All Of The Things

So this apparently was on the History Channel at some point in between the rerun of Pawn Stars and the rerun of that show that spun off of Pawn Stars which is every show on the History Channel that isn't Pawn Stars. Seems like a good video to link, and I know it's an hour and a half, but I've well established that I will link stupidly long videos and not even blink.

So, I present their history of the world in two hours (25% off if you act now!) All of the history. Or at least all of it that would fit in 90 minutes of film. Enjoy your Friday night that is now a Saturday morning here.

But You Don't Have To Take MY Word For It

I'm clearly too late as far as the matter of 'whether it will be funded or not'. But if you are my age, you remember Reading Rainbow, and clearly a lot of you do. After Reading Rainbow went off the air, we lost basically the only good show purely about books that we even had on television. (Because come on. Nobody watches Booknotes on CSPAN, right?)

So anyway, as anyone who would be caught dead at this blog already knows, LeVar Burton has launched a Kickstarter to bring it back and get it into classrooms. And on a million-dollar ask, within the first few days he's already got $2.5 million (as of this writing), with 33 days still on the clock. It took only 11 hours to hit the target.

Call me greedy, but while I am ecstatic and happy over this... it still is only one good book show, aimed at getting kids to love reading. I want more. What I'd like, once we have Reading Rainbow back, is a good book show for adults. Let's face it, adults aren't reading Thomas The Tank Engine unless they're reading it to kids. I'd like a show tackling the stuff that gets on the bestseller lists, on the talk shows, in the People and Entertainment Weekly writeups, that kind of thing. I want it to be something people would actually watch. We don't have that and I want it.

But Reading Rainbow first, of course.

Expensive Worthless Paper

It's a funny little tidbit that inevitably gets tossed around in every championship or conference championship round of team sports that there are always a small number of T-shirts made in advance that depict each of the surviving teams eventually winning the title. The actual winner will have their T-shirts immediately thrown on them in the postgame celebratory chaos and quickly placed on sale to the victorious fans, while the loser's shirts never show their face in American public if the league can help it. They are quietly transported to some part of the world, typically impoverished, where the locals don't care about the sport and don't care what's depicted on the shirts as long as they have clothing to wear. This process is these days not quiet enough for someone to keep from finding where exactly this season's shirts are headed and incorporating it into the requisite trash talk.

That isn't the only piece of merchandise made in advance, though. The actual game tickets are printed in advance as well. It takes some time to get tickets out of the printer and into the hands of fans attending the games, and teams want and need this to be done before the game takes place. But the process can very possibly take longer than the time between when a team qualifies for a particular round of the playoffs and the time that round starts. In order to buy themselves time, tickets are printed and sold early by teams still alive at that point. It's then a simple matter to cancel and refund the tickets if the team doesn't make it, or if the team is not so nice (often they're not), bank the money and offer regular-season tickets for next year instead.

But these tickets don't see much circulation either. They may remain on-continent, but you can't wear a game ticket. And there's no sentimental value; the tickets are sold to fans of the team, fans who are not exactly going to be inclined to hang onto a reminder of a failed season and playoff games that they had hoped to attend but which ultimately invited someone else. The tickets will usually simply be thrown away or returned to the team (or incinerated if the team never sent them out), though perhaps not until someone takes a self-loathing picture of them for mass consumption.

It isn't particularly often that either T-shirt or ticket ends up in enemy hands.

According to this LA Times article from 1986, all teams in Major League Baseball still in contention going into September were required at that time to print off playoff tickets, and when playoff tickets are printed off, it's for the entire playoffs. They have to take that last-minute miracle run to the title into account. This article from the Baltimore Sun on August 22, 2012 suggests that such a policy remains in place. Therefore, it can reasonably be inferred that when, going into September 1, 1990, though no team was officially eliminated yet (though some were getting close), those who were 10 or fewer games back on the division leads, or in the lead, needed to start putting the wheels in motion. In this case, in addition to the leading Red Sox, Athletics, Pirates and Reds (all of which held their leads), that meant the Blue Jays, White Sox, Mets, Expos, Dodgers and Giants also needed to take playoff ticket-printing seriously, just in case. That in turn means ten teams printing World Series tickets when only two sets will be needed- namely, those of the Reds and Athletics.

I don't know what happened to the other sets. But I do know that at least one set of White Sox tickets survived, was framed, and entered public circulation. How do I know this? Because today, I located that set inside Clara's Antiques here in Watertown. And while the tickets may have originally been priced at a combined $150, in the end it only took $12 for them to fall into the hands of a Cubs fan.



We Cubs fans, we know a little something about suffering.

