Passing the Turing Test.

Everyone's going on about this little work of genius:



It is rather fun.

I have two observations. Firstly, I reckon this passes the Turing Test, which is interesting, because it isn't that good. It has always been assumed that the way to pass the Turing Test was to develop an astoundingly clever computer. Turns out that it can be done far more quickly and easily by raising an entire generation of astoundingly stupid humans with no grasp of grammar or coherence.

Secondly, it told me this earlier:

As a nudist, I am unkempt.

Cue the mighty Random Surrealism Generator:



I never tire of that thing.


Update:

(Just in case you hadn't already worked it out) it'll give you a different message every time you refresh the page.

Unconventional weapons.

Dear Victims,

Here's a bag of grain. Maybe you could throw it at the gunmen when they come for you.

Love and kisses,

Bob & Midge

Oo, sauce.

My first post at The Daily Bread is up. It's about how to make a nice creamy sauce for tortelloni.

That is all.

Chemistry.

Mark Holland links to this:

Research conducted by award-winning U.S. scientist Nathan Zohner concluded that roughly 86 percent of the population supports a ban on dihydrogen monoxide. Although his results are preliminary, Zohner believes people need to pay closer attention to the information presented to them regarding Dihydrogen Monoxide. He adds that if more people knew the truth about DHMO then studies like the one he conducted would not be necessary.

A similar study conducted by U.S. researchers Patrick K. McCluskey and Matthew Kulick also found that nearly 90 percent of the citizens participating in their study were willing to sign a petition to support an outright ban on the use of Dihydrogen Monoxide in the United States.

... which is one hell of a lot more subtle than, but inevitably reminds me of, this:

Unlike traditional water bottling facilities who bottle water only from one specific region, we have designed an innovative blending system that harnesses and compresses the benefits of waters ranging from the French Alps to the Rocky Mountains. Our 27-step process bonds the molecules and rigorously blends the waters together. It then secretes the water molecules and harvests them for the final stage. Once ready, the substance is introduced to the environment and the excess vapors are released. The remaining substance is pure, natural, dehydrated water.

 

Accounting fictions and welfare.

In the comments of my post about neds, The Candidate says:

Hari's problem is that he doesn't make the vital distinction between ordinary decent working class people and the underclass. The former aren't scared of a bit of work and object as much as the middle classes to their taxes subsidising the plasma screens and super sized Big Macs of the chav.

It is the blurring of these boundaries that has undermined the good (albeit antiquated) intentions of the welfare state - the difference between a safety net of last resort for those genuinely falling on bad times and a gravy train for the chav scum.

This is certainly true, but it isn't the whole problem. The really big problem is that the welfare state is run by accountants. Let me explain.

National insurance contributions are taken out of my wages every month. (I have no problem with the government offering a national insurance scheme, by the way, but I think it should be optional.) In return for those contributions, I get certain benefits: six months of dole money if I'm unemployed, incapacity benefit if I get so ill I can't work, etc. Fair enough. Where it all goes wrong is the way national insurance works for people who are long-term unemployed, like I very nearly was this year.

What the government do is, instead of just giving you, say, £55 of unemployment benefit, they give you £60 benefit while simultaneously taking away £5 national insurance contribution. This is obviously just an accounting fiction to keep the books balanced, right? You never, at any stage, give the government £5: they're just moving money from one account to another. The idea is that, if you're unemployed for two years, then get a job, but then get made redundant after four months, you will still qualify for unemployment benefit — which is fair enough. The problem arises because the accountants who run the benefit system treat this simple little book-keeping entry as The Absolute Truth. As far as the government are concerned, you have indeed given them money, and they treat it as income — and they treat you as if you're paying them. Conversely, if you don't claim benefits, they treat you as if you're not paying them.

Last year, Vic (my wife) changed jobs. As it happened, there were two weeks between one job finishing and the next beginning. No problem: we could easily afford the tiny shortfall in income. It hardly seemed worth bothering the government with. Big mistake.

We now know that, as far as the government are concerned, Vic's national insurance contributions are not up to date, so she doesn't qualify for any benefit in the event of her losing her job or being unable to work due to illness (which is a very real danger, as she is diabetic). She's been paying national insurance and income tax nearly every week since sometime in 1996, but, because she missed two weeks' payments last year, she doesn't qualify. But here's where it gets silly. If she had signed on and claimed dole money during those two weeks, her payments would be up to date and she would qualify for benefit, because the government would have a book-keeping entry marked "national insurance contribution". In other words, the more money you take away from the government, the more money they believe that you have given them. They actually penalise you for not claiming benefits.

