of us professional shut-ins find that we have to establish arbitrary rules and mini-disciplines to prevent our lives from becoming totally unstructured and unhealthy. “Bed is for sleep” is one of mine.
All of my conscious writing and research is done strictly at a desk, whether or not I happen to be wearing pants. With that said, as I get older, I do find sleep to be a more important component of my overall work process. Naps can be magical, and the ability to get around a writing difficulty by means of one is something I would immediately miss if I became a miserable corporate prisoner/drone again.
This kind of consideration deepens the psychic divide between commuters and remote workers: we have trouble understanding one another’s worlds even when we have switched between them. Commuters shudder at the thought of an amorphous life with less social contact and minimal formal barriers between work and non-work. Indeed, I think working at home does make one a little dottier (note: this is not necessarily a practical disadvantage for a newspaper columnist). I suspect it may also discourage groupthink. It definitely cuts down on pointless meetings; and whenever I visit a newsroom these days, I instinctively feel unhealthy, like a 19th-century Lake Poet visiting an especially polluted part of London.
I’ve spent more of my time working from home over the last decade than sitting in the office (and therefore also needing to drag my carcass to and from said office), and I really do understand his viewpoint. It’s one of the things I anticipate with no joy at all, as any new job I’m likely to land will probably require a daily commute. On a good day, it’s about an hour’s drive to downtown Toronto, but there aren’t enough good travel days and taking public transit literally doubles that time. Spending four hours per day to get to work and back feels very wasteful, even when I can get in some reading on the way.
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JourneyQuest S03E03 – “The Bardest”
Zombie Orpheus Entertainment
Published on 28 Nov 2017Watch the complete, uncut season on Amazon Prime or ZOE Premium (http://www.zombieorpheus.com) and be sure to follow us on Facebook for the latest updates (http://www.facebook.com/zombieorpheus)
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QotD: Nuclear winter
In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences reported on “Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear Weapons Detonations” but the report estimated the effect of dust from nuclear blasts to be relatively minor. In 1979, the Office of Technology Assessment issued a report on “The Effects of Nuclear War” and stated that nuclear war could perhaps produce irreversible adverse consequences on the environment. However, because the scientific processes involved were poorly understood, the report stated it was not possible to estimate the probable magnitude of such damage.
Three years later, in 1982, the Swedish Academy of Sciences commissioned a report entitled “The Atmosphere after a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon,” which attempted to quantify the effect of smoke from burning forests and cities. The authors speculated that there would be so much smoke that a large cloud over the northern hemisphere would reduce incoming sunlight below the level required for photosynthesis, and that this would last for weeks or even longer.
The following year, five scientists including Richard Turco and Carl Sagan published a paper in Science called “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions.” This was the so-called TTAPS report, which attempted to quantify more rigorously the atmospheric effects, with the added credibility to be gained from an actual computer model of climate. At the heart of the TTAPS undertaking was another equation, never specifically expressed, but one that could be paraphrased as follows:
Ds = Wn Ws Wh Tf Tb Pt Pr Pe etc(The amount of tropospheric dust = # warheads × size warheads × warhead detonation height × flammability of targets × Target burn duration × Particles entering the Troposphere × Particle reflectivity × Particle endurance, and so on.)
The similarity to the Drake equation is striking. As with the Drake equation, none of the variables can be determined. None at all. The TTAPS study addressed this problem in part by mapping out different wartime scenarios and assigning numbers to some of the variables, but even so, the remaining variables were — and are — simply unknowable. Nobody knows how much smoke will be generated when cities burn, creating particles of what kind, and for how long. No one knows the effect of local weather conditions on the amount of particles that will be injected into the troposphere. No one knows how long the particles will remain in the troposphere. And so on.
And remember, this is only four years after the OTA study concluded that the underlying scientific processes were so poorly known that no estimates could be reliably made. Nevertheless, the TTAPS study not only made those estimates, but concluded they were catastrophic.
According to Sagan and his coworkers, even a limited 5,000 megaton nuclear exchange would cause a global temperature drop of more than 35 degrees Centigrade, and this change would last for three months. The greatest volcanic eruptions that we know of changed world temperatures somewhere between 0.5 and 2 degrees Centigrade. Ice ages changed global temperatures by 10 degrees. Here we have an estimated change three times greater than any ice age. One might expect it to be the subject of some dispute.
But Sagan and his coworkers were prepared, for nuclear winter was from the outset the subject of a well-orchestrated media campaign. The first announcement of nuclear winter appeared in an article by Sagan in the Sunday supplement, Parade. The very next day, a highly-publicized, high-profile conference on the long-term consequences of nuclear war was held in Washington, chaired by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich, the most famous and media-savvy scientists of their generation. Sagan appeared on the Johnny Carson show 40 times. Ehrlich was on 25 times. Following the conference, there were press conferences, meetings with congressmen, and so on. The formal papers in Science came months later.
This is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold.
Michael Crichton, “Aliens Cause Global Warming”: the Caltech Michelin Lecture, 2003-01-17.
