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Important If True 40: Tactical Turtle and the Songsmith

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Important If True 40:

Important If True 40


Tactical Turtle and the Songsmith
Sorry for the late episode—it took us a bit of work to figure out how to record Nick remotely without a quality hit, but we're happy with where we ended up!

With Nick Breckon now contained within the computerized realm, this week's Important If True takes an algorithmic bent as we soldier on to discuss the issues that matter most. For instance: If you blast Billy Idol from a boombox while covering your body in memes, will the Terminator let you in the front door? If DeepMind doesn't know who you are, can you ever really know yourself? And are corn and maize the same thing? Nope, that's a trick question, asshole. Welcome to Memeland.

Discussed: Nick Breckon, podcasting, bitcoin mining, Patreon postcard update, the gross seductive power of screens that is proven by the very fact of all of our existences, Toyota dashboard bizarre universe "Chris Remo", machine learning interpretation of cats as memes, Italian pop song with gibberish English lyrics, The Great Microsoft Songsmith Rapture of 2009, "White Wedding" by Billy Idol feat. Microsoft Songsmith, "White Wedding" by the Rivertown Skifflers, "We Will Rock You" by Queen feat. Microsoft Songsmith, Microsoft Songsmith as classical muse, maliciously hacking Google AI to misidentify a turtle as a rifle, World War I-era dazzle camouflage, camera-defeating fashion, infiltrating the Terminator base while decked out in internet meme garbage, fractal DeepMind memeland, high-tech modern corn maze production, Petaluma Pumpkin Patch and Amazing Corn Maze, Maze Wars, the Great Wikipedia Editor Corn vs. Maize War, pro-maize arguments, pro-corn arguments

Send us your questions at [email protected]. If you enjoyed this and would like to subscribe to an ad-free feed, please consider supporting Idle Thumbs by backing our Patreon.

Chris' Endorsements: Wide-ranging BBC knowledge-enhancing podcast In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg

Jake's Endorsements: Vice article "I Made My Shed the Top-Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor
Chris' Sub-Endorsement: New Yorker article "The Most Exclusive Restaurant in America

Nick's Endorsement: London historical site/tourist trap/surreal theatrical experience Benjamin Franklin House (also read our friend Duncan Fyfe's report on the experience, "Benjamin Franklin and Me")

Sponsored by: Quip electric toothbrushes with $10 off your first brush head refill
Shoutout by: Better Than Speed Podcast (iTunes)

 

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In the same vein as Prisencolinensinainciusol, there's also "Skwerl", a short film in the same kind of pseudo-English. As a bonus the screenplay is linked in the description and it's fascinating.

 

A big thing that gives languages their distinctive sounds is called "phonotactics", which are the rules for what sounds can be used in words and also where they can be used, like how you can end an English word with /ŋ/ (ring, thinking, etc), but you can't start one (this is why English speakers usually have such a hard time with the name "Nguyen"). So what things like that song and that film play on is essentially creating "words" that obey the rules of a specific language's phonotactics while not actually being real words in that language.

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Thank you so much for endorsing In Our Time. This seems like a fantastic wealth of knowledge. I've come to really appreciate the various podcast and audiobooks available online. I use them when doing house chores or doing work that allows me to multitask.

 

I've enjoyed the volunteer based Libravox recordings of various books from Tibetan Book of Living and Dying or Walden Pond, Audible editions of many books from Thomas Sowell to Earnest Becker to Alice Miller, the School of Life youtube series, and other youtube lectures from Jordan Peterson, Bessel Van Der Kolk, Slavoj Zizek.

 

I absorb knowledge this way really well so I am very grateful and very excited to have a new fountain of knowledge to drink from. 


Thanks!

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Regards Corn v. Maize:

 

Guys, there's a new world crop.  Didn't exist in Europe until after the conquest of north america.  Called both "maize" and "corn."

 

And then there's a collection of grains referred as "corn" in manuscripts going back to ancient Rome, none of them related to Amerindian maize.

 

So, clear enough, right?

