Category Archives: Uncategorized

Chocolate capers

The most expensive chocolate in the world is from a company called Noka. Its price is many times that of other high-end chocolates, because, according to the makers, it's a special, ultra-pure, no-additives blend chosen from "secret" plantations around the world. A website called Dallas Food wanted to find out if Noka's chocolates worth the prices they charge.

Read their fascinating and informative investigation to find out if Noka is really worth $853 per pound.

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BTW, this is yet another link that I found at Making Light. They find the best stuff. Everyone should read them, every day.

Dead Tree Live Blogging

So there's this trend, where someone reads a book and tells the world how it's going, as they go. It's like a semi-real-time progressive book report. Here are the three I'm watching right now:

  • Defective Yeti is doing Moby Dick.
  • Slacktivist is doing the Christian end-times fantasy series, Left Behind. And he's managing to get literally hundreds of comments after each installment. Impressive.
  • The Chumps Of Choice is doing Thomas Pynchon's latest, Against The Day. It's a group effort, and I'm participating in this one. We're only on pages 25-50 (25 pages per week), so it's still not too late to jump in !

(Three makes a trend, right?)
Any others ?

Celebrating Sagan

Ah, Carl Sagan. By happy coincidence, I was just getting into being a precocious little know-it-all when Cosmos came out (1980). So, I got to watch each episode, first run. And then I watched them in re-runs over and over. And then I got the book, which covers the same stuff as TV series, but with a bit more depth, and I read it over and over again. And then I was the smartest little ten year old in my class! Sure, as a ten year old, some of it was way over my head, but I did my best to remember as much of it as I could, even if I didn't understand it. For example, I learned that ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate) is the molecule our cells use to store and transmit energy - even though I couldn't make any sense of the reaction diagrams in the book's appendix. I learned about I learned about near-light-speed travel, even though I still can't get my head around relativity. I learned about evolution, astronomy, cosmology, physics, biology, mathematics and history. I learned things from that show that none of my high school or college classes even approached. I can't imagine what I'd be like if it wasn't for Cosmos getting me excited about science. Turtle-necked sweaters will always remind me of Sagan. The book will always be on my bookshelf.

The Pig Go

Neural Network Zen:

    Not wanting to throw away a several hundred thousand dollar investment, the CTO decided to put the monstrous neural network to use doing something else: prose. The developers spent a few hours re-training it to work from a dataset of phrases and output actual sentences instead of tokenized log lines. The reports it generates [are] included in a section of the company's newsletter. Following is one of its more recent creations.

    The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.

From The Daily WTF's article, No, We Need a Neural Network.

About those "commandments"

Bullseye Rooster discusses the merits of the ten commandments.

Sample:

    3. Thou shalt not lie.
    Seems reasonable, but commandments are absolutes, and we all know times we should lie. Some very few good christians lied to the gestapo to save jews during the holocaust. And they invoked God's name to do so.