April 5-6, 2019, Santa Clarita, CA #wcscv
Month: March 2019
📺 “Fresh Off the Boat” Fresh Off the RV | ABC
Directed by Anya Adams. With Randall Park, Constance Wu, Hudson Yang, Forrest Wheeler. While Honey and Marvin celebrate the birth of their baby, Jessica's book is finally released.
Seems like I’ve been seeing a lot of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on television lately. I know I just saw him in an episode of The Big Bang Theory that recently floated by. He wasn’t quite as entertaining here because he’s obviously 30+ years older than he should have been for a show set in the early 90’s.
📺 “Fresh Off the Boat” The Hand That Sits the Cradle | ABC
Directed by Michael Spiller. With Randall Park, Constance Wu, Hudson Yang, Forrest Wheeler. When Jessica offers to help out exhausted new mother Honey with Zuo Yue Zi - which means "Sitting the Month" taking care of her - Honey begins to realize that 30 days of having to abide by Jessica's strict rules and dietary regimen could leave her more harried then she already is. Meanwhile, after watching "Pumping Iron," Eddie and Emery attempt to put together a workout routine in order to buff ...
📺 “Fresh Off the Boat” Workin’ the ‘Ween | ABC
Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar. With Randall Park, Constance Wu, Hudson Yang, Forrest Wheeler. Honey and Marvin ask Jessica and Louis to be baby Maria's godparents, and Jessica offers to babysit her on Halloween night. But the Huangs are in for a spooky evening when they agree to help wean the baby off of her pacifier. Meanwhile, Eddie is hired by mattress store owner Harv for a job to make some extra money so that he can buy himself a car and ends up having to work in the creepy store all...
Felt like a sub-par episode to me…
Reply to The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic | Nautilus
Amanda Gefter (Nautilus)McCulloch and Pitts were destined to live, work, and die together. Along the way, they would create the first mechanistic theory of the mind, the first computational approach to neuroscience, the logical design of modern computers, and the pillars of artificial intelligence.
Quick note of a factual and temporal error: the article indicates:
After all, it had been Wiener who discovered a precise mathematical definition of information: The higher the probability, the higher the entropy and the lower the information content.
In fact, it was Claude E. Shannon, one of Wiener’s colleagues, who wrote the influential A Mathematical Theory of Communication published in Bell System Technical Journal in 1948, almost 5 years after the 1943 part of the timeline the article is indicating. Not only did Wiener not write the paper, but it wouldn’t have existed yet to have been a factor in Pitts deciding to choose a school or adviser at the time. While Wiener may have been a tremendous polymath, I suspect that his mathematical area of expertise during those years would have been closer to analysis and not probability theory.
To put Pitts & McCulloch’s work into additional context, Claude Shannon’s stunning MIT master’s thesis A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits in 1940 applied Boolean algebra to electronic circuits for the first time and as a result largely allowed the digital age to blossom. It would be nice to know if Pitts & McCulloch were aware of it when they published their work three years later.
👓 Deep text: a catastrophic threat to the bullshit economy? | Abject
I used to be an artist, then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor. — Kenneth Goldsmith It’s a striking headline, and the Guardian…
👓 Celebrating the Work and Life of Claude Elwood Shannon | IEEE Foundation
In 2014 IEEE Information Theory Society President, Michelle Effros, knew that something had to be done. The man who coined the very phrase, Information Theory, had largely been forgotten. Given his importance, and the growing impact that his work was having on society at large, she led the IEEE Information Theory Society on a quest to use the Centennial of Claude Shannon’s birth to right this injustice.
A series of activities were planned, including a dual IEEE Milestone dedicated at both Nokia Bell Labs and MIT. Such was his stature that both institutions were intent on honoring the work he accomplished on their respective sites. His work, after all, foresaw and paved the way for the Information Revolution that we are experiencing, making possible everything from cell phones to GPS to Bitcoin.
By the time of the Nokia Bell Labs event, the keystone project – a documentary on Shannon’s life was in the formative stages. IEEE Information Theory Society leadership had secured the services of Mark Levinson, of Particle Fever acclaim. The script was being written and preliminary plans were underway.
To make the film a reality, a coalition of individuals, foundations and corporations came together with the common objective to bring the story of Shannon to as wide an audience as possible. An effective partnership was forged with the IEEE Foundation which was undertaking its own unique project - its first ever major fundraising campaign. The combination proved to be a winning entry, and the Shannon Centennial quickly became exemplary of the impact that can occur when the power of volunteers is bolstered by effective staff support.
19 June was the World Premiere of the finished product. The Bit Player was screened to a full house on the big screen at the IEEE Information Theory Society’s meeting in Vail, CO, US. The film was met with enthusiastic acclaim. Following the screening attendees were treated to a Q&A with the film’s director and star.
