Google made an artifical brain by linking together 16,000 computers with 1,000,000,000 connections (a fraction of a normal brain, but what the heck) and set it loose on YouTube. Over a couple of days of constant work, the artificial brain learned to recognize various things including cats.

Picking up on the most commonly occurring images featured on YouTube, the system achieved 81.7 percent accuracy in detecting human faces, 76.7 percent accuracy when identifying human body parts and 74.8 percent accuracy when identifying cats.

“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,” the team says in its paper, Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning, which it will present at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Edinburgh, 26 June-1 July.

Details here.

What I want to know is this: If I put a kitty cat on every one of my blog posts will I get more hits???

Actually, I think the TSA does a pretty good job at their security theater. (Calling it something like “security theater” does not automatically prove that such theater has no function.) I remember the old days when there were one or two hijacking of an airplane every single week. Hell, my friend Billy’s dad hijacked a plane!. And later when I was doing a lot of international travelling, when there were few hijackings but the security systems at airports were visibly flawed. So I appreciate that there have been improvements even if it may be not the way I would have done it.

Having said that, TSA agents can be real boneheads at times. The latest is a case of a man bringing his father through security. His father, as it happens, as in a jar in the form of cremains. The TSA agent ended up spilling about 25% of dad on the floor and laughing about it, supposedly.

“They opened up my bag, and I told them, ‘Please, be careful. These are my grandpa’s ashes,'” Gross told RTV6’s Norman Cox. “She picked up the jar. She opened it up.
“I was told later on that she had no right to even open it, that they could have used other devices, like an X-ray machine. So she opened it up. She used her finger and was sifting through it. And then she accidentally spilled it.”

Read the rest of the story here.

If those TSA agents could see the stuff I brought through airports before they showed up they’d freak. Human remains? Huh. Run of the mill.

Alexander Aan was sentenced for two and half years in prison simply for having written “God does not exist” on Facebook. He has done nothing wrong! Freedom of conscience and expression is one of the fundamental human rights that must be respected in all civilised countries by all civilised authorities.

Sign the petition here.

Remember the whole WMD thing, where President George W. Bush and Colin Powell and all those guys looked the American People straight in the face and said “we are absolutely certain that Saddam Hussein has Weapons of Mass Destruction”? Many doubted this claim. The war happened, and the claim was absolutely totally undeniably indubitably proven false. But Republicans kept saying it like it was true over and over again.

Well, a current poll shows that a majority of Republicans believe that Saddam had WMDs.

The poll is here (PDF). It covers a lot more than just WMDs and is worth a look.

I find it interesting that the poll uses the term “Democrat” to refer to the “Democratic Party” but it does not use “Republic” to refer to the “Republican Party.” Anyway, the poll showed that “..63 percent of Republican respondents still believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003. By contrast, 27 percent of independents and 15 percent of Democrats shared that view.” (see this summary)

This is coming from a few different sources none of which are really linkable so I’ll just copy and paste this press release from the Environmental Defense Fund:

*** BREAKING *** BREAKING *** BREAKING ***

…

Moments ago, a federal appeals court upheld EPA’s climate pollution emission standards, rejecting four legal challenges that had been filed by industry groups and several states’ attorneys general.

The court ruled in favor of clean air protections in four major cases, denying petitions against the Climate Pollution Endangerment Finding and the Clean Car Standards and dismissing petitions against the Timing and Tailoring Rules.

EDF activists submitted tens of thousands of comments in favor of these critical rules and today’s court decision affirms our efforts to defend EPA’s common sense solutions to promote cleaner air and a safer climate future.

This ruling also comes one day after the public comment period closed on the proposed new EPA rule that would limit climate pollution from new fossil fuel power plants. An incredible 113,579 EDF activists joined a record-shattering 2 million Americans who submitted comments in favor of this rule that, if implemented, will help end dirty energy as we know it.

