I was obsessed with figuring that [joke] out. The way I figure it out is I try different things, night after night, and I’ll stumble into it at some point, or not. If I love the joke, I’ll wait. If it takes me three years, I’ll wait.
One of the first things that Robbins ever explained to me was his observation that the eye will follow an object moving in an arc without looking back to its point of origin, but that when an object is moving in a straight line the eye tends to return to the point of origin, the viewer’s attention snapping back as if it were a rubber band.
Here’s a crazy fact: in 2011, two Stanford professors (Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun) taught an online course called Introduction to Artifical Intelligence. Of the 160,000 students who signed up, only about 23,000 completed it. And while the success rate isn’t so great, the sheer number of students they were able to educate in one pass is absolutely staggering. Looking back, Thrun said: “Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors in the world combined.”
“The GPS guided me to a part of town that I had never seen before, and my heart sank. It looked abandoned and seedy. Run down warehouses, not that well lit, and the kind of place where in the US, I would stay away from after dark and even during the day. I made up my mind that I would drive by the address and then just turn around and drive home.”
In one compact, teachable verse (Verse 2), the song forces us to think about traffic stops, vehicle searches, drug smuggling, probable cause, and racial profiling, and it beautifully tees up my favorite pedagogical heuristic: life lessons for cops and robbers
This video is one of those things where, once you start watching… you can’t pull away. I don’t speak Korean, and have no idea what the lyrics mean. Still, my brain tries to put some kind of narrative to the visuals I’m seeing, piecing the disparate sequences into some kind of coherent whole.
I started reading the first few pages, and then the storyline took an odd little turn. And then it took another odd little turn, and made me wonder where things were headed. I went a few more pages in, and another turn… and before I knoew it, I had lost maybe nearly half an hour, reading through a ton of the story.
Don Johnson is a blackjack player who’s done well for himself. He’s done really well for himself, actually. He’s made nearly $15 million from three Atlantic City casinos (and won nearly $6 million in one night at the Tropicana).
Trust Issues is an utterly fascinating article at Lapham’s Quarterly about “Methuselah” trusts. Named after the long-lived Biblical Methuselah, these perpetual trusts are pockets of money that are meant to accrue interest over extraordinarily long periods of time.
The catch? We’re actually talking about compound interest.
I’m updating the blog over lunch, so I don’t have a time to elaborate here… but this is an absolutely fascinating article about how a select few people are gaming a Massachusetts lottery game called Cash WinFall. One example is 70 year old Marjorie Selbee and her husband: Over the next three days, Selbee bought…
Wanted: Gentleman Bank Robber is the true story of Leslie Ibsen Rogge who, during the span of two decades, did the unthinkable: he robbed over 30 banks, stole over $2M, appeared on “America’s Most Wanted”, and spent over a decade eluding the FBI while on their Top Ten List. And he did all of it…
When I was an undergraduate at Indiana University, I was an English major looking to learn more about Literature. I carried several Norton Anthologies in my backpack, each one a large cinderblock of the best writing from a specific era. I studied Chaucer, Shakespeare, essays from the Victorian era, poetry of all shapes and sizes,…
Just read over a pretty eyebrow-raising article about the Stuxnet worm. Entitled A Declaration of Cyber-War, Michael Joseph Gross lays out what researchers have found about this virus in the past year… and speculates on the hand(s) that may have coded it. In computer security parlance, a vulnerability in a computer application that has not…
Doc Searls has a very interesting post regarding the role of the Internet, during the early moments of the earthquake in Japan. Though this was written on March 11th, it’s still a pretty insightful glimpse into how, more and more, we are turning online to find updated, of-the-moment information on world events. Here’s the take-away:…
Secrets of a Mind-Gamer is the story of an unlikely mnemonist: someone capable of remembering and recalling large amounts of data. The article has a fantastic opening, providing an example of how one would go about memorizing a random sequence of playing cards: Dom DeLuise, the comedian, was implicated in the following unseemly acts in…