The Pew Global Attitudes project asked “Suppose a young person who wanted to leave this country asked you to recommend where to go to lead a good life – what country would you rcommend?”
Everybody is going to end up in Australia! But a lot of people will pass thru Canada on their way there.
Yes, but why do I think this is hilarious?
In sum, Shamay-Tsoory and his/her colleagues propose a neural network for processing sarcastic utterances:
* 1-The left hemisphere language cortices interpret the literal meaning of the utterance;
* 2-The frontal lobes and right hemisphere process the intentional, social and emotional context, identifying the contradiction between the literal meaning and the social/emotional context;
* 3-The right ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrates the literal meaning with the social/emotional knowledge of the situation and previous situations, helping the listener determine the true meaning.
I consider this pretty funny too: “I work in the Artifical Intellegence Lab.” I have personally uttered that one, without irony.
Update: Lanugage Log or laugh track, you be the judge.
The VI reference mug, shown at right, is available here. The emacs reference place setting for twelve is not yet available.
Martin suggests an interesting take a number design for how the presence, interrupt, asynchronies communication problem might be solved. For this to work well, an estimated wait time is needed. Different wait times for different correspondents based on static and dynamic information about the relationship. Monopoly telecommunication companies could let you spend multiple minutes from your monthly allotment to move thru the line faster. This is all tied to Martin’s insight that celebrities will sell elements of the presence to their fans. In the future we will all be celebrity phone companies!
A friend of mine floated a cool idea regarding humor. We all know that humor comes in various species: irony, farce, slapstick, etc. etc. But we lack a scale of how skilled a bit of humor is. There is a world of difference between the appropriate bit of humor inserted into a cocktail party and the art of finding the humorous thing to say in the midst of a funeral.
Humor, like enthusiasm, is not self-moderating. A classroom of high school students can trivially be drawn into an escalating chain reaction. It’s ironic; teachers who labor to nurture wit find it necessary to quench even the slightest fission of humor because their charges are such ill-trained humorists.
Of course all emotions run the risk of running off into exaggerated forms. Stress, panic, depression, etc. etc. The wonder of humor is its ability to call them back down out of the stratosphere. It’s a high art of getting it just right. A skill we have all observed in talented people around us. Injecting just the right bit of wit into a situation, diffusing at least a portion of the escalating emotions.
If this talent had a name you could put on a job description! Awards could be granted: “Best pun used in an IRS audit.” High school councilors could advise students join the guild. An international society could be formed. States could grant and revoke licenses. Weighty text books and complimentary multi-media virtual world educational games could be sold at great cost to state school boards.
There must be some sort of clever logic here. Either why time travel is impossible or how black holes form when this works. Surely the resulting flash-crowd would be troublingly massive.
Speaking of time, I see from these charts mentioned here that every minute I survive pushes out the estimated time of my demise another 6 seconds. Not a bad return on the investment. Better yet the returns improve the older I get!
I’ve started getting a lot of that I think of as Jesus spam. If I train my Bayesian filters to recognize this as spam will Jesus’ email get thru? Could it be that one of the other Gods is sending this mail. Is taking a God’s names in vain a form of identity theft?
Driving back last night along the turnpike in Connecticut we found bill boards advocating the acquisition of an attorney as the first step in purchasing a house. As I drove a long I got to thinking “That’s silly, why stop at the house?” Why shouldn’t we all have an attorney at our side when engaging in most of life’s transactions. I thought: “I should get myself an attorney before this next toll booth!”
This lead to a conversation with my son about that that saying popular with gun advocates: “A well armed society is a polite society.”
We had heard a eye rolling piece on NPR just a few days before about how the taser advocate are hard at work to see to it that we all carry a tazer with us at all times. They mentioned the polite society meme. 30 years ago the handgun industry tried a similar scam much to their profit in urban America; wasn’t pretty.
I’ve been asking people if they think it would be a good idea to give everybody in their school, office, club a taser – polite is good right? My son’s opinion on this was that his school would rapidly descend into Hobbesian Anarchy.” “It hurts right? … You’d really want to go first then.”
I assume that everybody at Taser International carries a taser around the office, right? One wonders what would happen if you snuck into the office and zapped a few folks from behind and then snuck out.
So then we got to talking about how you might use pricing to temper the speed that society transitions into a state of anarchy. If you made it really expensive to reload then presumably only the rich could afford to slip into a state of anarchy. This only reminded us of how gangs of wealthy young victorian men would terrorize the country side in olde England. It’s a return to traditional values!
Presumably giving everybody their own lawyer would lead to a rapid decent into some hellish modality who’s name I’m not familiar with. Presumably the rich are already testing that out.
I didn’t get The Long Memo! Long is hot! Long is in! Soon to be voted top adjective of the decade? The Long Emergency, current sales rank in the 800s! Obviously it’s a left wing conspiricy!
That’s not trash that’s progress!