Among the techniques used to tell Shannon’s story was the testimony of current luminaries in the fields he inspired. All spoke of his importance and the need for his impact to be recognized. As one contributor, Andrea Goldsmith, Stephen Harris Professor in the School of Engineering, Stanford University, put it, “Today everyone carries Shannon around in their pocket”.
Based on this article the Claude Shannon movie The Bit Player has already had its premiere. I updated the IMDb entry, but I still have to wonder if it is ever going to get any distribution so that the rest of us might ever see it?
👓 Luke Perry, ‘90210’ and ‘Riverdale’ Star, Dies at 52 | Variety
Actor Luke Perry, known for roles in “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Riverdale,” died on Monday after suffering a massive stroke on Wednesday. He was 52. “[Perry] was surrounded by his children Jack and Sophie, fiancé Wendy Madison Bauer, ex-wife Minnie Sharp, mother Ann Bennett, step-father Steve Bennett, brother Tom Perry, sister Amy Coder, and other close family and friends,” his rep said in a statement. “The family appreciates the outpouring of support and prayers that have been extended to Luke from around the world, and respectfully request privacy in this time of great mourning. No further details will be released at this time.”
👓 Luminary Media Sets Podcast Launch Lineup With Lena Dunham, Trevor Noah And More Than 40 Others | Deadline
Once the company officially launches (sometime in the first half of 2019, it says), its streaming app will be available as an $8-a-month, ad-free subscription version and free version with ads. Some of its shows will be existing podcasts moving over to Luminary as their new exclusive home, and others will be Luminary originals.
Podcasting, of course, has its own roster of A-list talent best-known to people who wear earbuds a good portion of the day. Three such figures are making their next shows for Luminary: Guy Raz, known for How I Built This and the TED Radio Hour; Leon Neyfakh, the creator and host of Slow Burn; and Adam Davidson, the creator of Planet Money.
While it is not yet a billion-dollar business, podcasting pulled in $514 million in revenue in 2018, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Spotify has recently moved aggressively into the sector, buying Gimlet Media for $230 million.
This sounds like yet another standalone app that is going to turn podcasting into a silo so they can monetize the content. Why not just build a payment system on top of what is already there? They could build less and capture/help out a much larger portion of the ecosystem.
I suspect that RSS will not be involved in this process and one will have to use their app instead of just any app.
👓 Podcasts startup Luminary launches with $100m of funding | Music Ally
Another day, another podcasts startup attracting significant investment, amid the wider excitement around the spoken-word format. This time it’s a Los Angeles-based startup called Luminary, which is launching a slate of more than 40 podcasts including the likes of Lena Dunham, Malcolm Gladwell, Trevor Noah and Conan O’Brien as hosts. What’s more, the New York Times reports that Luminary has already secured nearly $100m of funding.
Its CEO Matt Sacks certainly has all the right lines when it comes to signifying ambitions, too. “We want to become synonymous with podcasting in the same way Netflix has become synonymous with streaming,” he said. “I know how ambitious that sounds. We think it can be done, and some of the top creators in the space agree.”
The way Luminary has gone after some of the most prominent podcasters to create their next shows for its company mirrors what Spotify is doing – there’s something of a land-grab going on for anyone who’s proven their ability to engage listeners with this format. Luminary isn’t just a producer though: it’s launching its own app, which will offer an $8 monthly subscription for ad-free access to its entire lineup. The app will also have an ad-supported free section.
👓 Luminary. A better way to podcast
Luminary is a podcast streaming platform that gives you access to 500k+ shows, when and where you want. Sign up today and be the first to try @luminary!
Look ma! Another stand alone app-cum silo billing itself as a podcast solution. What do you want to bet there’s no RSS and it won’t work with any other podcatcher?
🔖 The Negentropy Principle of Information by Leon Brillouin | Journal of Applied Physics: Vol 24, No 9
The statistical definition of information is compared with Boltzmann's formula for entropy. The immediate result is that information I corresponds to a negative term in the total entropy S of a system.
S=S0−I
. A generalized second principle states that S must always increase. If an experiment yields an increase ΔI of the information concerning a physical system, it must be paid for by a larger increase ΔS0 in the entropy of the system and its surrounding laboratory. The efficiency ε of the experiment is defined as ε = ΔI/ΔS0≤1. Moreover, there is a lower limit k ln2 (k, Boltzmann's constant) for the ΔS0 required in an observation. Some specific examples are discussed: length or distance measurements, time measurements, observations under a microscope. In all cases it is found that higher accuracy always means lower efficiency. The information ΔI increases as the logarithm of the accuracy, while ΔS0 goes up faster than the accuracy itself. Exceptional circumstances arise when extremely small distances (of the order of nuclear dimensions) have to be measured, in which case the efficiency drops to exceedingly low values. This stupendous increase in the cost of observation is a new factor that should probably be included in the quantum theory.https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1721463
First appearance of the word “negentropy” that I’ve seen in the literature.