the blog quebecois

Long-known to robotics researchers and cognitive psychologists, the problem of the Uncanny Valley is lately of most interest to games designers.

Basically, it's the puzzle that the closer we get to simulating human beings, we seem to retain a near-universal and infallable ability to distinguish between the fake and the real. It seems to be almost hard-wired into us. Wikipedia article here.

But now a company named Image Metrics has come closer than I've ever seen to jumping the chasm. Watch the video and be prepared for a surprise about the 1:20 mark.

Warning: Sound, but no screaming zombies.

An inspired genre-blend of Bloons And Tower Defence. Click the picture or here to start.

Warning: Sound, but you can mute it with a button at top right.

You don't get to this point without a lot of hard work.

barbrastreisand.com:

John McCain has served this country. No one in this election is denying him that. But his selection of Governor Palin has demonstrated that he is willing to put his desperation to win this election above the welfare of the American people. As someone who has spent over 40 years advocating on behalf of women both politically and philanthropically, as someone who was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton and as someone who cares deeply about the health and welfare of all women, hear me Senator McCain: "This calculated, cynical ploy to pull away a small percentage of Hillary's women voters from Barack Obama will not work. We are not that stupid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Dear Barbra,

As your new writing coach, may I offer some advice?

Contrary to popular opinion, decorating your sentences with excessive punctuation does not convey -- some might say it even detracts from -- the cogency of your argument!!!

Furthermore, the intensity of your feelings is best communicated by proper attention to word selection and cadence!!!!! Ending your, um, essay with nineteen (19) exclamation marks (I counted them) just makes you look . . . stupid!!!!!!!

Sincerely,

Best Week Ever:

A model walks the runway at the Thom Browne Spring 2009 fashion show during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Exit Art on September 9, 2008 in New York City.

Before I Die is an Internet project in which people send in Polaroids of themselves with their final ambitions scrawled in felt pen on the white lower margin. The woman above wrote:

Before I die I want to be carried out of my home feet first

Not to be anal and all nitpickey about this, but isn't that what you sort of plan for after you die?

Warning: Enhanced sound effects. Either that or the cat can throw one helluva punch.

Yeah, yeah, I know that the R-word is politically inflammatory; on the other hand, just try to come up with a more-fitting adjective for Coldplay's Chris Martin (right) in action.
Link.

Al Capone's (recreated) digs at Eastern State Penitentiary (in Pennsylvania) where he was keeping a low profile following the Valentine's Day Massacre.

It's just one of many photos at Opacity, an ambitious (and beautiful) project to document abandoned infrastructure (schools, hospitals, prisons, power plants, etc.) in the northeastern U.S.

that Red Bull doesn't give you wings?

Fanhouse:

This is Russian high jumper Ivan Ukhov failing miserably on a jump at the Lausanne Grand Prix, going under the bar instead of over it: So what was Ukhov's problem? It hasn't been reported in the English-language media, but in other countries the stories say that he was jumping under the influence of Red Bull and vodka.

Another view here:

Mike On Ads will guess your sex, weight and age, or give you a free stuffed animal!

OK, I was kidding about the weight and age. Also, the free stuffed animal is probably off the table, too.

But he's serious about the sex thing. What he does is query (following your permission) your browser's recent history and compares sites viewed against Quantcast's extensive demographics profiling.

Then a bit of arithmetical magic:

So what I did is I modified the SocialHistory JS so that it polled the browser to find out which of the Quantcast top 10k sites were visited. I then apply the ratio of male to female users for each site and with some basic math determine a guestimate of your gender. The math is really quite simple, I just take: 1 / (1 + r_1 * r_2 * … * r_n)

where p_i is the ratio of men-to-women for the specific site. For example, if you had been to two sites that had a 2-1 ratio of men to women, the probability of you being female would be:
1 / (1 + 2 * 2) = 1/5 = 20%%

Site Male-Female Ratio google.com 0.98 flickr.com 1.15 digg.com 1.56 azlyrics.com 0.79 drudgereport.com 2.08 gizmodo.com 2.08 ultimate-guitar.com 1.25 breitbart.com 1.94 google.ca 1.33 lifehacker.com 1.63 metafilter.com 1.27 musiciansfriend.com 1.86 boingboing.net 1.5 colostate.edu 0.92 reddit.com 1.33 fark.com 1.82 bugmenot.com 2.03 nationalreview.com 1.74 mentalfloss.com 0.75

leading to the conclusion:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 0% Likelihood of you being MALE is 100%

No stuffed animal for me. (And being 100% MALE, why would I want one anyway?)

Via The Presurfer

CBC Sunday ran a long documentary on the fiscal crisis in the States. What a fine piece of journalism that was, featuring an interview with the famously unbiased George Soros.

Host Evan Solomon was rather coy, too, about what caused it all. I suspect he looked into it, didn't like what he saw, and so confined himself to airy allusions about (Republican) greed, deregulation, and . . . Ronald Reagan (cue stock footage, scary music).

It's impossible to look at the issue objectively and not see the grubby fingerprints of Democrats everywhere.

Bloomberg.com:

The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn't be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie ``continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,'' he said. ``We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.'

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: ``It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.''

Via Neatorama