Buy this horse

We just got this horse from a facility in Ireland.

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yoputube

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Why Deep Blue makes me blue

MIT Tech Review invited Daniel Dennett to comment on Kasparov’s loss to Deep Blue, ten years ago today. The short of it, says Dennett, is “big deal.”

It’s interesting to see how the discussion about Deep Blue has changed over the last decade (it’s interesting that I’m old enough to think about something across a decade, too). Back then I was devastated by Kasparov’s loss. Not because I believed that Skynet was nigh and we were doomed to machine enslavement, but because I had to accept that chess was not a thing of beauty, but merely a problem with a solution.  I had believed that chess would always be complex enough to be a combination of science, computation, fight, and art — that it was a space for competition, computation, and creativity and expression. Playing over Fischer and Capablanca games (the only grandmasters who are accessible to me, probably because of their style), I would often gravitate to words like pretty, dazzling, stunning, beautiful. I thought there were flashes in the game that were beyond computation and had an element of inspiration, a spark of creative genius. When I heard that Kasparov lost the match, I thought chess had been solved, chess was over.
Now, Dennett, not only says that chess is over. He thinks it never was.

Yes, but so what? Silicon machines can now play chess better than any protein machines can. Big deal. This calm and reasonable reaction, however, is hard for most people to sustain. They don’t like the idea that their brains are protein machines.

Many people still cling, white-­knuckled, to a brittle vision of our minds as mysterious immaterial souls, or–just as romantic–as the products of brains composed of ­wonder tissue engaged in irreducible non­computational (perhaps alchemical?) processes. They often seem to think that if our brains were in fact just protein machines, we couldn’t be responsible, lovable, valuable persons.

We’ve had a decade since the match for the broader culture to absorb ideas of evolutionary psychology (apparently, a beginner’s guide to the subject was on the set of the last tow Matrix films), and cognitive approaches to art and music. Sadly, I’m less saddened than I was a decade ago.  I can see now that my brain is a protein machine and that my dog is a walking furry algorithm of soft-seeking and food-acquiring behavior.  I’m saddened by my lack of sadness, which is little comfort since that emotional state is just an interesting recursion (probably not even a strange loop).
Sigh.  At least Dennett writes well . . . but, of course, I’m just kinked to like good writing.

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We are all advertisers

It doesn’t matter if you don’t own a company these days — you can still be an advertiser.  You can still take part in the tradition of paid self-promotion. In fact, it’s an imperative.  Google’s Adwords — those sponsored search results in the boxes next to the actual search results — has made it possible. Since advertisers only pay per click, and not per exposure, costs can be minimized.  And because the ads are tied to search, you can advertise basically anything — including yourself.

I’m an obsessive data backer-uperer: I need to know that my info is safe and secure. So I use Mozy, an online backup service that gives user 2GB of free space. They also have a referral program.  You get an extra 225mb for every new user you sign up and who makes at least one backup.  So, I created a Google ad, touting Mozy, and placed my special referral code in the link.  I pay about a quarter for each click.  So far, I’ve gotten over a gig of extra space.

Ah, American ingenuity!

Feel free to help me out: https://mozy.com/?code=K35YML

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The JetBlue brand takes a hit

One of my favorite brands and favorite airlines, JetBlue, has seen its image badly tarnished this week.  A consistently top-rated low-cost airline that began life less than a decade ago with the brio of a Business 2.0 startup, JetBlue practically invented the “transcendent brand experience,” in which all its customer touchpoints — the Web, the phone, its planes, its staff, its ads, and service counters all match in tone and style and experience.  In a way, the New York based JetBlue is the first Web-based airline — an airline that recognized that the Web would be the main way people were going to interact with the company (aside from boarding its planes), and how the company would communicate its ethos, message, and competencies to customers.  I have never seen an airline generate such enthusiasm and loyaly from it staff and passengers.

This week, the luster came off.  Almost a week after the Valentine’s Day snowstorm that created air travel havoc, JetBlue is still trying to dig itself out.  Today it announced cancelations of a quarter of its Monday’s flights in hopes of getting its schedule and system sorted out. The Drudge Report splashed horror stories of passengers stuck on aircraft for 10 hours.

JetBlue has consistently won top honors for customer satisfaction, despite its recent growing pains. And in the wake of its storm-related troubles, JetBlue has so far done all the right things: apologies, refunds, compensations.  But it’s safe to say that the honeymoon, however long its been, is over.  The brand will survive, but in many ways, JetBlue has become just an ordinary airline.

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In case you didn’t know about France

In case you still had a shred of doubt about France’s continued and long history of anti-semitism, the Archbishop of Paris has generously settled the matter for you. During a trip to Israel, Andre Vingt-Trois said that France was doomed to a “pandemic of anti-Semitism.”  At Smiling Bomb, we say that admitting a problem is always half the battle.  Unfortunately, the Archbishop doesn’t see much hope for his backward country. He does however offer a a tip for Frenchmen who might feel their anti-semitic urges welling up:

“The feeling is fueled by a certain amount of events but we can be French and Catholic and not be frightened about meeting Jews and even enjoy it.”

Translation: It’s hard hanging out with Jews, what with their diabolical history, but if you put your mind to it, you might actually have fun.

Full story on Yahoo!

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Learning to do tight narratives

bbuddies.jpgFun link from the Idea Sandbox, discussing how to do 30-second elevator pitches, a challenge increasingly faced by the digerati. They have an interesting suggestion for inspiration:

It can be challenging to boil down what you do into a short blurb… For inspiration, I suggest paying attention to the 30-second narrations at the beginning of TV shows.

the entry contains links and scripts even (such commitment!) to the openings of 70s classics, such as The Hulk, 6 Million Dollar Man, A-Team, and my favorite, Bosom Buddies.

