The first two sentences in this morning’s Boston Globe read:
The Federal Reserve cut its key rate yesterday to a range between zero and 0.25 percent, the lowest figure ever. The Fed acknowledged that it has virtually exhausted its rate-cutting arsenal….
Really? We think there’s no more room for cuts when the rate is down to zero?
Overheard on the D line yesterday evening:
It would be like Jurassic Park. I’d be suspended in Jell-o forever.
Don’t judge too quickly. With all the plot holes in that movie, we might well have overlooked eternal Jell-o suspension in there somewhere.
(I like best a scene when the power is all out so Hammond is eating all the ice cream so it won’t melt… while electric fans turn overhead.)
Sine-Wave Speech is created by taking regular speech and essentially reducing it down to sine waves, absent all the complexities that make normal speech understandable.
Listen to a sample and you’ll hear nothing but whistles and beeps.
On the other hand, listen to the original sound (ordinary speech) and then listen to exactly the same sample again.
Then panic.
The theory is that the brain’s very perception of the sound is colored by its past experiences of listening to similar sounds. You perceive, at a low level, that you’re hearing speech, and therefore you can decipher it. I suppose it’s not unlike how we adjust to listening to people with heavily accented speech, but it’s so much more extreme that it’s scary.
Listen to four more samples on that page, and not only will you get the same effect or all four, but you’ll even get better at deciphering the sine-wave version the first time around.
(via Kottke)
I just noticed this headline in yesterday’s Boston Globe:
Police team up to solve robberies
In related news, “Fire department seen putting out fires.”
Page A9 in this morning’s Boston Globe contains a very brief article, quoted here in its entirety (there is no byline):
Protest in South Africa
Minibus taxi drivers set fires yesterday during a march in Cape Town against the government’s proposed bus transit upgrade for the World Cup, which the taxi drivers say will cost them revenue.
I fully expected it to continue, “In other news, oil companies threatened to uproot train tracks and sabotage any cars used for carpools. Electric company officials were also seen breaking into homes known to have installed energy-efficient florescent or LED lighting.”
A South African website called Independent Online covered the event more extensively yesterday, running an article with the absolutely awesome headline “Commuters flee rampaging taxi drivers.”
Taxi drivers blockaded roads and threw stones at Golden Arrow buses and private cars, allegedly in protest against the formation of the city’s new Bus Rapid Transit system, perceived permit inequalities and the taxi recapitalization process.
Then it just goes over the top in insanity:
[Commuter Thembakazi Bizana] said commuters ran for their lives when taxi drivers started throwing stones. “It was chaos out there… I took a cab and they started stoning the cabs also, saying we are not allowed to use any transport.”
This might be the worst protest plan in the history of protests. First, they stoned cabs as part of their protest to encourage cab use. Second, better mass transit is a good thing, but they’re opposing it for personal reasons (and that’s a hard sell). Third, and most importantly, they’ve caused people serious harm. I know I’d be a lot less inclined to take a cab in Boston if I knew the driver was prone to dragging people from buses and beating them up.
I love analyzing how computers work in movies. Someone on the production staff must know something about computers to get the fake systems to appear operational, but at some point during the process the desire for flashy technology overrides that real-world knowledge.
National Treasure using Wikipedia
I started watching National Treasure: Book of Secrets this afternoon. If the first film is any indication, this promises a wealth of unlikely technological behavior.
Already I had to pause the movie only 30 minutes in when Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) started looking up historical names in an online database branded “Find On-Line.”
In the first split second of screen exposure you should recognize the fonts and proportions of Wikipedia. An image is floated right, and the familiar Monobook navigation menu is on the right. In the remaining second or two you see the image, you might also notice the unusually high concentration of links in the text, and maybe even the way the first line is indented (à la “Queen Victoria redirects here. For other uses…”).
Finally, let’s take a moment to reflect that although Riley is using a MacBook, he appears to be running applications that borrow heavily from both Windows and Linux.
Of at least 1,200 movie clips currently on Hulu, these are the top 20 most popular today (as titled on the site):
Did you too detect a theme?
Only six items in the entire list do not immediately imply sexual content. I included the clips’ descriptions for two of those in parentheses, which clears up the confusion right away.
Of the others, “Master’s Bathroom” features a couple bathing nude, “Harry Potter” has one character grab another’s breasts, “You Got Punked” has a woman flash someone with her back to the camera, and “You Really Suck” opens with a female cheerleader adjusting her underwear while a male cheerleader watches.
The next 20 don’t look much more promising.
I find our society deeply troubling right now.
From the Report of the Virginia Tech Review Panel, analyzing the mass murder there last year:
A female student trying to get into Norris Hall shortly before the shooting started found the entrance chained. She climbed through a window to get where she was going on the first floor. She did not report the chains, assuming they had something to do with ongoing construction.
I can’t imagine that if I showed up to work to find all the doors chained I would even consider that a gunman could be responsible, nor that he was inside at that moment preparing to start shooting.
However, I also highly doubt that upon finding the doors chained shut I’d consider climbing through a window to get in anyway.
By Ashley Halsey III in the Washington Post (via this morning’s Boston Globe):
There will be no visitors allowed at the grand opening of the US Capitol Visitor Center.
Uhh… you keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means. I here advance the notion that until visitors are allowed in, the visitor center isn’t particularly “open.”
(They’ll be allowed in later in the day.)
I linked to Amy Walker’s 21 Accents video when it became famous back in March. After watching her new Yes video, which seems like it would be a good to watch before an important meeting, I felt like revisiting some of her other work today. My favorite remains her parody of the song All I Ask of You:
I’m here, with you, beside you,
Close to you and by you
Even knowing all the words, I laugh every time.
For original work, I like best her original song Let’s Not Sleep.