March 2013
2 posts
February 2013
2 posts
January 2013
1 post
She says to me, “I want to get a tattoo, but I want it to be meaningful. Also, I want it to be an ‘in the moment’ sort of thing.”
Because spontaneous and thought out go hand in hand.
October 2012
1 post
September 2012
4 posts
August 2012
3 posts
“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.”
—Bill Nye the Science Guy
“It is thanks to Ray Bradbury that I understand this world I grew into for what it is: a dystopian future. And it is thanks to him that we know how to conduct ourselves in such a world: arm yourself with books. Assassinate your television. Go for walks, and talk with your neighbors. Cherish beauty; defend it with your life. Become a Martian.”
—Tim Kreider on Ray Bradbury’s futurism
July 2012
13 posts
“You can think about only what you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know only what you have thought about.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer
“The God who prescribes forbearance and forgiveness of every sin, even to the point of loving one’s enemy, fails to practise it himself, but rather does the opposite: since a punishment which is introduced at the end of things, when all is over and done with for ever, can be intended neither to improve nor deter; it is nothing but revenge.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer
The Bathtub
The Lost Bayou Ramblers
I’ll admit, the movie kind of dragged on, but the soundtrack made it worth it. It was a touching story with an amazing lead child that reminded me of Scout Finch if she was raised in the Bayou. There were intimate moments and stunning cinematography, but the pacing could have been better. The friend I saw it with made a good point, “That was everything ‘Tree of Life’ wanted to be.”
“Do you know how helpless you feel if you have a full cup of coffee in your hand and you start to sneeze?”
—Jean Kerr
GoogleX making a digital human brain →
mindblog.dericbownds.net
by Deric Bownds
[…] Google’s brain used an array of 16,000 processors to create a neural network with more than one billion connections, and presented it with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos. Without any instructions or labels, it learned to detect faces, human bodies, and cats! This suggests that the human brain, which has at least a million times more connections than this model, could learn significant classes of stimuli with minimum genetic nudging other than instructions for making nerves cells whose connections can be shaped by the sensory input received.
Here is the abstract from Le et al.(PDF here):We consider the problem of building high-level, class-specific feature detectors from only unlabeled data. For example, s it possible to learn a face detector using only unlabeled images? To answer this, we train a 9- layered locally connected sparse autoencoder with pooling and local contrast normalization on a large dataset of images (the model has 1 billion connections, the dataset has 10 million 200x200 pixel images downloaded from the Internet). We train this network using model parallelism and asynchronous SGD on a cluster with 1,000 machines (16,000 cores) for three days. Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not. Control experiments show that this feature detector is robust not only to translation but also to scaling and out-of-plane rotation. We also found that the same network is sensitive to other high-level concepts such as cat faces and human bodies. Starting with these learned features, we trained our network to obtain 15.8% accuracy in recognizing 20,000 object categories from ImageNet, a leap of 70% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art.
My Easy God is Gone - James Kavanaugh
I have lost my easy God – the one whose name
I knew since childhood.
I knew his temper, his sullen outrage,
his ritual forgiveness.
I knew the strength of his arm, the sound
of his insistent voice.
His beard bristling, his lips full and red
with moisture at the moustache,
His eyes clear and piercing, too blue
to understand all,
His face too unwrinkled to feel my
child’s pain.
He was a good God – so he told me -
a long suffering and manageable one.
I knelt at his feet and kissed them.
I felt the smooth countenance of his forgiveness.
I never told him how he frightened me,
How he followed me as a child,
When I played with friends or begged
for candy on Halloween.
He was a predictable God, I was the
unpredictable one.
He was unchanging, omnipotent, all-seeing,
I was volatile and helpless.
He taught me to thank him for the concern
which gave me no chance to breathe,
For the love which demanded only love in
return – and obedience.
He made pain sensible and patience possible
and the future foreseeable.
He, the mysterious, took all mystery away,
corroded my imagination,
Controlled the stars and would not let
them speak for themselves.
Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce
umbilical is broken,
I live with my own fragile hopes and
sudden rising despair.
Now I do not weep for my sins; I have
learned to love them.
And to know that they are the wounds that
make love real.
His face eludes me; his voice, with all
its pity, does not ring in my ear.
His maxims memorized in boyhood do not
make fruitless and pointless my experience.
I walk alone, but not so terrified as when
he held my hand.
I do not splash in the blood of his son
nor hear the crunch of nails or thorns
piercing protesting flesh.
I am a boy again – I whose boyhood was
turned to manhood in a brutal myth.
Now wine is only wine with drops that do
not taste of blood.
The bread I eat has too much pride for transubstantiation,
I, too – and together the bread and I embrace,
Each grateful to be what we are, each loving
from our own reality.
Now the bread is warm in my mouth and
I am warm in its mouth as well.
Now my easy God is gone – he knew too
much to be real,
He talked too much to listen, he knew
my words before I spoke.
But I knew his answers as well – computerized
and turned to dogma.
His stamp was on my soul, his law locked
cross-like on my heart,
His imperatives tattooed on my breast, his
aloofness canonized in ritual.
Now he is gone – my easy, stuffy God – God,
the father – master, the mother – whiner, the
Dull, whoring God who offered love bought
by an infant’s fear.
Now the world is mine with all its pain and
warmth, with its every color and sound;
The setting sun is my priest with the ocean for it’s alter.
The rising sun redeems me with rolling
waves warmed in its arms.
A dog barks and I weep to be alive, a
cat studies me and my job is boundless.
I lie on the grass and boy-like, search the sky.
The clouds do not turn to angels, the winds
do not whisper of heaven or hell.
Perhaps I have no God – what does it matter?
I have beauty and joy and transcending loneliness,
I have the beginning of love – as beautiful as it
is feeble – as free as it is human.
I have the mountains that whisper secrets
held before men could speak,
I have the oceans that belches life on
the beach and caresses it in the sand,
I have a friend who smiles when he sees
me, who weeps when he hears my pain,
I have a future of wonder.
I have no past – the steps have disappeared
the wind has blown them away.
I stand in the Heavens and on earth, I
feel the breeze in my hair,
I can drink to the North Star and shout
on a bar stool,
I can feel the teeth of a hangover, the
joy of laziness,
The flush of my own rudeness, the surge of
my own ineptitude.
And I can know my own gentleness as well
my wonder, my nobility.
I sense the call of creation, I feel its
swelling in my hands.
I can lust and love, eat and drink, sleep
and rise,
But my easy God is gone – and in his stead
The mystery of loneliness and love!
© Copyright – James Kavanaugh