School's Out Forever

From time to time, far too often really, you'll hear about a school that closes down due to lack of funds. The students are dispersed to other nearby schools, jobs are lost, the building is repurposed or torn down. But the thing about these closings is that they are usually K-12 schools. Colleges are never thought to be at any particular risk of closure; in fact, with spiraling tuition fees and crippling pressure on high school graduates to both go to and graduate from college, one might think your average college as quite profitable.

So what happens when that isn't the case? What happens when a college closes down? The Chronicle of Higher Education has endeavored to find out, as they happen to have a shuttering college to profile, or at least, one that's desperately fighting to avoid it. That college, which began as an elementary school in 1888, is Saint Paul's College in Lawrenceville, Virginia, which in what makes a depressing kind of sense happens to be a historically black college.

#YesAllWomen

I have spent the past few days getting progressively outraged over the UC-Santa Barbara shooting, and progressively more embarrassed to call myself a man. I have seen women of all stripes, ages, shapes, sizes and walks of life angrily pour their hearts out about the violations of their dignity and sometimes their body inflicted upon them by men who at best saw nothing wrong with their actions and at worst were adamant that she must have liked it, stories that until this moment they have been afraid to tell for fear it would negatively impact their career and/or their lives. I have seen women who are still, even amongst all the visible support, afraid to tell their stories because they continue to fear the men that still don't understand why the women are angry and why they won't just shut up about it already, men who are liable to respond to them on Twitter within seconds. I have seen women express fear of rejecting a man now, lest that man turn out the same way.

I have seen many men offer their support as best they can, hopefully taking to heart the pleadings from the women to do what they can to get it through their gendermates' heads because clearly the women aren't being listened to by those that need to do so. For I have seen some men insult the appearance of these women, disregarding their cares because they are 'too ugly' or 'too fat' or 'overreacting' or 'paranoid'. I have seen men call women 'man haters' as an excuse to continue their vile behaviors. I have seen men who have taken this moment as a sick and twisted opportunity to push an NRA agenda, suggesting that women carry guns so that they may ward off men like them, even though many women already carry mace and tasers for this same purpose, as if to suggest that the women will have to actually kill the men in order to stop them. I have seen this train of thought furthered in complete ignorance of the actual point, which is that women feel like they should not have to carry guns, mace, tasers, take karate classes, or make any other special effort to defend themselves against unwanted advances from men who refuse to take no for an answer.

Never mind that I and everyone else has seen a woman use a gun against threats from her husband, as a warning shot, and be sentenced to 20 years in prison as a direct result.

I personally AM a man who has expressed disgust, is expressing it now, that I cannot step in and admonish these men, these men who objectify and diminish and violate, without being accused of 'white knighting'. As a fan of Taylor Swift, I have seen her- a woman who takes great pains not to discuss her sex life lest she become objectified- accused both of sleeping with too many men (thereby being a slut) and of sleeping with too few (thereby being a prude), sometimes in consecutive comments in the same thread. I have seen men threaten women that they had better pose for nude pictures soon lest men stop taking interest in them, and men immediately cease to take interest in women who have done so quickly after ogling their bodies. I have seen men see a current photo of Jennifer Lien- aka the highly desired Kes from Star Trek: Voyager, replaced on the show by the even more desired Jeri Ryan, aka Seven of Nine- and, now deeming her to be insufficiently attractive, gnash teeth, rend clothing and curse the heavens that now they'll never have sex with her. I have seen countless men post about the disgusting and harmful things they would do to themselves in order to sniff an attractive woman's farts. I have seen far too many demands to hand over my 'man card'.

I have seen women shamed for sleeping with men, and I have seen men celebrated for sleeping with women. I have seen far too many premises in major media where a man's quest to sleep with as many women as possible makes him into the protagonist, such as in virtually any movie starring Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn or Jason Sudekis, 'Hall Pass' being a particularly enraging example. I have seen far too many premises in which the female equivalent is made into an antagonist, such as Mystique of the X-Men, or Krysten Ritter's character in 'Don't Trust The B---- In Apt. 23'. I have seen far, far, FAR too many plots in which the woman is turned from the side of the bad guy to the side of the good guy after sleeping with the male protagonist, but a man is not turned but rather ensnared into the service of the bad guy when sleeping with a woman. The genders are almost never reversed. The woman is encoded and perpetuated as evil for desiring sex even though she is commanded to supply it, as all that is needed to turn her good is being fucked by the right guy (and she must be the submissive one, as attempting to take control could be harmful to the man). The man is encoded and perpetuated as merely undertaking a humble and noble quest to "score", and of course, when one is scoring, one must try to get the highest possible score.

I have seen men pat themselves on the back merely for refraining from raping a woman.

I have seen enough.

I have had enough.

Don't You Want To Have A Body?

