David Attenborough is awesome. He is largely responsible for turning the BBC into the network it is today (including the move to color TV and building BBC2). But most people know him from his nature specials. If you’ve ever watched a nature special, you probably know who he is. He does nature specials better than anyone else, and has been all over the world to film its beauty for us. You can read more about him on his BBC page and his Wikipedia page. But you come to know Attenborough best by looking at his impressive body of work. To commemorate his awesomeness, I’ve put together the complete list of everyone’s 20 favorite Attenborough moments, along with a few other clips I like. Thats a lot of videos, so instead of embedding them into the page I’m just linking them. Enjoy! Edit: After 4 days of work and 2.11 gigs later, the list is now complete!!! Yay 1. Attenborough watching a lyrebird mimicking various noises (The Life of Birds) Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CNi-EFWLpk 2. Mountain gorillas (Life on Earth) Video: Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–xJjzA3hQY Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT2q7VOErFU 3. Blue whale encounter (The Life of Mammals) Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcLHFu2lZ6c 4. His description of the demise of Easter Island’s native society (State of the Planet) Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84PTH8ceWvI 5. Chimpanzees using tools to crack nuts (The Life of Mammals) Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii6I4nNPClw 6. A Grizzly bear fishing (The Life of Mammals) Video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=LXOSAZz6Px4 7. Imitating a woodpecker to lure in a real one (The Life of Birds) Video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=hgYQUBZUYSI 8. The presenter being attacked by a displaying male Capercaillie (The Life of Birds) Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgP7K1PlNTQ 9. Chimps wading through water on two feet (The Life of Mammals) Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrdU-3Uaq10 10. Observing a male bowerbird’s display (The Life of Birds) Video: Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yOL49n-j70 Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygz-SiqF-YA Part 3: […]

Novelty dance spawned by a 1962 hit. 11 letters. Answer This question is from a NYT crossword puzzle that was used in yet another Man vs Machine competition, this time pitting 25 humans against a single program, WebCrow. The machine had at its disposal a big database of past completed crowsswords, a dictionary, and the entirety of Internet. WebCrow beat the pants off the humans. A crossword-solving computer program yesterday triumphed in a competition against humans. Two versions of the program, called WebCrow, finished first and second in a competition that gave bilingual entrants 90 minutes to work on five different crosswords in Italian and English. The competition took place in Riva del Garda, Italy, as part of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. WebCrow took on 25 human competitors, mostly conference attendees, while more than 50 crossword enthusiasts and AI researchers competed online |Link via Engadget| Although this was more of a demonstration than an actual competition, the result is no small potatos. Although the program proceeds by trial and error, its not exactly brute force because you can’t guarantee a solution. Furthermore, solutions sometimes rest on puns or other word play that can confound any straightforward algorithmic approach and requires some understanding of the language involved. Of course, that understanding is freely available on Internet. But the AI researchers involved don’t want to give credit where due. Internet is just ‘shallow knowledge’, apparently. Tony Veale works on software that can deal with human language at University College Dublin, Ireland, and watched WebCrow in action. He told New Scientist he was impressed. “It’s part of a trend to use the web as a shallow source of human knowledge for artificial intelligence,” he says. The web is “shallow” because most content cannot be understood by a computer, Veale explains, but […]

“One of Governor Warner’s operating principles is to go where the voters are,” she continues, “not make them come to you. We saw how rich an environment [SL] was. I mean, you can sit next to someone’s avatar, strike up a conversation, and forget that you’re not in the same room. We started to see that in Second Life, people can get together and talk politics with other folks without the obstacles of real life.” |link via BoingBoing| Thats right, former governor of Virginia and presidential hopeful Mark Warner is giving a stump speech in Second Life. God Bless the Metaverse. Update: Full transcript available MW: Thanks Hamlet. Fire away with the questions. HA: How are you today? MW: Well this is my first virtual appearance, I’m feeling a little disembodied! Oh, dear.

“A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.” –Hamlet Interesting find on BoingBoing. Someone at Stanford compiled a list of over 7,800 metaphors for the mind, and sumbitted it as a searchable dissertation. Brad Pasanak: The Mind is a Metaphor In my dissertation, Eighteenth-Century Metaphors of Mind, A Dictionary, I analyze a collection of over 7,000 metaphors that I’ve assembled from various electronic and traditional sources. I consider the tacit assumption, shared by a variety of scholars, that changing metaphors are indicative—if not productive or constitutive—of broader cultural change. In contrast, my research makes clear that, with few important exceptions, metaphors of mind in the eighteenth century display astonishing persistence in the face of revolutionary ferment and change.

… Groovy I just found out that Spike Jonze is making a film based on Where the Wild Things Are, and Dave Eggers is getting screenwriting credits. How neat is that? I stumbled across this after finding this commercial Jonze Wes Anderson directed. I posted it up on the HTEC website, but it is worth posting here too. I like the way it contrasts with one of my favorite short films ever, Camera. If you are reading this site, I’ve probably shown it to you a few times already. But if not, you can watch it after the break.