I was unemployed for most of the first half of this year (I got a job about a week before my benefits ran out and I became officially long-term unemployed). As far as the government are concerned, my national insurance contributions are up to date, because I was "paying" them the entire time I was unemployed. If I had only been unemployed for one month (which was the plan), I might not have bothered claiming benefit, and would therefore not be due any benefit now. Here are some very rough estimates of the figures involved:

Scenario A: unemployed for 6 months, employed for 6.
I claim approximately £1430 in benefits; I pay (assuming my current salary) approximately £770 in national insurance contributions.

Scenario B: unemployed for 1 month, employed for 11.
I claim approximately £240 in benefits; I pay about £1410 in national insurance contributions.

As far as the government are concerned, I pay them exactly the same amount in scenarios A and B. But then there's

Scenario C: unemployed for 1 month without claiming benefits, employed for 11.
As before, I pay about £1410 in national insurance contributions. But, this time, as far as the government are concerned, I pay them less money than in either scenario B or scenario A, because I fail to claim money from them.

Earlier this year, Vic got a letter from the government giving her the option of bringing her contributions up to date by paying the shortfall. Think about that for a moment: she can make up for not having taken money from the government by giving them money.

The moral is simple. The only way to be absolutely sure of qualifying for benefits is by never working. If you think that you might ever have any need to claim them, start early and don't stop.

Compounding stupidity with obstinacy.

Maria Alquilar is an artist from Florida. She was recently paid $40,000 to put a ceramic mural on the side of the new library in Livermore, California. The mural features portraits of historical figures with their names spelt incorrectly. That wasn't the city council's intention when they commissioned the work, of course. It's just that Alquilar can't spell.

That alone is no reason to suppose she's stupid, of course. Some people use their intelligence to get good at spelling; others use it to become adept at making large-scale ceramic works of art, and that's fair enough. No, what makes it abundantly clear that this woman is thick as mince is her reaction.

She had planned to fly to California and put the missing "n" back in Einstein and remove the extra "a" in Michelangelo, among other fixes. But after receiving a barrage of what she called "vile hate mail," Alquilar said Livermore is off her travel itinerary and there'll be no changes by her artistic hand.

"No, I will not return to Livermore for any reason," Alquilar, of Miami, told The Associated Press in an e-mail. "There seems to be so much hatred within certain people. They continuously look for a scapegoat. I guess I am the sacrificial goat."

Yes, as far as Alquilar is concerned, the spelling mistakes are someone else's fault. She made the mural, she designed the mural, she put the incorrectly-spelled names in the mural, but someone else is to blame for the misspellings in the mural. Either that or she doesn't know what "scapegoat" means.

Now, why would she have got hate mail? Well, being a sensitive artistic type, maybe she's exaggerating a bit: maybe it was more disdain mail than hate mail. Or maybe it's got something to do with this:

She previously told officials in Livermore, about 40 miles east of San Francisco, that she would fix the 11 misspellings. She asked for $6,000 plus travel expenses to correct the work they paid her $40,000 to create. The city council, faced with the embarrassing prospect of leaving the typo-strewn work in front of its spanking new library, voted 3-2 to approve the expenditure.

She's happy to take $40,000 of taxpayers' money, but doesn't think that such a sum carries with it any responsibility whatsoever. She thinks that she should be allowed to charge extra — a lot extra — just to fix her own fuck-ups. And she doesn't understand why the people she's extorting might take a bit of a disliking to her. And then she thinks that, when she throws a tantrum and leaves her patrons in the shit, this demonstrates how principled she is.

Alquilar explained that it took her a lot of time and money to create the work

Yes, and? She has chosen to do this for a living, so obviously it takes time. So does my job. So does Elton John's. As for the money it took, that, lest we forget, was provided to her by someone else. The amount of money this work cost her is smaller than the amount she charged for it. This work didn't cost her money; it made her money. Does she really not understand this?

She noted that plenty of people from the city were on hand during the installation who could and should have seen the errant spellings, she said.

