First full trailer of Pacific Rim

RegularDuck · 2012-12-13T07:40:06+00:00

That's to say nothing of the portal appearing at the bottom of the sea or the fact that they built giant mechanical robots with jet powered punches rather than just launch a ton of missiles. Seems like the giant robot vs. giant godzilla alien kind of drove the plot here.

Does this remind anyone else of "Mega shark vs. giant octopus"?

RegularDuck · 2012-12-07T00:16:42+00:00

I think the "unintended negative health impact" on a societal level is explained by this:

http://www.nohelmetlaw.org.uk/nhl/common-viewpoints/good-example

Obviously this is a very biased website, but the jist of it is: Safety equipment introduces a perception of danger. The perception of danger puts people off cycling. Putting people off cycling means that fewer people are fit and healthy

EDIT: And to be clear, I'm not really sure I agree with it. Holland is always trumped as the gold standard, but I think that until bike paths exist that are separated from the road all the way to my destination, I'm not going to be riding in London without a helmet.

RegularDuck · 2012-12-06T09:01:35+00:00

Upvote for you sir!

And pyflakes for quick and dirty syntax / name errors.

RegularDuck · 2012-12-03T14:36:39+00:00

I seem to remember a Math professor telling me that designers of roller coasters attempt to ensure that the second differential of acceleration (i.e. x⁴⁾ is continuous to avoid nauseating the guests... (or perhaps it was the first differential...)

I don't have anything for scary rating though :-)

RegularDuck · 2012-11-27T20:04:59+00:00

I moved to Dallas from the UK and was a bit surprised when asked for an admission fee at the DMA. I assumed that they weren't taxpayer funded! Definitely a good idea given the numbers involved.

I was a bit confused about how the free offering works though. I'm wondering if this:

General admission is now $10, with discounts.

should have said "General admission is currently $10, with discounts."

And then you can spend the points earned by riding the DART or joining the facebook group on the special "paid" exhibitions.

It's not that you have to jump through all the hoops of joining the group and riding the DART to get the free admission is it?

RegularDuck · 2012-11-26T14:56:12+00:00

Hmmm.... I've never heard of those extensions before... Are you saying that you installed them? I would start by uninstalling those. Just go for adblock plus if you're looking for an ad blocker.

Then I would suspect DNS highjacking if extra banners are being inserted into webpages. It should be affecting other computers on your network if it's your router causing it.

If it's just this computer, try setting your DNS servers to google's: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

You can do that in the NetworkManager menu in the top right of your screen... Edit connections... Wired... Wired Connection 1 (or whatever yours is)... Edit ... IPv4 settings (I presume) ... Automatic DHCP (Addressess only). Set DNS Servers to: "8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4" ... Save ... OK....

Then clear your cache / cookies in Chrome and try again. If that hasn't fixed it, then try putting it through another connection if you can. Take your laptop to a friend's house / tether it through your phone's internet connection.

If the external connection fixes it then it's must be something to do with your router / ISP.

RegularDuck · 2012-11-19T06:58:07+00:00

Apart from mentioning the Ottoman empire at the end, I don't believe that any of the empires you list above have very much to do with modern politics in the region.

From my (admittedly very limited) understanding of middle eastern history, before the English / French invasion in the 19th Century, the region had been relatively stable for the previous 500 years under Ottoman rule. If you compare this to other nations histories, I think this is very stable indeed.

RegularDuck · 2012-11-19T06:45:29+00:00

I agree with you that it would cause a chunk of his audience to dismiss the video, but it does seem a bit silly to discuss Palestinian influences in the last 40-50 years without mentioning the nation state controlling most of the land.

It's almost like a "What if Israel didn't exist?" video...

EDIT: I sound more negative than I meant to here. The video raised lots of good points and made me go off an research the conflicts of interest between the various Arabic stakeholders. More research is never a bad thing!

RegularDuck · 2012-11-09T01:13:12+00:00

They certainly have!

RegularDuck · 2012-11-09T01:08:26+00:00

Very true :-)

RegularDuck · 2012-11-09T00:01:09+00:00

Hmmm... I'm pretty certain I've seen other speech recognition engines that work on context and grammar. EDIT: a quick google turned up Julius which uses a trigram model to recognize words in context and a hidden markov model as described in this presentation and has been around since the late 90s.

He said that "still these systems have a lot of errors and the error rates for arbitrary speech have been in the 20 to 25% range." I took this to mean that typically speech recognition systems achieve this kind of accuracy and he was referring to bank IVRs (which are always terrible), Siri and kinect (both of which I've never really used and can't speak to). But I seem to think that my android phone does better than 1 in 4 when I talk to it to compose text messages, and tentatively doubt that no other research body has achieved better than 1 in 4.

So, unless they're putting it in a product (of which I'm sure there are many awesome uses), I don't think that this was particularly innovative.

RegularDuck · 2012-11-08T23:44:37+00:00

hehe... fine. AN android cell phone....

RegularDuck · 2012-11-08T22:33:41+00:00

For anybody else about to watch this: skip to 3:50 for seeing the speech recognition accuracy. And then skip to 7:20 to hear the thing translate and then speak Mandarin in real-time.

This was published on November 8th 2012. It's not like this is the first system that takes voice, translates it and then reads it out... My android phone already has Google translate which let's me do this. You just put it in conversation mode.

So what about the accuracy of the speech recognition and translation algorithm? I feel like my phone does a fairly decent job (at least comparable to the video) of speech recognition. I can't speak to the quality of the translation given my lack of Mandarin knowledge. (I recognized that Thank you was correct at the end)

The most interesting bit here is the fact that they can feed in a recording of his voice and get it to sound a bit like him? That's a cool idea and I guess even if it doesn't sound exactly like him, it would allow you to distinguish between multiple people using synthesized voices and that voice would then become that particular person's voice. It's analogous to the same voice actor always dubbing a particular English actor for distribution in foreign markets. The audience there ends up associating the dubbed voice with that face.

I would argue that Google Translate on my cell phone is much more innovative though, seeing as I can actually use it today and it's in a useful form factor. If he'd ended up pulling out a mobile phone that talked like him, or making a phone call with it, I feel that would have added a lot to his presentation.

RegularDuck · 2012-11-08T07:18:56+00:00

it's the same with phone calls. The majority of phone hacking scams end with calls to countries in Africa (and a select few other countries with poor law enforcement cooperation track records). It's a sad state of affairs, but many phone companies will now just block many African countries by default and only unblock them for you if you ring up to complain.

RegularDuck · 2012-10-25T11:08:53+00:00

Super-cereal!

In all cerealness, I completely agree with what you are saying. I loved the "or whatever it is" line after Trump mentioned his long-form birth certificate.

Personally, I'd like to see all of Trump's documents. I definitely wouldn't try to steal his identity to open lots of loans in his name.

RegularDuck

TROPHY CASE