Excursions

I had the same start to my day as Colin’s - with a glorious morning. However, where I was pleased by the clouds crowding the skies, it was fading ones that had that effect on him. Fascinating how we can share the experiences, but not the elements behind them.

From the Medium help section.

Medium taps into the brains of the world’s most insightful writers, thinkers, and storytellers..

Also from Medium help section.

Footnotes are not supported on Medium

I always find it fascinating how limiting Medium as platform is for writers.

M. G. Siegler recently posted his thoughts on Arrogance Peaks in Silicon Valley. I found this belief of his fascinating.

The nerds have taken over the world.

Oh, the Irony. Nope, they haven’t — head back to your original premise.

Every now & then, I come across a IndieWeb enabled site with all the principles implemented, working just the way they were meant to. And it is then that I see the power of this initiative. Whatever it takes, I need to reach there.

Some years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted.

Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags.

So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.

There is some great theory there. Man I love human tendency to fool oneself into not hating something.

Make us fools, but we hate waiting.

Inside Google’s secretive X laboratory, known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, a small group of researchers began working several years ago on a simulation of the human brain.

There Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors, which they turned loose on the Internet to learn on its own.

Credit where it is due, Google has to be lauded for encouraging the open research on topics so varied. There is so much potential with computing power and data at Google.

At cost of being cynical (a bit), I felt this would be so so useful (?) to Google with all the data that it has with it. And equally frightening to the users watching. Obviously Google is looking at that, no? And then I read this.

Google scientists said that the research project had now moved out of the Google X laboratory and was being pursued in the division that houses the company’s search business and related services. Potential applications include improvements to image search, speech recognition and machine language translation

And bingo!

On a side note, NYT had to ruin it by changing the headline to “How many computers to identify a cat? 16000”. Underplays the success that this is.

Evidence of Machine Learning scratched at Google X Laboratory

Interesting read this about an experiment involving Joshua Bell. You feel for him when we says this:

With “Chaconne,” the opening is filled with a building sense of awe. That kept him busy for a while. Eventually, though, he began to steal a sidelong glance.

“It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah …”

The word doesn’t come easily.

“… ignoring me.”

What is even more puzzling though is this thought from Mark Leithauser.

"Let’s say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It’s a $5 million painting. And it’s one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: ‘Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.’"

So life-less we have become. Or were we always like this?

If a great musician plays great music but no one hears, was he really any good?