Yes, they probably should, but that doesn't mean that she shouldn't have. And, at the end of the day, she had more responsibility for this than anyone else. I don't notice her volunteering to pay any of her profits to these other people who she says had full responsibility for her spelling.

The mistakes wouldn't even register with a true artisan, Alquilar said before deciding to leave the work as is.

"The people that are into humanities, and are into Blake's concept of enlightenment, they are not looking at the words," she told The AP.

Which kind of makes you wonder why she put the words in at all. Here's something from her own website:

Maria believes that the most important elements that should exist in a Public Art Work are the following:

1. The work must have universal appeal for the users of the site on all levels, intellectual, emotional and spiritual.
2. The users of the site should be considered at the planning stage.
3. The visitors to the site must be able to interact with the art at one or more of the aforementioned levels.

So, does this work of hers have universal appeal on an intellectual level for the staff and patrons of a library, do you think?

Bizarre etymology.

This is fascinating: an account of one man's confusing quest to find out why turkeys are named after a country from which they do not come.

So how did such a creature end up taking its name from a medium sized country in the Middle East? Was it just a coincidence? I wondered.

The next day I mentioned my musings to my landlord, whose wife is from Brazil. “That’s funny,” he said, “In Portuguese the word for turkey is ‘peru.’ Same bird, different country.” Hmm.

With my curiosity piqued, I decided to go straight to the source. That very afternoon I found myself a Turk and asked him how to say turkey in Turkish. “Turkey?” he said. “Well, we call turkeys ‘hindi,’ which means, you know, from India.” India? This was getting weird.

I spent the next few days finding out the word for turkey in as many languages as I could think of, and the more I found out, the weirder things got. In Arabic, for instance, the word for turkey is “Ethiopian bird,” while in Greek it is “gallapoula” or “French girl.” The Persians, meanwhile, call them “buchalamun” which means, appropriately enough, “chameleon.”

Curiouser and curiouser.

The great cop-out.

Somewhere down south, Frank McGahon has an argument with Diana Pérez García. Diana objects to being described as a supporter of the creed of Mao and Stalin just because she describes herself as a Communist. Perhaps she isn't aware that Communism was the creed of Mao and Stalin. But probably not. More likely, she's one of the thousands of modern-day Communists who insist that, once they succeed in having their revolution and bringing about a new Communist state, it won't, unlike every Communist state that has ever existed, quickly turn into a living hell, because their Communism is proper Communism. The world has never seen a true Communist state, they earnestly tell us.

I disrespectfully disagree.

Communists who claim not to support Stalin or Mao miss the point. Before Lenin even took power, plenty of people predicted that Communism would inevitably lead to atrocity. The reason they were able to make that prediction is that the seeds of atrocity are sown in the ideology itself. Atrocities didn't occur despite Communism; they happened because of it. It would be easy to disprove this if it weren't true: just point out the Communist state which isn't a waking nightmare for its inhabitants. The point is that you don't have to support Stalin when you're supporting the introduction of a system that inevitably leads to Stalin. And, if you succeed in introducing that system, your eventual protestations to the victims that you had no idea what was coming will sound especially weak in the light of the repeated lessons you refused to learn from history and the repeated warnings you dismissed as slander.

Giving the dead their due respect.

Further to my post about Arafat's death, here's John Ihle putting it a little less politely:

Over the next few days, as world leaders cravenly lick shit right out of Arafat's putrid anus, please remember that he pioneered airline hijacking and school massacres and that he sent his goons around the world to kill Jews wherever they were, whether athletes in Munich or crippled pensioners on holiday in the Mediterranean. And rejoice that the world's biggest mass murderer of Jews since Hitler did not live to see his most fervent wish fulfilled: the people of Israel live.

 

Those crazy antipodeans.

Dogs are just great, as any fule kno. But some poor souls are allergic to them. What to do?

Well, an enterprising Australian called Wally Cochran came up with the idea of crossing poodles, which don't shed and therefore don't set off people's allergies, with labradors, which are cute and dopy and friendly and fun. The result is a breed of dog that makes the perfect family pet and is totally safe for asthmatics.

But none of that is what I'm blogging about. No, the important thing is that, being Australian, Wally named this new breed the labradoodle. Is that just the greatest word in the English language, or what?