Filed by Bil at 4:15 pm under The Arts, The South
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Before we get to our monthly activities recording the unbridled hatred of our anonymous friends and strangers tomorrow, I’d like to just give a shout-out to what surely must be the best blog in the world. There’s a recording of a reading of one of his posts with some psychedelic, spaghetti-western guitar beneath it, and seriously…it’s amazing.

You can close your eyes and just listen.

Filed by Lance at 3:48 pm under General, Hatemail, Shameless Plugs
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…if we only gave you one thing to do with your hate.

Here are two:
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Filed by Bil at 7:25 pm under Fightin' Words, Love, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, The Science
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I read a New York Times Opinion article recently about our human tendency to anthropomorphize machines and assign the badge “Artificial Intelligence” to robots that simply aren’t intelligent. (I suspect he’s referring to articles like this one.) The opinion article is a great read, but it’s kinda long and it seems to conclude in a different place than it starts out, so if I were a high school English teacher, I’d give the essay a B.

At its core, this piece is a warning to us humans not to infuse our technological advancements with religious or philosophical ideologies. And I must say, I completely agree with that statement. My favorite point the author makes is this:

In fact, the nuts and bolts of A.I. research can often be more usefully interpreted without the concept of A.I. at all. For example, I.B.M. scientists recently unveiled a “question answering” machine that is designed to play the TV quiz show “Jeopardy.” Suppose I.B.M. had dispensed with the theatrics, declared it had done Google one better and come up with a new phrase-based search engine. This framing of exactly the same technology would have gained I.B.M.’s team as much (deserved) recognition as the claim of an artificial intelligence, but would also have educated the public about how such a technology might actually be used most effectively.

It punctuates exactly what he’s trying to state before going on to make grander observations about religious wars and the concept of personhood.

However, it did get me thinking – not so much about personhood or religion, but about the meaning of intelligence.
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Lance at 4:40 pm under General, Pop Culture, The Arts
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Through my work with the Bite Size Arts Ensemble, I came up with this idea to get kids actively involved in creating theater.

I came up with a simple “script,” really just a bullet point list of the flow of a scene. I usually based this off of some ideas they had, or fleshed out a story they told me. I then came up with a list of assignments, i.e., Director, Art Director, Cinematographer, Actors, and gave them specific assignments, then turned them loose, guiding them and making suggestions as the “Producer.”

Here’s the results, I’m really proud of these kids: