More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 September
Lindsay's latest posting at http://writersrest.com/2012/09/06/pretending-to-be-human-the-latest-thing-in-robo-calls/#comment-1542 has enthused me to write this :
Ah, The Turing Test, one of the beloved things that returns and returns, and always pays returns!
I always had an interest in Alan Turing and his fellow theorists and code-breakers, and had been to the place that gave rise to the present GCHQ (the UK’s Government Communications HQ), but seeing the play about his life, brilliantly performed by an all-amateur cast, had me taking my then girlfriend that same weekend to that place in Buckinghamshire, Bletchley Park.
Turing’s sister (who calls him Alan M. Turing) has written a book about him, which I shall some day read, as I shall some day read the text of the play and be amazed again at how much the actor who played him embodied that role and knew a huge role almost word perfect.
For now, I see a little bit of his lively mind and thinking from the thirties and through and beyond the Second World War, and feel moved to support the campaign that he should be pardoned for being gay before his time, and also for his seeming suicide to be looked at not as the self-crime that it then was in law.
If that does not encourage you to visit Writer's Rest, I admit failure...
Plus there's now :
Another thing is that the best AI is where the money is being sought: it is not in the very unconvincing services that ‘direct your call’ by getting you to press 1 then 3 then 2, etc., etc., or the stilted automated announcements at the station, as they have no interest in conveying the notion that they are persons, just suitably comprehensible cut-up bits of persons’ voices.
Actually, that is no false economy, but not pretending to be any more than one is, whereas those who use highly developed AI fail to realize how objectionable people will almost always find a however-clever machine that rings them up, if they catch it out as one, and may have to learn a difficult lesson about what matters to human-beings.
The reason? Simply the same affront at a computer seeming to personalize a form-letter, but addressing me incompetently as Mrs Apsley, because of the principle rubbish in, rubbish out – the seeming care about me as this mythical ‘valued customer’ is belied by not even knowing who I am! Just as irritating as if the new doctor calls one by the wrong name, but he or she can be corrected, and should apologize…
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Showing posts with label GCHQ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GCHQ. Show all posts
Friday, 7 September 2012
Saturday, 28 April 2012
The habit of collecting (4)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 April
Few - not even Bruno Bettelheim's adherents, acolytes, agents, and (they think) apostles - would doubt that the (core) impulse is something of the order of:
There's one that I haven't got!
Mrs President Marcos [I'm calling her that just to be flippant] knew that feeling well, but what did the possessor (as I cannot well speak for ownership) and person displaying this number-slave have at the forefront of his or her mind to have collected it?
GD15 SIX
Which one has to translate into GD IS SIX, as well as postulating that there must be many, many others in the series (in fact, as the whole aphabet isn't used, it must be 23 or 24 squared, some of which might mean more than others):
DD IS SIX (for Dating Direct*)
BB IS SIX (I need not explain that one, I fear)
GG IS SIX (good old Germaine**!)
BJ IS SIX (now that is rating something...)
CJ IS SIX (for those flagging already, just skip to the closing homily!)
All of which, though, assumes that the proposition talks about an age, anniversary, or score, whereas there could be something else going on...
x = 2
x x y = 6
y = ?
Back with the proposition GD IS SIX, could it, itself, be a known acronym, maybe for:
* Gross Diameter
* An open source code library for the dynamic creation of images by programmers (according to www.boutell.com/gd/)
* Graeme Dixon
* The ethical URL shortener with no registration required (according to v.gd/)
* Grand Designs
* Great Dunmow
* Gérard Depardieu (or, to extend him to his full height, Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu)
The end is listless, I believe
But it must really be to do with the spirit of North by Northwest (1959), one of the craziest, but still best, Cary Grant films ever - we are being (or feel that we are being?) set this puzzle to work out, who - or what - 'GD' is, and what it means for it to be 'six', or '6'.
But maybe it's a metaphor for what we make of life, and could mean no more than the title of that Hitchcock film - a big confusion about nothing (where people get killed - or do they?).
Maybe God's Design for Richard Dawkins, maybe Dawkins' message to a God (whom he states is fictional) - God Deficiency is Six?
In closing
Personally - if I can be intimate and private for this closing moment - I don't go along with much of that
We will never know the answer, but that's because it's all wrapped up with
Cheltenham - GCHQ - MI6 - Whitehall - Harry Palmer - hush hush - need-to-know basis - Reggie Perrin and his brother-in-law Jimmy
Amen
Post-Amen (as at 6 May)
In fact, it was GL15 SIX, so please ignore suitable amounts of the above!
End-notes
* Or Deadline Dave...
** Would that be a kind of rating (a bit as for bowed Eric)?
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 April
Few - not even Bruno Bettelheim's adherents, acolytes, agents, and (they think) apostles - would doubt that the (core) impulse is something of the order of:
There's one that I haven't got!
Mrs President Marcos [I'm calling her that just to be flippant] knew that feeling well, but what did the possessor (as I cannot well speak for ownership) and person displaying this number-slave have at the forefront of his or her mind to have collected it?
GD15 SIX
Which one has to translate into GD IS SIX, as well as postulating that there must be many, many others in the series (in fact, as the whole aphabet isn't used, it must be 23 or 24 squared, some of which might mean more than others):
DD IS SIX (for Dating Direct*)
BB IS SIX (I need not explain that one, I fear)
GG IS SIX (good old Germaine**!)
BJ IS SIX (now that is rating something...)
CJ IS SIX (for those flagging already, just skip to the closing homily!)
All of which, though, assumes that the proposition talks about an age, anniversary, or score, whereas there could be something else going on...
x = 2
x x y = 6
y = ?
Back with the proposition GD IS SIX, could it, itself, be a known acronym, maybe for:
* Gross Diameter
* An open source code library for the dynamic creation of images by programmers (according to www.boutell.com/gd/)
* Graeme Dixon
* The ethical URL shortener with no registration required (according to v.gd/)
* Grand Designs
* Great Dunmow
* Gérard Depardieu (or, to extend him to his full height, Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu)
The end is listless, I believe
But it must really be to do with the spirit of North by Northwest (1959), one of the craziest, but still best, Cary Grant films ever - we are being (or feel that we are being?) set this puzzle to work out, who - or what - 'GD' is, and what it means for it to be 'six', or '6'.
But maybe it's a metaphor for what we make of life, and could mean no more than the title of that Hitchcock film - a big confusion about nothing (where people get killed - or do they?).
Maybe God's Design for Richard Dawkins, maybe Dawkins' message to a God (whom he states is fictional) - God Deficiency is Six?
In closing
Personally - if I can be intimate and private for this closing moment - I don't go along with much of that
We will never know the answer, but that's because it's all wrapped up with
Cheltenham - GCHQ - MI6 - Whitehall - Harry Palmer - hush hush - need-to-know basis - Reggie Perrin and his brother-in-law Jimmy
Amen
Post-Amen (as at 6 May)
In fact, it was GL15 SIX, so please ignore suitable amounts of the above!
End-notes
* Or Deadline Dave...
** Would that be a kind of rating (a bit as for bowed Eric)?
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