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UFO-gate = thousands of times worse than Russia-gate
UFO researcher says new documentary exposes ‘what the secret agenda has been’
Even within the much-maligned and widely misunderstood field of “UFOlogy,” Steven Greer is a divisive figure.
His affinity for the spotlight and his willingness to dive deep into areas of the subject where other UFO researchers fear to tread have painted him with a broader target for contention than many of his contemporaries. He is at it once again with the recent book-and-film combo Unacknowledged: An Exposé of the Greatest Secret in Human History — the compelling documentary half of which will receive its Toronto premiere coupled with a Q&A with Greer this Saturday. The event is open to non-conference attendees as part of the three-day Alien Cosmic Expo UFO symposium taking place over the weekend at the Airport Crowne Plaza Hotel.
Greer is not easing off. As he puts it, Unacknowledged — the book and the film, the latter directed by first-time documentarian Michael Mazzola — “really take people from zero to 100 quickly.”
Kurt Eichenwald and the dangers of tentacle hentai research
Video (warning: contains deplorable content) and text description:
On June 7th, 2017, Eichenwald claimed he had been sent an anti-semitic flyer as a result of Tucker Carlson mentioning him on his show. In an effort to prove the veracity of his claim, Eichenwald tweeted an image of him holding the flyer he was sent (shown below).
It was soon noticed that in the image, Eichenwald had a tab on his computer opened to B-Chiku, or Hentai. This led many to joke about the idea that Eichenwald masturbates to hentai pornography. These jokes were covered in Mediaite[9] (examples shown below).
The following day, Eichenwald defended himself by saying the tab was open because he was “trying to convince his wife that tentacle porn existed.”[10] Eichenwald went so far as to include a screenshot of a conversation with his wife where she verified his story.
Rather than tentacles, the tabbed hentai contained "traditional gender roles and values, with a submissive stay-at-home wife and a working husband".
U.S. Escalating Role in Syria
US coalition in first downing of Syrian army plane
U.S. warplane downs Syrian army jet in Raqqa province
I'm a little shocked it took this long.
Hardcore Oxygenarians
Jürgen Schmidhuber Goes Deep
Some predictions from "the father of deep learning", Jürgen Schmidhuber:
He predicts trillions of AI in the 2050s will mine and develop [asteroids].
He has a long list of “truths” that many disagree with.
1. Many think that intelligence is this awesome, infinitely complex thing. Juergen think it is just the product of a few principles that will be considered very simple in hindsight, so simple that even kids will be able to understand and build intelligent, continually learning, more and more general problem solvers.
Partial justification of this belief:
(a) there already exist blueprints of universal problem solvers developed in my lab, in the new millennium, which are theoretically optimal in some abstract sense although they consist of just a few formulas (http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/unilearn.html, http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedelmachine.html).(b) The principles of our less universal, but still rather general, very practical, program-learning recurrent neural networks can also be described by just a few lines of pseudo-code, e.g., http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/rnn.html, http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/compressednetworksearch.html
2. General purpose quantum computation won’t work (Juergen’s prediction of 15 years ago is still standing). Related: The universe is deterministic, and the most efficient program that computes its entire history is short and fast, which means there is little room for true randomness, which is very expensive to compute. What looks random must be pseudorandom, like the decimal expansion of Pi, which is computable by a short program. Many physicists disagree, but Einstein was right: no dice. There is no physical evidence to the contrary http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/randomness.html. For example, Bell’s theorem does not contradict this. And any efficient search in program space for the solution to a sufficiently complex problem will create many deterministic universes like ours as a by-product. Think about this. More here http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/computeruniverse.html and here http://www.kurzweilai.net/in-the-beginning-was-the-code
[...] Juergen won’t be surprised if Moore’s Law holds for another century. If so, computers will approach the Bremermann limit of 10^51 ops/s per kg of matter in the mid 2100s
Femtocomputing, please.
Interesting Wikipedia talk page.
AOMedia Video 1 Codec
This is from last month but there's no newer article about AV1:
Google’s Royalty-Free Answer to HEVC: A Look at AV1 and the Future of Video Codecs
AV1 can be used together with the audio format Opus in a future version of the WebM format for HTML5 web video and WebRTC.
What kind of features are you looking for in AV1 (other than the obvious: better compression efficiency than H.265/HEVC)?
Billy Joel on Trump
The fine pieces of shit over at Rolling Stone recently interviewed Billy Joel:
Critics used to give you a hard time. But it seems like in the past few years you've become cool.
Look, man, Trump is president, so all kinds of weird shit can happen.What do you make of that?
I'm still flabbergasted. I try to stay out of politics. I am a private citizen and I have a right to believe in my own political point of view, but I try not to get up on a soapbox and tell people how to think. I've been to shows where people start haranguing the audience about what's going on politically and I'm thinking, "You know, this isn't why I came here." As a matter of fact, one of the biggest cheers of the night comes when we do "Piano Man" and I sing, "They know that it's me that they're coming to see to forget about life for a while," and the audience lets out this huge "ahhhh" and I say, "OK, yeah, don't forget that." We're more like court jesters than court philosophers.
Normally I wouldn't even pay attention to some celebrity spouting off on politics (Because who gives a damn?) but Joel absolutely nails what a whole lot of folks are thinking on the matter. Tip of the hat to the Piano Man for keeping it classy.
"Trump" to be bleeped out on Broad City
Trump's Name Will Be Bleeped Out In The Next "Broad City" Season
Would I have seen this important news if I hadn't accidentally opened BuzzFeed? I'm not so sure.
June 2017 Russia Protests
Russia protests: Opposition leader Alexei Navalny sentenced
Russia protests: Kremlin critic Navalny jailed, hundreds arrested
Will Navalny make it into the Kremlin or get shot in the night?
Fourth Kepler and K2 Science Conference
NASA invites members of the media to attend the fourth Kepler and K2 Science Conference to be held June 19-23. The weeklong science conference will take place at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
Probably a good time to look for exoplanet-related announcements.