Thanks, DS. “The power of the community to decide, of course, asks us to reexamine what we mean when we say that something is ‘true.’ We tend to think of truth as something that resides in the world. The fact that two plus two equals four is written in the stars-we merely discovered it. But Wikipedia suggests a different theory of truth. Just think about the way we learn what words mean. Generally speaking, we do so by listening to other people (our parents, first). Since we want to communicate with them (after all, they feed us), we use the words in the same way they do. Wikipedia says judgments of truth and falsehood work the same way. The community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by consensus. Yes, that means that is the community changes its and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. The community isn’t likely to do such an absurd or useless thing, but it has the ability.” -From “The Hive”, The Atlantic, September 2006 Discussions of Wikipedia have become increasingly confused and confusing in popular discussions, thanks in no small part to Steven Colbert. But Wikipedia has always been clear and concise about its own position relative to the ‘truth’. From Wikipedia in eight words Facts: Wikipedia contains facts, not opinions, and not original research. Since any opinion of note has been expressed by some person or group of people, we do not try to decide or claim that an opinion is “true” or “false”. We state instead, neutrally and factually, which people hold what views, and allow the facts to speak for themselves. Wikipedia, I think rightly and as any honest encyclopedia should, does not claim to […]

The basic debate over folk psychology is whether or not our common sense psychological terms like ‘intentions’ refer to actual entities in the brain. I generally side with the eliminativists on these issues, but the token eliminiativists like Churchland often come across as if the (primitive, ignorant) ‘folk’ are making a huge mistake by continuing to use words like ‘belief’ and ‘desire’ and (especially) ‘intention’ in describing the mind. To make the view a little more appealing, I usually compare folk-psychological terms to speech and thought bubbles in comic books. We all know what speech and thought bubbles mean, and how to read them in order to understand the illustration. But none of us think that speech actually occurs in bubble form, or that the comics are trying to accurately represent the mechanics of speech in depicting them as bubbles. They are just convenient ways to depict behavior in a simple, static way. Well, we all understand thought bubbles, but they didn’t always have the form they currently have. BoingBoing recently linked to an interesting study in the evolution of speech bubbles. I’ll just point out some examples I found interesting after the break. Speech ‘balloons’ started out as scrolls, which is somewhat understandable. Interestingly, however, they often came out of the speaker’s hands, and not their mouths. The srolls were very ornate and elaborate. It looks like speech bubbles evolved for the most part due to the laziness of the artist, and the fact that extremely ornate scrolls weren’t necessary (or appropriate) for a quick political cartoon. You start seeing a more balloon-like shape in the mid-18th century. Eventually, this appears to have evolved in to a method not only for keeping track of speakers and what they said, but also the order in which they say it. This […]

I have a bunch of videos I want to show my students, but my classroom doesn’t have the resources to show them any video clips, and I don’t have a laptop to bring in anyway. I’ve been putting videos on the HTEC site, but I can’t be sure that everyone will have the codecs to view them, or will even have access to the site on anything other than a public computer. So I’ve been trying to mess around with video editing so I can cut out some important clips and upload them to YouTube for everyone to see. I honestly feel somewhat guilty for not having put anything on YouTube until now, as if I didn’t register for the draft or something. So I uploaded my first ever video last week, of Bush’s recent foray into French existentialism. Amazingly, the video has already been viewed over 1500 times, which I’m sure says something about something. In any case, it was frighteningly easy to cut the clip and upload it, so I thought it’d be a good way of preparing clips for class. However, the other films I’m trying to cut together are all much larger files, and much harder to deal with, especially given YouTube’s 10 minute/100 meg file limit. My second attempt is uploading at the moment, I’ll update this post when its up and running. edit: Here we go

I’ve been quite busy. I’ve moved, I’m preparing a new class (complete with website), and I have an bleeding ear infection that, thanks to a whole lot of vicodin has kept me bed ridden for the last week. But even still, I have to post this: The study involved 69 children, ages 7 to 12, who were separated into three groups and then asked to rate their pain on a numerical scale when they were stuck with needle used to take a blood sample. The children’s mothers also rated the kids’ pain. Those watching TV cartoons reported half the pain as those who were being soothed by Mom. When compared with children who just sat in a hospital room with mothers who didn’t try to soothe them, the TV watchers reported one-third the pain. “The power of television is strong and it can be harmful for children if it is stronger than the force made by the mother to distract children,” Bellieni said. “I believe that this power must be controlled and reduced.” |Link via Engadget| Too late, Bellieni. Way, way too late.

Long live the King Alright, I think I hammered this thing into shape. It looks a bit awkward, but I think its pretty smooth. I’m just happy that it looks normal on IE, which is no small miracle. To look at how far this format has come, take a look at my old blogger page. We’ve come a long way, baby.