Friday, April 4, 2014

Beware of guitar-playing robots, fake papers, and Darth Vader

Jewish date:  4 Nisan 5774 (Parashath Meṣora‘).

Today’s events:  National Reading a Roadmap Day, National Repot your Plant Day, International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action (UN).

Greetings.

It has been too long since I last posted, and I have too many things, including weird things, accumulating on my desktop.  I therefore present you with three weird things:

1) “Squarepusher Explores ‘Emotional Machine Music’ With 78-Fingered Robot Guitarist”, which is arguably a defictionalization of Animusic.

2) “Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers”, the papers in question being generated by
SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator.  This is the sort of hoax which reveals that some people are not doing peer review correctly.

3) For all you science-fiction fans out there, “Ukraine's Darth Vader bids to lead nation to the dark side”.  As if there weren’t enough people in office who had gone over to the Dark Side already…

Enjoy, share the weirdness, and Shabbath shalom.

’Aharon/Aaron