Like some insane LARPer thrust into the battlefields of World War II, Fighting Jack Churchill (1906-1996) shot German soldiers with broad-headed arrows, played the bagpipes on commando raids, and captured enemy soldiers with a claymore. Then he got captured and escaped from a German prison camp, walking 150 miles across occupied territory. For an encore he was sent to Palestine and ran into Jewish-Arab crossfires in full highlander regalia, kilt, bonnet, stockings and spats.
[via Damn Interesting]
Category: Oddities
Bruce Sterling found this timeline to the Singularity written by someone promoting open source AI. Sterling: The awesomest part of this cosmic prediction is the notion that open-source guys can deliver on time.
. That timeline page has the line Contra-Singularity aspects : Hard for people to accept AI coded in JavaScript
, which I found funny. They also have a link to this open source AI model thing. The whole web site / net looks like spamblogger mimicking a mentally-defective AI with English as a second language (first one must be Forth). I guess that’s appropriate.
(From an ad): There’s a dating site for Deaf people. It’s called Deaf-Match.
Categories
The Awesomeness of Thor in Action!
Cheese rock links like this are a speciality of Joey deVilla’s blog. More about this weird character here.
Categories
Daisy Daisy
Why does HAL sing “Daisy, Daisy” in 2001: A Space Odyssey? (kottke.org)
In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke was touring Bell Labs when he heard a demonstration of a song sung by an IBM 704 computer programmed by physicist John L. Kelly. The song, the first ever performed by a computer, was called “Daisy Bell”, more commonly known as “Bicycle Built for Two” or “Daisy, Daisy”. When Clarke collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey, they had HAL sing it while Dave powered him down.
He links to a page with the relevant recording.