It’s not hard to vent on the subject of “global warming” and the hysterical reporting thereof. But it’s hard to do it with style. Plus … isn’t it somehow strange that the IPCC releases its executive summary (”… for policymakers”), months before it releases the science versions? This makes the current document way harder to check than a normal science paper. It’s almost as if it’s intended that way.
Parents: never trust tiny people in skirts with your sons.
These pictures tell the whole story, such as it is.
They were taken nearly two years apart, in the bedrooms of two different vulnerable young men.
Notice that the same girl-like creature is looking over the boys. Note how fickly she turned her
feminine charms from the older to the younger young man in the family. And she must have stolen
the last “t” from “stuart”, her newest conquest.
![](http://web.elastic.org/~fche/blog3/images/winxp-postupdate.png)
If the Microsoft programmer geniuses who wrote this dialog box and similar nagware had a better sense of humour or of history, they might have taken their lead from the cashier character from Space Quest III Monolith Burger.
![](http://web.elastic.org/~fche/blog3/images/spacequest3-24.gif)
In this scene of the old adventure game, the player’s character is to purchase some food at this parody of McDonald’s. Just as on earth, the cashier is trained to “upsell” – to increasingly insist that the customer purchase more and larger food condiments. As the scene progresses, the cashier alien’s pimply face gets bigger and bigger, and the menu options change from “yes / no” to “large / small” to “large / large”. At the end, the game’s offers literally cannot be refused.
Oh … still sore about that Scumsoft business? Sorry.
![](http://web.elastic.org/~fche/blog3/images/spacequest3-36.gif)
I figured why it is that, in every story where the a character gets “three wishes” from some agent of the supernatural, it always ends up badly.
It’s because they forgot to tell the genie, after “make me rich, but …”
- don’t make me a target for crime due to that wealth
- don’t make me lose it all the next day
- keep me healthy for a long time to enjoy it
- but not so healthy that I outlive everyone and end up a solitary creature
See how the pleas get more and more clever & elaborate, and yet still offer a mischevious genie an opportunity to teach a lesson!
In politics, a variant of this phenomenon is known as the “law of unintended consequences”. Whatever the noble intentions of the politicians, something unforseen and adverse always happens – sometimes even worse than the original problem they hoped to solve.
The technical reason: Frame Problem
In the field of AI, the Frame Problem is the difficulty of telling a computer that models some piece of the world about what changes and what doesn’t, when something occurs. It may require an effort proportional to the knowledge base size to add all the effects and non-effects of an additional action (see the genie plea list above). For example, for a program with an astronomy knowledge base, to teach it what a “supernova” event is could mean having to painstakingly enumerate how any particular comet on the other side of the universe is affected. Or whether dropping this ball might possibly affect a window on the other side of the street. It might, if it’s about to bounce back off of an incline, and it had lots of energy, and the street was narrow, and ….
It always depends. And writing down how it depends is just too much work to do it correctly.
From Australia, comes a breathless report about global warming and toddlers in hospital.
GLOBAL warming will take a toll on children’s health, according to a new report showing hospital admissions for fever soar as days get hotter.The new study found that temperature rises had a significant impact on the number of pre-schoolers presenting to emergency departments for fever and gastroenteritis.
The two-year study at a major children’s hospital showed that for every five-degree rise in temperature two more children under six years old were admitted with fever to that hospital.
The University of Sydney research is the first to make a solid link between climate changes and childhood illness.
Whoa dude! Won’t someone please go to back to school and learn the difference between (a) weather and (b) climate? Or the difference between (a) 5 degrees celsius peak and (b) 2 degrees celsius average? Or (a) a hot spell during summer and (b) a gradual change over a century? Or (a) slope of a small linearized piece of a curve and (b) a quantitative trend?
If things were really as simple as the reporter outlined, we could make all toddlers hospital-safe by simply refrigerating the city of Sydney a few hundred degrees. Thermodynamics be damned – just think of the children!
A longer-term study was needed add strength to the findings, Dr Lam said.
Of course. More study. And more research dollars. Send money soon. Ta.
One ‘David’ on Bruce Schneier’s weblog:
Sure, there was a major security issue on September 11, 2001…
He was responding to me.
Geeky electronics humor at work.
/foo/ Samsung’s serial connection is also female
/foo/ I am so stupid, so I right now have female with female
/bar/ wups
/bar/ go get a straight-throu male-to-male adapter
/fche/ in san francisco?
/foo/ fche: yeah in one of those places “rainbow flags” are flying high ;)