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November 29, 2017
Frankenstein: Paradise Lost – Extra Sci Fi – #5
Extra Credits
Published on 28 Nov 2017Paradise Lost told the story of Satan, a creation who rejected his creator just like Frankenstein’s monster did. But even Satan had a loving creator, beauty, and friends. The monster had nothing, and his life in Mary Shelley’s eyes was not a horror story, but a tragedy.
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November 28, 2017
Evergreen headline – “FCC bureaucrats don’t know what they’re talking about”
Nick Gillespie on the heightening panic over the FCC’s reversal of the controversial Net Neutrality rules:
Current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai memorably told Reason that “net neutrality” rules were “a solution that won’t work to a problem that doesn’t exist.”
Yet in 2015, despite a blessed lack of throttling of specific traffic streams, blocking of websites, and other feared behavior by internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile carriers, the FCC issued net neutrality rules that gave the federal government the right to punish business practices under Title II regulations designed for the old state-enabled Bell telephone monopoly.
Now that Pai, who became chairman earlier this year, has announced an FCC vote to repeal the Obama-era regulations, he is being pilloried by progressives, liberals, Democrats, and web giants ranging from Google to Netflix to Amazon to Facebook, often in the name of protecting an “open internet” that would let little companies and startups flourish like in the good old days before Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Facebook dominated everything. Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which back in 2009 called FCC attempts to claim jurisdiction over the internet a “Trojan Horse” for government control, is squarely against the repeal.
[…]
Yet the panic over the repeal of net neutrality is misguided for any number of reasons.
First and foremost, the repeal simply returns the internet back to pre-2015 rules where there were absolutely no systematic issues related to throttling and blocking of sites (and no, ISPs weren’t to blame for Netflix quality issues in 2013). As Pai stressed in an exclusive interview with Reason last week, one major impact of net neutrality regs was a historic decline in investment in internet infrastructure, which would ultimately make things worse for all users. Why bother building out more capacity if there’s a strong likelihood that the government will effectively nationalize your pipes? Despite fears, the fact is that in the run-up to government regulation, both the average speed and number of internet connections (especially mobile) continued to climb and the percentage of Americans without “advanced telecommunications capability” dropped from 20 percent to 10 percent between 2012 and 2014, according to the FCC (see table 7 in full report). Nobody likes paying for the internet or for cell service, but the fact is that services have been getting better and options have been growing for most people.
Second, as Reason contributor Thomas W. Hazlett, a former chief economist for the FCC, writes in The New York Daily News, even FCC bureaucrats don’t know what they’re talking about.
Hazlett notes that in a recent debate former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who implemented the 2015 net neutrality rules after explicit lobbying by President Obama, said the rise of AOL to dominance during the late 1990s proved the need for the sort of government regulation he imposed. But “AOL’s foray only became possible when regulators in the 1980s peeled back ‘Title II’ mandates, the very regulations that Wheeler’s FCC imposed on broadband providers in 2015,” writes Hazlett. “AOL’s experiment started small and grew huge, discovering progressively better ways to serve consumers. Wheeler’s chosen example of innovation demonstrates how dangerous it is to impose one particular platform, freezing business models in place.”
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November 27, 2017
Steve Kates on growing up in a communist home
At Catallaxy Files, Steve Kates reflects on how his early upbringing gave him insights into modern political discourse:
The one blessing about being brought up in a communist household is that you understand the left a good deal better than most. It also brings an added measure of concern when I see how easily a public unused to lying as a tactic is influenced by these manoeuvres which are standard practice on the left. My Dad was an expert in agit prop and I grew up understanding the role of the agent provocateur only too well. These are not well-meaning individuals who wish to investigate the truth. They are individuals whose only interest is to disrupt the communications among those on the other side through whatever lies they might find convenient and they hope persuasive.
[…] You will be lied to by the left to the furthest extent they believe they can get away with. That there is not an instantaneous scepticism amongst us on this side of politics from any unverified political story carried by a mainstream media organisation fills me with dread since most of us are so middle class that we find it hard to believe others will lie, distort, or withhold relevant information without the slightest hesitation if it serves their ends. The attitude you need to take when reading anything from an MSM report is the same attitude you might take when buying a used car. Do not trust a thing you are told and make sure you verify everything you can from a separate source.
Dishonesty is the trade mark of the left, not that they have a monopoly, but it is a specific tactic aimed at the fair minded who are seldom as aware as they need to be of the practice, and seldom think of the need to guard against the premeditated lies they tell. […] The interesting part is that for the left to succeed, they can only achieve their ends by lying. For the right, what you hear people say is almost invariably what they believe. The left often mimics the same concerns but it is tactical and never substantive unless for a change good policy overlaps what they see as tactical advantage.
The one valuable part of being on this side of the fence is that with so many out there on the left who will swarm around any genuine falsehood stated by someone on the right, the standard of probity is higher. This is part of the reason why sex scandals, to just name the issue in relation to Roy Moore, are not as common on the right as on the left. Except that when they are caught out – such as with Bill Clinton – it is no longer a scandal and is put to bed as soon as it is practical to do so. They never mean it. It is not hypocrisy, it is a policy of deceit. They are perfectly aware they are lying and just take the rest of us for fools.
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