Accept no substitutes

Day: June 30, 2005

Reasons to Fear Food

Reasons to fear food are presented in Weight Watchers Recipe cards from 1974 as discovered and annotated by Wendy McClure (author of “I am not the New Me” and blogger at Poundy )

I am at the unfortunate age at which this is a part of my history I can still remember. Hopefully I will grow out of that. Molded food haunts my dreams. That is food that has been pressed into molds, but food that is covered with mold comes in occassionally as well. I have spent most of my life as a thin person.

Michael Taeckens of Algonquin Books wants me to point out that Wendy will be reading from and signing her book in Durham at The Regulator on Friday, july 8th, at 7:00pm.

GarageBand and the Archbishop

Two items that are somehow related.

Apple follows up their podcast-enabling iTunes update with a nice writeup on how to use GarageBand to create podcasts. Especially helpful are the various GarageBand independent hints and suggestions on how to compose a good show.

Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams delivered a speech, published in the Guardian, subtitled by the paper “Humanity, imagination and a real sense of community are what is needed to rescue journalism from its parallel universe”

Words of Philip K Dick

The Philip K Dick Android had a few things to say when Sally and I spoke with him last week at NextFest.
First, Dick uses some deep structure parsing to get the sense of what he is being asked (thanks Noam Chomsky for inventing this).
From that, Dick can choose from some canned answers. Sample: What is your favorite color? PKDA: Green.
Or he can, drawing on the old ELIZA software, enter into a Rogerian interview. Example: What do you think about the President? PKDA: Which President do you have in mind?
But third, Dick can draw on a large database constructed from the entire corpus of his work. Using latent syntactic analysis, PKDA can create entirely new and unique phrases and answers that sound very very Philip K Dick.
Example: Phil, Where are we now? PKDA: [looking around the room] We appear to be my living room. [pause] It could be a simulacrum though. [pause] But why would the authorities bother?
Now that is the real Dick!

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