Anthony Davis is apparently some sort of athelete, and he apparently has these eyebrows:

And he intends to trademark them. Well, actually, he’s already trademarked them:

Davis, known for his connected eyebrows, trademarked the phrases “Fear The Brow” and “Raise The Brow” earlier this month.
“I don’t want anyone to try to grow a unibrow because of me and then try to make money off of it,”

It is a good thing he does not have a twin, or there might be a fierce, and at the same time incredibly stupid, legal battle.

I’ve started a new project on marriage. I was asked by some Minnesota-based political folks to consider writing a few blog posts on the science and anthropology associated with marriage, to evaluate some of the claims being made by anti same-sex-marriage activists, Republicans and others. I happen to be an expert on marriage, having been married several times. So, I am going to write a stream of posts on the topic on Greg Laden’s Blog starting with this one. There will be occasional posts connected to this stream here on The X Blog as appropriate, or perhaps the occasional cross posting. The entire flow of posts will be framed in intro pointer posts at the Minnesota Progressive Project, such as this one.

So, this is what you should do: Read this, then read this. Then, later, read other stuff.

There may be some guest posts.

Yes, thanks to Facebook and Chris Rodda, the word’s out; it’s my birthday! One year has gone by since I promised myself to use a semi-colon at least once in every blog post for one year; that’s done with. And I want to thank all the people who have sent me birthday wishes on Facebook; I tried to “like” all of them but Facebook has rounded out my feed so at one point I see a single entry that says “175 people have wished you a happy birthday” and there’s a picture of about nine people there.

I’ll figure that out later.

Every year, there is one thing I want for my birthday, and Julia finds out what it is, and tells everyone else, and then they don’t get it for me usually because it is not spec’ed out, and later I buy it myself. This year my birthday present will be a small propane grill. Very small. Portable, even. Not a propane stove, but a propane grill. Weber makes one, it’s called the Weber 1520 Propane Gas Go-Anywhere Grill. We don’t grill much at home but when we do the charcoal grill is overkill even though it’s very nice (it was a birthday present from a few years back). And we’ll still use the charcoal grill now and then. But there are those times when pulling the charcoal grill out onto the driveway, getting the coals lit and ready, cooking two hot dogs and a potato or something followed by having this hot grill ready to be knocked down by the toddler for the next two hours seems like the wrong way to go. The small propane grill will require that I get a new and more useful table, which is actually a good thing. It is also portable so we can go down to the river now and then and cook our potato there.

There is also one thing I want for my birthday every couple of years that is too expensive and extravagant but Amanda gets it for me anyway; this was one of those years and the thing is a lens. Since I didn’t bring that camera up to the cabin I can’t show you anything yet, but in a few days you’ll see, I’ll finally be a great photographer! (It is all in the equipment, right?)

The other thing I got for my birthday was this: Two shirts from JC Pennys. Absolutely appropriate since this year my birthday falls on Pride Day in the Twin Cities.

Oh, and about the semi-colon; I was kidding.

Happy Birthday everybody! (Who’s having one, that is.) And thanks for the good wishes.

Are you aware of Dana Hunter’s current project? The author of En Tequila es Verdad, the blog that always makes me want to take a shot, is writing detailed essays that track events connected to the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens. She’s writing them as part of her blogging over at Scientific American, but she just posted an update on Freethoughtblogs that serves as an index to all of the stories so far, so you should click here to get oriented and then click through to the stories.

Even though we know how the story turns out, Dana’s posts make for an edge of your seat thriller. Also, you probably don’t really know or remember exactly how it turns out because it was a while ago. The main thing I remember about it was hearing news from my sister who lived pretty close and got pretty heavily dumped on, and my other sister who lived a little farther away but mostly upwind, but who’s travel plans got messed up for a long time.

I hope Dana turns her story into something people visiting the region can carry along and learn stuff. There is a lot of interest these days in the Yellowstone Caldera and related magma movements and earthquake. This story, about Mt. Saint Helens is in many ways more interesting and more immediate.