 

If it's the yellow or white stuff that comes on cobs originating in the Americas, you can call it "maize" and be totally fine.

 

If it has middle eastern origins and you want to insist on calling it "corn" instead of "barley" or "millet" or what have you, then you're being a dick.

 

In short, this is yet another case of "you know what, no, it's not 'both sides do it'," and if you're getting sucked in and amused by the entirely artificial internet-bigots-originated debate, then you're part of the problem.

 

Hope that helps?

 

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27 minutes ago, robotslave said:

Hope that helps?

 

It literally never helps to be an asshole when “helping.”

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4 hours ago, robotslave said:

Hope that helps?

 

 

It doesn’t; but it’s pretty clear from the tone of your post that helpfulness is not your principal goal.

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I have only listened to the beginning of the episode, and I think you nailed the remote setup! :tup: If you hadn't talked about it, I would probably not have realized that Nick wasn't in the room. I hope the setup feels comfortable enough for you too to keep going.

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I literally made an account to answer a question Chris had at 53:45 on this episode. There is an archive of the corn/maize debate. There are four of them! And they are all equally ridiculous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Maize/Archive_1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Maize/Archive_2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Maize/Archive_3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Maize/Archive_4

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In Our Time is terrific. I tend to end up with quite a backlog as it's not really something you can listen to whilst doing anything else, but when I get round to it I find it really rewarding - and similarly, I feel like I'm making up for a slightly complacent attitude during my university years. It even occasionally features one of my old tutors.

 

Looking forward to listening to the recent Moby Dick episode.

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"Obviously, the implications of this are massive and terrifying, but the stupid version of it is ridiculous." 

 

This quote from Chris perfectly describes the MO of Important If True.

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The Ace of Spades one gives me a bit of a Van Morrison feel, honestly. Also reminds me of the track from Mouth Moods, ACVC, in just the absolute absurdity of rock vocalists being separated from their backing tracks. As someone who greatly enjoys out-of-genre covers, I am so happy to have been introduced to Songsmith.

 

 

Also wanna join in on all the In Our Time love; I listened to the ep on Kant's Categorical Imperative because of the pod, and really enjoyed it. I like the producer coming in at the end and asking everyone if they'd like tea or coffee. (I have a vague memory of this show being recommended on another pod I listen to, but can not for the life of me remember where.) 

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Concerning what jake said about the cat generating neural network:

They augment the dataset with reflections. So, you very well could  be looking at "backwards" gibberish text.

Also, the video for that paper is very good. The sections on latent space interpolation are worth seeing. The first is on faces (at 1:50) the other is on objects (at 4:00), which includes the cat pictures

 

The way these networks work, they take in random noise and use that to generate an image. If you didn't give it any random noise, it would always generate the same image. By smoothly varying the input noise, the output also smoothly varies (this is a result of how neural networks are built and it's a little hard to explain why this happens, but it does). So, every frame  of the video is a real output image from the network.

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20 minutes ago, Kyir said:

 

Alternatively: Songsmith making very appropriate choices.

 

DAMN that is choice. I've never heard this one, which is amazing given how many hours I've spent listening to Songsmith covers.

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I couldn't tell this podcast was recorded with a Remote Nick! Pretty impressive.

 

I've only listened to some of the philosophy episodes of In Our Time, but I've enjoyed all of them. It's a pretty good show. I can definitely second Chris's recommendation.

 

The story about going on your own to the Ben Franklin House is amazing. One of the top tier Important if True incidents, I'd argue.

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The Songsmith stuff sounds so nuts. Glad to have a pod where I can learn about this sort of wild niche technology.

 

Nick "Telepresent" Breckon sounded really natural, great job on that.

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On 12/11/2017 at 1:23 AM, Nappi said:

I have only listened to the beginning of the episode, and I think you nailed the remote setup! :tup: If you hadn't talked about it, I would probably not have realized that Nick wasn't in the room. I hope the setup feels comfortable enough for you too to keep going.

 

Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing.  I'd never have guessed Nick wasn't in the room with you guys from the sound quality.  Great job getting him piped in from Canada!

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