Weekly Web Harvest (weekly)

  • “Watson then presented three relevant arguments in favor of banning violent video games for minors, but qualified its assessment by bring up several relevant counterarguments and considerations. In all, it was a fairly cogent review of the data.

    tags: ibm watson debate ai weekly argument thoughtvectors

  • “Michelle Phan found success posting make-up tutorial videos, attracting more than six million subscribers to her channel since she started it in 2007. She is a member of a group of YouTube stars whose popularity rivals that of many mainstream pop stars.

    tags: bbc youtube copyright weekly tweet

  • “Ben Jonson’s frustration that Shakespeare’s plays were far more inconsistently and incoherently put together than his own but were nevertheless, somehow, more popular, and commented that this was just it: Jonson’s plays were put together, more like “mechanical models of plays” than the real thing, whereas Shaksepeare’s plays had all the odd growths and irregular edges of organic life. This is my chief complaint with much fiction of the past fifty years, including much very highly regarded fiction, like that of John Updike: these aren’t novels, they are mechanical models of novels. Precision-engineered down to the last hidden screw, but altogether without the spark of life.

    tags: structure perfection writing patterns weekly

  • “A great deal of the work of the post office would then be to regulate the use of these personal television channels. Much of the information now sent by mail could be sent through the air on the personal channel, to be viewed in the home or to be printed out for a more or less permanent record. …

    tags: asimov future tv channel weekly

  • “This is lovely, strange, and wrenching all at the same time. A teenager whose father passed away when he was just six had pulled out an old Xbox game that he and his dad used to play together, only to discover a part of his father lived on in the game, as a ghost car.

    tags: weekly video games future now tweet

  • “Reluctant to transcend his station as a mere mortal and interfere with the vicissitudes of fortune, local lifeguard Blake Dunphy confided to reporters Tuesday that he found himself mentally shackled by the question of whether to save a swimmer currently thrashing for his life or allow destiny to take its course unfettered. “Though this man sputters and flails before my eyes and the path to his salvation lies readily before me, the broader question remains: Who am I, a mere earthly being of flesh and blood, to determine whether my fellow man lives or dies?” “

    tags: weekly satire onion lifeguard life destiny

  • tags: history human shape change world weekly tweet

  • “They had unwittingly stumbled onto patterns that tied into theories humanities scholars had been discussing for years. The sagas are thought to have been written using actual genealogical information, says Tangherlini — in fact, many of the Icelandic sagas are classified as “family sagas,” and they may have been written to cement a family’s glorious past — so it makes sense that their social networks are very realistic. There’s a theory that the person who wrote Njal’s Saga used Laxdæla as a source, an idea that recognizes the interconnectedness of the locations and people involved. And Laxdæla, which tells the story of Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir and her four marriages, is thought by some scholars and critics to have been written by a woman. The physicists’ networks suggest that the patterns close readers were picking up on are quantifiable. They’d arrived at similar observations using different methods.

    “THERE ARE A LOT OF LATENT PATTERNS IN THIS MATERIAL THAT YOU CAN’T DISCERN OVERTLY.”

    tags: viking facebook socialmedia research weekly

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