Google Research translates a Chinese Rx

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I prefer the Inscrutable East.

An observation on a recent Jeopardy question, from Coach at the NPL

Yesterday, "Who is Doctor Who?" was accepted as the question for the answer about the fellow who travels through time. While the show is called "Doctor Who," the character himself is actually just "the Doctor." Or so I thought.

Securocrat

From an article about MI5 bugging of Sinn Fein offices, ca 2004

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Last Monday night a bugging device was discovered under floorboards in an upstairs room at Connolly House, Sinn Fein's Andersonstown office. The sophisticated electronic listening device was disguised as a wooden joist with two microphones attached to false nail heads. One microphone was directed towards a downstairs constituency office and the second into the upstairs conference room. Packed into the five-foot wooden construction were dozens of batteries and a number of transmitters.

This is the seconded bugging device discovered in the last 10 days. The first was uncovered by workmen mending a roof in a block of flats in West Belfast. Packed under the eaves, the device led to a microphone embedded in the ceiling of a flat belonging to a party member who works in Gerry Adams's constituency office. In December 1999 a vehicle used by Adams and McGuinness during crucial meetings with the IRA was also bugged.

"This is not the way to make peace," said Adams, "it is wholly unacceptable for the British government or their securocrats to be engaging in bugging operations against political opponents. It is wholly unacceptable for the largest nationalist party to be subjected to this kind of electronic surveillance. This is not a breach of our security, it's a breach of our human and civil rights..."

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I like that word, securocrat. Apparently it's been around awhile.

An embarrassment of Zombies

Daniel Dennett:

Must we talk about zombies? Apparently we must. There is a powerful and ubiquitous intuition that computational, mechanistic models of consciousness, of the sort we naturalists favor, must leave something out—something important. Just what must they leave out? The critics have found that it's hard to say, exactly: qualia, feelings, emotions, the what-it's-likeness (Nagel) or the ontological subjectivity (Searle) of consciousness. Each of these attempts to characterize the phantom residue has met with serious objections and been abandoned by many who nevertheless want to cling to the intuition, so there has been a gradual process of distillation, leaving just about all the reactionaries, for all their disagreements among themselves, united in the conviction that there is a real difference between a conscious person and a perfect zombie—let's call that intuition the Zombic Hunch—leading them to the thesis of Zombism: that the fundamental flaw in any mechanistic theory of consciousness is that it cannot account for this important difference. A hundred years from now, I expect this claim will be scarcely credible, but let the record show that in 1999, John Searle, David Chalmers, Colin McGinn, Joseph Levine and many other philosophers of mind dont just feel the tug of the Zombic Hunch (I can feel the tug as well as anybody), they credit it. They are, however reluctantly, Zombists, who maintain that the zombie challenge is a serious criticism. It is not that they dont recognize the awkwardness of their position. The threadbare stereotype of philosophers passionately arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is not much improved when the topic is updated to whether zombies—admitted by all to be imaginary beings—are (1) metaphysically impossible, (2) logically impossible, (3) physically impossible, or just (4) extremely unlikely to exist. The reactionaries have acknowledged that many who take zombies seriously have simply failed to imagine the prospect correctly. For instance, if you were surprised by my claim that the Steinberg cartoon would be an equally apt metaphorical depiction of the goings on in a zombie's head, you had not heretofore understood what a zombie is (and isnt). More pointedly, if you still think that Chalmers and I are just wrong about this, you are simply operating with a mistaken concept of zombies, one that is irrelevant to the philosophical discussion. (I mention this because I have found that many onlookers, scientists in particular, have a hard time believing that philosophers can be taking such a preposterous idea as zombies seriously, so they generously replace it with some idea that one can take seriously—but one that does not do the requisite philosophical work. Just remember, by definition, a zombie behaves indistinguishably from a conscious being—in all possible tests, including not only answers to questions [as in the Turing test] but psychophysical tests, neurophysiological tests—all tests that any "third-person" science can devise.)...

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The Must Reads

A must read in (12900 hits)

A must read for those (50900 hits)

A must read for anyone who (73000 hits)

Find a comfortable chair and start reading. One might start with more self-effacing (and thankfully shorter)

A must read in my opinion (2060 hits)

LogWatch

Operating a webserver on the Internet is like owning a house in a neighborhood full of idiotic robots who cruise by hourly to check whether you've forgotten to lock a window or door. If one of the robots finds a open door, he whistles to a Ukrainian or Minnesotan hacker weenie who immediately comes over, lets himself in, and starts smashing your furniture and repainting the walls.

Failed logins from these:

adm/password from 61.242.97.222: 1 time(s)
adm/password from 61.66.214.8: 2 time(s)
apache/password from 61.242.97.222: 1 time(s)
apache/password from 61.66.214.8: 1 time(s)
ftp/password from 61.242.97.222: 1 time(s)
games/password from 61.242.97.222: 1 time(s)
ident/password from 61.242.97.222: 1 time(s)
mail/password from 61.242.97.222: 1 time(s)
news/password from 61.242.97.222: 1 time(s)
nobody/password from 61.242.97.222: 1 time(s)
nobody/password from 61.66.214.8: 1 time(s)
operator/password from 61.66.214.8: 1 time(s)
root/password from 61.242.97.222: 22 time(s)
root/password from 61.66.214.8: 59 time(s)