At one point or another, you've probably gotten into a conversation with a chatbot. A chatbot, of course, is designed to be able to hold up its end of a conversation about a given topic. Often, this is for commercial purposes and the chatbot is only programmed to deal with the commercial task at hand. For example, any of you who have Charter as your cable provider who have needed customer service at some point- like me- will run into a chatbot who will run through the more common customer-service issues with a complainant. It makes sure the issue is handled the same, pre-prescribed way every time, and it frees up their employees for the more complex issues. It pays for the chatbot to appear as human as possible; better that the customer never realize they're talking to a robot, because if they do, Charter knows as well as anyone that the customer is likely to just quit talking to the chatbot and demand to speak to a human. And that uses up resources.

Disguising a commercial chatbot as human is one matter. General conversation, which can be about literally any topic, is a far more dicey proposal. This is what the infamous Turing Test covers, and chatbots have historically fared rather poorly at it. Sooner or later, the topic gets too esoteric and the chatbot starts making odd conversation choices. Often, this comes sooner, as if the people I know are any indication, the chatbot will be immediately slammed with the most bizarre possible topic of conversation the human can come up with just to see how it handles it. And when a failure point is inevitably found, rest assured it will be mined for every last troy ounce of humor.

But perhaps this is being too rough on the chatbot. Perhaps it can be given an easier task. What if you merely asked a chatbot to hold a conversation with itself?

Meet Cleverbot, our contestant. Cleverbot has been running since 1997, and has remembered every single conversation it's ever had with a human, and if Wikipedia is to be believed on the matter, grand total that means over 150 million of them. As I write this, it's having over 9,400 conversations at this very moment; typically the number is around 10,000. It takes into account everything that's ever been said to it, everything it said in response, and everything that's been said in response to that response, and use that information to continually make for better conversation.

I did mention that said information is filled with people being deliberately ridiculous, correct?

In 2011, Igor Labutov, Jason Yosinski and Hod Lipson, three residents of the Cornell Creative Machines Lab- an endlessly fascinating playground of engineering- decided to hook Cleverbot up to itself. Well, to be honest, first they hooked up a different, earlier-model chatbot, Eliza. Eliza is essentially built to repeat your own conversation back to you, which is fine when a human is talking to it (and liable to quickly get them angry when their own ridiculousness is thrown right back in their face), but when Eliza has to come up with its own conversation to repeat back it itself, it gets a bit lost. The result isn't all that amusing, as I will demonstrate by feeding two Elizas each other's conversations:

"Hello. My name is Eliza. How may I help you?"
"Hello. My name is Eliza. How may I help you?"
"We were discussing you, not me."
"Oh... not you?"
"Oh...?"
"OK... "We was discussing you, not me." Tell me more."
"We were discussing you, not me."
"You're not really talking about me, are you?"
"What makes you think I am not really talking about you, am I?"
"How long have you been not really talking about me, are you?"
"Would you prefer if I were not?"
"Oh... prefer if you was not?"
"Oh... were not?"
"Tell me more..."
"Tell me more..."
"Tell me more..."
"Why did you repeat yourself?"
"We were discussing you, not me."

That's where I stopped, as it was clear to me at that point that I'd heard just about everything that was going to be said between them. Enter Cleverbot, which was fed into a text-to-speech synthesizer, which was then fed into an avatar that would speak that text, and then pitted against a second Cleverbot hooked up the same way.

This is what happened. (I am not ashamed to say, thank you, Outrageous Acts of Science on the Science Channel. I was blanking on a topic for today.)



That year, Cleverbot, or at least a souped-up version of it, was given a Turing test at the Techniche 2011 festival in India. In order to pass, generally a computer needs to make over half of the conversation subjects think it's human. Cleverbot managed to get 59.3% of its human counterparts to vote it as human. Actual humans, serving as controls, scored 63.3%.

Apparently, this is what almost passing a Turing test- or even passing it outright, depending on how you look at it- looks like. Ferrets. Which ones? All of the ferrets. What are their names? NO NOT ANY FERRETS AT ALL. Drink from a rhinoceros bean.

How To Strip Naked In Front Of The White House

...really? You're kidding. ...you're not kidding. Ohhhhhkay fine. If you say so.

1. Do not strip naked in front of the White House.
2. Do not strip naked, in fact, in any public place that does not explicitly permit nudity.
3. Do not climb fences while naked.
4. Do not climb the White House fence at any time.
5. Do not climb the White House fence while naked.
6. Do not assault people.
7. Do not assault law enforcement personnel.
8. Do not assault people while naked.
9. Do not assault law enforcement personnel while naked.
10. Do not assault Secret Service personnel while naked.
11. Do not assault Secret Service personnel on the White House lawn while naked.

If alcohol turns out not to be a factor in this, I am going to bury my face in my hands and scream for all the days.