Back in junior high, I was in a leadership program whose director felt compelled to distribute Apple Newton’s to all its participants.
So, early on I had a chance to toy around with relatively premature handwriting recognition software.
Earlier today, my younger brother sent me a link to this video presentation of a new sensitive, yet smart sketching system developed at MIT — for a whiteboard no less. It is called ASSIST.
I wonder if his graduate assistants spend all their free time playing “The Incredible Machine” on it.
By accident and by chance you have probably seen one of those nature shows that are narrated by an intellectual sounding Briton.
And with this erudite accent they can make just about any type of loathsome activity sound interesting — or at the very least, leave you with the impression that you have learned something.
Among other edutainment lessons, you have no doubt seen a pregnant female eat her male counterpart. Crunch, slurp, and burp. This cannibalistic act of course, is poo-pooed by you and I, however no lawsuit is filed or law is passed to upend this violent “cycle”… because it is “natural.”
On a personal note, I always think of black widow spiders, and how the male gets the shaft — head first — however, this is neither here nor there.
And while breeding patterns like those above occur across the animal kingdom, a paper published last year in Nature reconfirmed a decades-earlier hypothesis: that man and chimpanzee are separated by a mere 1.23%, “and that the most striking divergence between them occurs, intriguingly, in the Y chromosome, present only in males.” (original emphasis included).
In a recent article in The American Spectator, this finding is discussed at length. However, what starts as a stoic science lesson, ends with some very dubious conclusions (e.g. humans didn’t evolve from chimps, we share a common ancestor, and are both branches along the same grouping, however generalizing and projecting habits and manners of one species onto another is a non sequitur).
And no accent can change that.
See also: David Attenborough’s, The Trials of Life.  Via ehmunro.
I can’t say that I’m much of a fan of guitar soloists, except of course, for Jimmy Hendrix.
Earlier today a friend sent me a comical parody of guitar legend: John Petrucci.
Note: my air guitar is about as intimidating as his world domination mode.
See also: Metallica sues Canadian Band for use of E,F chords.
