Number line vulnerability?

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "Other numbers are largely unaffected, but anyone using '4' for their certificate key is urged to upgrade to '5'." This obviously echoes the recent panic about vulnerabilities in PHP. The joke works because PHP was just about as much of the assumed ontological background as the number line, even for the […]

Gendering duct tape again

The Weather Channel recently published a story about the value of duct tape in keeping out flood water: "Duct tape kept out more flood water than sandbags in laboratory tests". Its newletter advertised that story as "A victory for dads everywhere": The Wikipedia article on duct tape tells us about the history, in which the […]

AI doom as message overload

Norbert Wiener's 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings makes some uncannily accurate predictions, e.g. It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, […]

More caricatured AI reactions

Following up on yesterday's "Singularities" post, today's SMBC: Mouseover title: "Meanwhile the Engineers are just lighting themselves on fire to see what happens." The aftercomic: In fact, there's a wide range of reactions from each group — and likewise from Linguists, although some possibilities are oddly missing… See also "Intellectual Automation" (3/7/2011); "AI Panics" (11/27/2016); […]

Singularities: von Neumann, Good, Vinge, …

The OED gives citations for singularity going back to the 14th century, e.g. this example from 1398 in the sense "The fact or condition of being alone or apart from others; solitariness": Men vsyd to ete togyders in open place, leest syngularite schuld brede lechery. A mathematical singularity, as Wikipedia tells us,"is a point at […]

Thank you for visiting WordsMatter.softville.com

  —  Bob Ray