Weekend Thoughts - 12.9.17

Image by Vitamin, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. The concept of a speaker that listens to and interacts with its users is still fairly new, but they are becoming more common with each passing day. However, there are still reasons why you should not buy a smart speaker. It seems odd to me that we as a society are reaching a point where, just like in Orwell's 1984, being constantly surveilled by technology is becoming commonplace. Even if you trust companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to not intentionally spy on you via smart speakers, smart cameras, and the like, these devices are certainly hackable and susceptible to bugs, which means that the data they obtain may eventually get into the wrong hands. Maybe I'm alone here, but I don't want every snippet of the private conversations I have in my home to be shared with others just because of vulnerabilities in these "smart" devices (and yes, that includes smartphones!). I'd suggest reading through this article carefully because it's worth considering whether you are willing to put your privacy (and the privacy of others in your home) on the line for the sake of convenience.

2. Although I went to a Chess Club meeting or two in middle school, I wouldn't consider myself to be a very strong chess player. However, I do enjoy playing the game from time to time and find it to be an interesting—albeit endlessly intimidating—game of skill. Now it turns out that a new artificial intelligence known as AlphaZero has handily beaten the previously highest-rated Chess engine known as Stockfish. Perhaps most impressively, AlphaZero taught itself how to play in just four hours. At the end of the day, the final tally (out of 100 matches) was 28 wins, 72 draws, and zero losses. In other words, the chess engine that human chess players have been using to train has been bested so badly by this new AI that it didn't even win a single game—against an opponent that didn't even know how to play chess four hour prior to the first match.

3. Modern burials (at least in the Western world) typically involve toxic chemicals that are used to preserve the human body as well as coffin materials that do not break down quickly, harming the Earth and causing trouble for the surrounding environment and wildlife. A new burial technique involves a mushroom spore death suit that detoxifies the corpse and turns them into nutrients for plants. It's an innovative concept and one that may help preserve future life on Earth.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Weekend Thoughts - 11.28.15

Image by Benjamin Balázs, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Last October, a Chicago police officer named Jason Van Dyke shot 17 year-old Laquan McDonald (who was walking the streets holding a knife and allegedly under the influence of PCP, although he did not violently engage the cop) 16 times and murdered him. The police department then proceeded to lie about it and deleted surveillance footage from a nearby business, and the murderer was kept on payroll for 400 days after the incident. The footage of the murder was released this week, and can be viewed at the aforelinked website. Naturally, Chicago has not taken too kindly to this show of unnecessary force (on a minor, no less) by one of its police officers. Yet another example of why we need to be documenting and following up on the large number of civilians murdered by police more thoroughly.

2. I consider this to be both staggering and telling: more than 1 out of 4 Americans believes the United States government to be the enemy, according to a recent poll. My personal belief is that we are all in this together, and we need to work "across the aisle", so to speak, with our perceived "enemies", rather than engaging in a war against them. We must all wake up together, or we won't be able to awaken at all.

3. George Orwell, author of many timeless classics such as 1984 and Animal Farm, held some strong opinions regarding improving one's ability to think and write. A post on High Existence explore's Orwell's ways that politicians use language to deceive us, which may forever affect the way you perceive politician's speeches. I greatly enjoyed the following list of Orwell's "Six Rules for Better Writing and Better Thinking":

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active voice.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.