When Salon Commenters Make You Laugh

I think Gpanos, in a comment to this here Salon article, summarized one of life's greatest truths:

"Similarly, Swisher and Mossberg agreed that in Apple's current ad campaign pitting the frumpy "PC Guy" against the hipster "Mac Guy," John Hodgman's PC Guy is more likable."

This is probably because hipsters are cool in theory, but suck in practice, like Communism.

Spread your wings.

Go on, you're not going to hurt anyone. Least of all me.

Give those bastards a good flap, rev the engines, see what kind of dust devils you can kick up. Smell that warm, soft, leathery smell; take a look at that beautiful shadow. Haha yeah, it'd be a metal cover if it wasn't noon on a grassy park lawn. Of course it feels weird, you have two more friggin limbs! All right, now JUMP. Jump and beat. That's it, ride it, don't think too hard.

Fly.

The past tense of 'to cleave'

A popular tool in a butcher's shop is a cleaver. After a cleaver's been used on a piece of meat, that meat is...cleaved? it's not cleft or cloven, but is it clove?

Perhaps the butcher clove the meat, and now the meat is cleaved. Can anything other than hoofs be cloven? can anything other than a chin be cleft?

"There ain't no Moore's Law for neurons"

Watts says, in this comment thread, : "There ain't no Moore's Law for neurons."

Well, OK, but there should be. Maybe this is just my not-so-latent singularitarian/extropian streak talking, but there bloody well should be a way to get this giant piece of almost-meat in my head to be more efficient with its inputs and, as a consequence, develop new capacities.

A pied kiwi: wikipedia BURNS MY EYES

So I'm flipping through Wikipedia's articles on complexity theory and cellular automata, by way of reading about the controversies related to Stephen Wolfram's book A New Kind of Science. This was all sparked by news of Mathematica 6's release.

Then, I stumble upon the fascinating fact that some very simple rules are Turing Complete. In the process, I read a certain Wikipedia article, the object of today's post, that has visual examples of the basic computations that Rule 110 is capable of performing.

These images (in fact, almost all conventional images of one-dimensional cellular automata) would be a lot more interesting if I could look at them for longer than 3 nanoseconds.

Warning: severe eyeball abrasion ahead.

The Rule 110 Cellular Automaton (scroll down for images)