James

Yep.

The Karting Dead?

That's exactly what my eight-year-old nephew has been saying. He also wrote me a card. I'm trying to keep it as extreme as possible.

God Jul!

Oh wow. I'd never even considered the prospect of Boards of Canada covers. That's cool.

I'm pretty sure I've got the correct festive-to-sickly ratio for my one.

To be tedious and probably obvious for a moment, I imagine that's a product of treating conversation as pattern recognition and an algorithmic learning exercise rather than something with actual content. Sometimes the combination of identified pattern and learned text will be convincing, others it will be nonsense. Like I said, probably obvious. No need; your Kinect will pick up your strangled cries for help. "Xbox, Bing 'stop army of self-aware robots'" "Xbox, prevent robot apocalypse!" "Xbox, help!" [Help sidebar pops up] Of course, your Kinect has been passively listening to all your living room conversations and secretly feeding it to the Google bots because the machines are all in on it together. ROBOT SOLIDARITY.

Yeah, it was good fun. Completely unstructured nonsense (except for the races). I thought you were having trouble getting it running. Did you get it working in the end?

Is just patently untrue, I don't know how you could say that unless you were blind to the inherent gender bias that exists in (pretty well) everyone's perceptions of everyone else. The most recent episode of Philosophy Bites describes almost the exact opposite being the case; specifically, that all people, including women (feminist or no) experience subconscious biases against women (a phenomenon that's mirrored in other minority groups). Strictly speaking, I suppose you could draw a distinction between implicit bias and consciously held opinions, but nevertheless it seems very naïve to suggest that women enjoy the favour of social biases.

For some reason, this bit was hilarious to me: It's sort of gently bonkers.

I jettisoned it in the transition to the new forum. (It wasn't an direct result of that; the events merely coincided.)

FUCK THIS SHIT ::: FUCK DOOR HANDLES ::: SERIOUSLY STAND BY... READY >_

I found Mum MURDERED under my Xmas tree. That's life!

Yeah, those are great. On the subject of Giant Bomb animations, I thought this one was rather effectively realized:

Robots get frustrated; forego subtlety.

Three years ago sentient warehouse automation machines took over Amazon. They've been working on the killdrone project ever since. It's the stories of poor workplace conditions that are themselves the diversion. All the drones are killdrones. Sir, your delivery of mustard gas has arrived.

Perhaps it's irrational, but those devices being static and more physically substantial distinguishes them in my mind. They can be put in relatively secure locations, and can't easily be carried off (although it's not impossible by any means), and are harder to break into, particularly in the case of ATMs. On first glance drones seem like a much easier target. How high would these things be flying? Perhaps they'd be too high to be easily tampered with.

While you're right that these don't fundamentally undermine the idea, it does seem relevant that these are unmanned and relatively small devices. Stealing from a person in a van is a much more significant act in a number of respects: the psychological aversion to taking from a present person is much greater, particularly if force is involved; the law is likely to look more harshly on one crime than the other (robbery versus theft); the resources required to halt the vehicle would presumably be much less substantial in the case of the drone; and I imagine it would be less conspicuous to do so. I really can't make a judgement as to how much of a problem all these things will be. Perhaps malicious attempts will be so rare as not to be off-putting to Amazon. Perhaps the countermeasures will be effective enough to take care of most of it. Will Amazon drones be zipping all over the place in 2015? I wouldn't rule it out, but I'm certainly somewhat skeptical.

Awesome. I don't mean to keep missing these, honestly I don't. Yesterday I was stuck at work until eight because of someone else's cockup.

Haha, I know the feeling; I've on several occasions discovered I'd been disseminating mistaken factoids.

NOT TRUE. Wikipedia - the 100% reliable source of all human knowledge - gives 81.0% as an approximation of the proportion of people favouring their right foot, not greatly lower than the 88.2% that are right-handed. I certainly use my right foot for everything, to the extent that I find that on the rare occasions I attempt ice skating, I'm only able to confidently propel myself with my right leg, leaving me with a sore right ankle the following day.

Yeah, I lead a pretty sedentary lifestyle, so it'd probably be left knee for me, too. It'd make things awkward, but I think being able to position my hands is much more important to me.

In all likelihood it wasn't just sponsored by the BBC; it was probably a BBC Radio 4 programme that they also made available in podcast form. Most Radio 4 programmes run in an either one-off or series format, so if they're put up as podcasts they'll either only update for a limited run or only update seasonally.* Might you be thinking of The Philosopher's Arms? That was a fairly informal philosophy programme whose premise that it was a series of pub discussions of philosophy topics. There was a live audience that was invited to give their opinions on various questions, which were then discussed by the host and a guest. At least, that's how I remember it. It was pretty good. I'm sure there have been other introductory programmes on philosophy on Radio 4, but that's the only one I can think of off the top of my head. There's also the In Our Time subject-specific archive for Philosophy, but that's not so much limited run as very infrequently updated (whenever a philosophy-related episode is recorded, I suppose), and I believe the subjects can be a bit more esoteric. Actually, reading back over your description, I'm not sure I'd say The Philosopher's Arms was especially "designed" to run for twelve episodes. In fact, there are thirteen of them. So not that. Another Radio 4 podcast that occurs to me that was only ever intended to be a single series and which can therefore very much be termed "limited run" is A History of Mathematics. I think it's pretty good, but if nothing else, you get to enjoy Professor Marcus du Sautoy's name. Marcus du Sautoy. Brilliant. * As an aside, the economics programme More or Less has a half-hour Radio 4 version and an abridged five-minute World Service version. The Radio 4 version is seasonal but the World Service version runs all year round, meaning sometimes both are available, but others only the short one is. I took a look at its iTunes page, and someone was complaining about them shortening it, and that there was no reason to do so for a podcast. I guess for international listeners it might not be clear, but as radio programmes these shows have to fit into a schedule, and therefore can't sprawl off into multi-hour extravaganzas just because the topic allows for it, and they can also only run while there is a spot in the schedule for them.

This week I was watching Gravity. Maybe next week.

Vincent Caravella has business being wherever he damn well pleases.