Not sure these are tightest narratives (it takes 1:38 to get the bionic man going, and the edits are unbelievably slow), but it sure is fun. Memorable too, I was surprised how many lines I remembered (whether that’s a function of hearing them a million times or true memorableness, I don’t know.)

Better sources for learning tight narratives were introduced to me by a friend: the Carousel festival and Puppet Lab. Carousel (link to come later), challenges people to tell stories, be funny, entertain, using slides. The slides can be from a powerpoint (so some people had laptops there), but most used carousel slide projectors and some used filmstrips. The best of these used found materials (like civil defense and military training pamphlets), and laid faux narratives on top of them. Great stuff.

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Puppet Lab is a celebration of puppet arts and its non-electronic but significant evolution. Without the benefit of animations, digital transitions, fades, and many visual cues, these artists manage to tell stories that are moving, funny, insightful, and full of charm. Outside of the festival, is HIroshima Maidens, a puppet show that tells the story of young girls, disfigured by the Hiroshima bomb, and flown to the US for reconstructive surgery. The story is oddly affecting. The most powerful moment for me, was when the operation happened and the puppet was laid onPicture 1.png a sterile metal table all alone with instruments floating above her. Her vulnerability and isolation was palpable — this little puppet moved me.

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While marvelling at the amazing narrative power, my friend Tom said, “Flash animators should be forced to come to this and try to tell stories with so few tools at their disposal.”

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Whole Foods: The Best and the Worst

Whole FoodsI went into a Whole Foods over the weekend; I’ve gotten into these markets only a handful of times.  I’m eagerly awaiting for one to open in my neighborhood sometime in April.  But as exciting as it was, I found the experience also a little disturbing.  As everybody probably knows, these shops are enormous cornucopias of organic foods, both fresh and prepared. The food comes from all over the country, from all over the world, shipped to and beautifully arranged at 187 stores. The place is always packed too, and the checkout lines are long, but that’s okay, because the experience designers have managed to squeeze total efficiency out of the process, and so no matter how long the wait looks, it usually only takes a couple of minutes to get to a register. So what do I find disturbing about that? The ethos of Whole Foods is one of building and contributing to a self-sustaning eco- and food-system.  This is how they put it:

We believe in a virtuous circle entwining the food chain, human beings and Mother Earth: each is reliant upon the others through a beautiful and delicate symbiosis.

Beautiful, is it not? Poetry. But actually, I found the experience to be a terrifying example of the industrial age at its absolute pinnacle, and thus, utterly unsustainable.  There is no place to go but down, because the system is too tight, too “entwined.”  Entropy rules, as much here as anywhere else.

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It’s funny cuz they’re out of touch . . .

I don't understand!  There must be something wrong with them!The Times has an article today about the resumption of LOST, a TV show that I once deeply enjoyed and now am mildly annoyed by. The thrust of the article is roughly:

Anyone who thinks it’s a good sign that “Lost” is back has not spent enough time at the Web site of James Randi, a skeptical scholar of the pseudoscientific and the supernatural.

A fan recently posed this question online at randi.org: “Is a fascination and increased belief in the supernatural a sign of social decline?”

The answer came as categorically as the words under the Magic 8-Ball: “Yes. Absolutely.”

The article goes on to list a bunch of other shows that have supernatural elements, many of which I hadn’t heard of.

Oh, how I love when the Times laments the decline of civilization because things are slipping beyond their ken. They haven’t grasped that we live in a long tail world and many of these shows are watched only by one person. They’ve overlooked the complex narratives that underly the shows and are thus more, not, less content-rich and thought-provoking. They also have a narrow view that supernatural is escapism . . . like CSI isn’t techno-escapism?

Anyway, LOST annoys me now. I’m not sure if it’s because the show is dragging on (Americans lack the good sense to write a show with a natural cap, or lack the faith that they can create a new show when the current hit is over), or because I watched the first season on DVD and most of the second on iTunes — with no commercial interruptions, and no week long lags.

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pre-apocolyptic euphoria

“I” “work” “at” an “ad agency”, so we often talk about advertisements. Two advertisements, one a Super Bowl ad from Coca-Cola (their first in quite some time) and one that’s been out for a while. They were both presented by a guy who’s usually kind of grouchy (a totally charming grouch, seriously, but not always given to whimsy and cheaply achieved delight). The first, from Coke, is GTA machinima self-parody.

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A guy gets out of a car and instead of thrashing his environment, he flips everything to a happy mode (my favorite is when he passes two people wearing “the end is nigh” sandwich boards and spins them into “give a little love” signs.

The second one is from Honda.  “Here’s a little song for anyone who’s ever hated, in the key of grrrrr.” It spoofs and celebrates happy crunchy granola folk.

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Both commercials are sufficiently self-referential to be ironic, but they are ultimately silly, happy fun.

So what’s it mean? There’s a genre of pre-WWII literature that focuses on young people living it up before being sent to a war they can’t avoid and don’t expect to survive. These commercials are the first signs of that: global warming is here, we’re in a bad bad war, bad bad people have nasty nasty things and this is our response. Like we learn in Fight Club — the oxygen you get in planes is intended not to save us, but to induce euphoria. These commercials are pre-apocolyptic euphoria.

But you should watch them. They’re a lot of fun!

(The goddamn Youtube embed codes don’t work . . . )

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