December 2009
26 posts
‘Baby-Sitters Club’ Returns With Prequel, Reissued Books - NYTimes.com →
nytimes.com
Editors at Scholastic updated some of the references to technology and outdated fashions in the reissued books. So a “cassette player” has become “headphones” and a “perm” has become “an expensive hairstyle.”
I’ll buy it. And I’ll certainly buy these books. ESPECIALLY, because Ann M. Martin is in. MISS YOU BSC!
BOOK CLUB.
auto BSC reblog.
also, their updates are so non-committal! ‘expensive hairstyle’? ‘headphones’ but no mention of what they’re attached to? i guess they’re hoping they’ll last longer this way?
also, YES BOOKCLUB.
Where can I find pepper jelly in Brooklyn (preferably in or around Prospect Heights)?
Elizabeth Gumport at This Recording
Davidson’s photographs remind us that people’s personal lives are mostly tedious. Everybody has dirty plates and families. Privacy protects us. Behind closed doors we shine our shoes and our personalities; we rest and then resume playing the roles of interesting people. We hide our worst selves, and our dullest: we would rather have people see us as bad than boring.
“In Which We Do Whatever We Can Get Away With,” by @callmeicebox
hello hello hello! i’d like to read more of what you write!
The bookstore-less streets of Laredo: Laredo, Texas, is set to become the largest U.S. city without a bookstore. The B. Dalton in the Mall del Norte, owned by parent company Barnes & Noble, is slated to close next month. When it does, it will leave the city's close to 250,000 residents without a single bookstore. →
latimesblogs.latimes.com
(via adrianeq)
this wouldn’t bum me out so much if they had more than 3 branches of their public library. but they don’t so this is really bumming me out.
- Mr +J: Why are you trying to make me love [a girl on TV]?
- +J: I just want you to know what you like!
- Mr +J: I think she's too much like something I hate
- +J: ...me?
team to nation: i won't go down with this ship
The Eritreans were knocked out of the Cecafa competition for East and Central African nations last week.
But when the team plane landed back home, it was reportedly only carrying the coach and an official.
The government, which is frequently accused of repression, denies any players are missing.
But the country’s football federation confirmed to Cecafa head Nicholas Musonye that the players had not returned.
Mr Musonye told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme it was the third time the Eritrean team had failed to return home after a tournament.
“The Eritrean federation have done their best to bring a team to the competition - unfortunately these boys had other ideas,” he said.
“Definitely they are in Nairobi - we have so many Eritreans here - they must be somewhere.”
i mean, this BBC article goes on a little longer but is there a better last line than that one? no, there isn’t. (c/o Kaya)
if you're shopping at amazon.com, do it through this link please! be good! do it! →
amazon.com
you’re going to spend money anyway! so if you’re shopping at amazon.com, then do it through this link so that 6% goes to Corporate Accountability International, a great organization that a good friend of mine works for. happy birth of santa and happy 5th night of present week!
On Terrorism (but what isn't?)
- S+N: watch the office!
- it's like last week never happened
- ms. mandrake: weird, okay
- that's like pretending that the worst terrorism didn't happen
- but i'll try
- S+N: always forget
Play
Play
joke of a non-joke :-(
it’s a problem that The Onion has real (CNN/WaPo) headlines along the side but basically right next to their headlines because i preemptively laugh at awful headlines like ‘2 people, dozens of horses die in fire’ until i suddenly remember that that probably actually happened.
life is so hard
Even at our best, humans are not very good programmers; programming is not a task commonly encountered in the ancestral environment. A human programmer is metaphorically a blind painter - not just a blind painter, but a painter entirely lacking a visual cortex. We create our programs like an artist drawing one pixel at a time, and our programs are fragile as a consequence. If the AI’s human programmers can master the essential design pattern of sensory modalities, they can gift the AI with a sensory modality for codelike structures. Such a modality might perceptually interpret: a simplified interpreted language used to tutor basic concepts; any internal procedural languages used by cognitive processes; the programming language in which the AI’s code level is written; and finally the native machine code of the AI’s hardware. An AI that takes advantage of a codic modality may not need to wait for human-equivalent general intelligence to beat a human in the specific domain competency of programming. Informally, an AI is native to the world of programming, and a human is not.
- Yudkowsky, Levels of Organization in General Intelligence [via af]
this just happened at work:
S+N: i have another contract for you
lawyer: ugh
S+N: [meekly] you love it!
lawyer: [warily] you’re trying to re-program me
Booo York State →
nytimes.com
(via eatingpieelsewhere)
Adding insult to injury, it seems pretty clear that this article was written before the vote, with the assumption it would pass, and then just tweaked slightly…
Our New Project
- +J: How can we get you to marry him?
- S+N: yes! we need to brainstorm! more than we've ever brainstormed!
- but how does a girl with no money or anything to offer lure a hilarious attractive comedian who already has a successful career on a good tv show?
- we will take this on!
- this is our generations rubik's cube!
