My knitting blog is now located at the Needle Exchange!
I saw:
I’m actually kinda afraid of him/her. Well, more like I’m a bit intimidated. That’s a pretty big eye. Not sure if the image is scaled to take my monitor size into account, but it’s quite impressive nonetheless.
If whales don’t suit ya, try some narwhals.
Ooh, BTW, if you think I’m being bad by not working on my thesis, I’ve got you beat. I totally just finished. So there 
So I’m workin’ on the ol’ thesis. I’m citing a paper about working memory, theory of mind and humour and I just now paid attention to the non-primary authors in the study. The surnames are Uekermann, Channon, Winkel, Schlebusch and Daum.
The Schlebusch is what got me. Such good ol’-fashioned German names. Schlebusch!
Anyhoo, my thesis is starting to take a DANGEROUSLY FEMINIST slant. Could it possibly be that the Superiority Theory of Humour grew out of patriarchy? With a name like Superiority Theory of Humour, I would have thought it grew out of flower beds and little babies’ belly buttons.
Fortunately, I ran it by my supervisor today, and he told me to elaborate even more on that particular paragraph. Yay! Hopefully I can stop myself before I hand in a slightly-charred WonderBra with my paper. Thank goodness for electronic submission.
“As I reconstruct the world, I work entirely from memory,” he explains. “I never use photographs or other reference material. All the places, objects and buildings I have seen morph into new variations. Scale and perspective change as well: the images do not show what one could photograph in such situations, but how one experiences and remembers them.”
Suppose now that we would have a workable generate-and-test scheme for constructing and ameliorating representations. Then we could apply this scheme to itself in order to make it more efficient. This is a peculiar characteristic of metarepresentations: a metarepresentation allows to manipulate representations, yet it is itself a representation; hence it can manipulate itself (cfr. Pitrat, 1986; Lenat, 1983; Newell, Shaw & Simon, 1960). This argument can also be used to explain why it is meaningless to look for a meta-metarepresentation, a meta-meta- metarepresentation, etc. Indeed, such higher level representations could only be used to reason about representations (from whatever level) and hence would not be in any way more powerful than the (second level) metarepresentation.
–Heylighen F. (1988): Formulating the Problem of Problem-Formulation, in: Cybernetics and Systems ‘88, Trappl R. (ed.), (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht), p. 949-957.
This paper makes me feel like I’m in The Matrix.
The issue of how to search the space of all possible matches seemed the best issue to neglect in the early stages of this research. The reason is that efficiency is best addressed after it is established that there is something worthwhile to be efficient about.
– Winston, P.H. (1980). Learning and Reasoning by Analogy.*
Whenever I think I am TOTALLY BOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRED reading a paper, those tiny little gems are tucked in to perk me up again.
Seriously, forget actually implementing AI systems, I just want to read scientists being sassy.
* Yeah, I’m still reading it, what of it? I got bored last night and watched two Will Ferrell movies instead.
In any scientific work, it is necessary to have some way of determining success. For this work, claims for success are with respect to the following criteria: (1) there must be an implemented program that performs a specified task; (2) the implemented program must perform by virtue of identifiable principles.
In Artificial Intelligence, having such criteria for success in mind helps avoid tendencies either to be romantically speculative about the power of vague ideas or to be overcome by the performance of working, but ad hoc programs.
– Winston, P.H. (1980). Learning and Reasoning by Analogy.
A very similar sentiment to this post. At least SOME people are paying attention.