Last night, I watched the new Doctor Who: The Star Beast, forty-three years after the seven-year-old me read the original comic.
Reading
The future is fun! The future is fair! Some of us have learned to refrain from issuing hot takes on developing stories. Yes, sometimes it’s infuriating when the press holds back from stating the obvious. I still recall the hour or more of “we don’t know what happened yet” reporting when the Challenger exploded (1986) shortly after launch, even as TV ran and re-ran footage of the explosion and we watched the detached bosters, still firing, fly wildy across the sky. Other times, as in last week’s Canada/U.S. border crash, there is a race to sensationalize in the absence of facts. Will Bunch opens his Sunday column with an Orwell quote: “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” — George Orwell, 1984 The lie that the bridge crash was a terrorist attack from Canada spread before the flames from the burning Bentley subsided. First the truth: Here’s what really happened on Wednesday: A 53-year-old couple from Erie County, N.Y.
From a brewing AI copyright battle to union efforts to protect sky-high credit card fees, here’s a roundup of our reporting from the past week.
The Doctor is AI Forget that we cannot trust self-driving cars and that those flying ones we were promised remain elusive. Two random items this morning reinforce concerns about AI. This one: Followed by this one: Science is an imperfect process, the Hill opinion notes. “Since 1980, more than 40,000 scientific publications have been retracted. They either contained errors, were based on outdated knowledge or were outright frauds.” The problem is that those zombie studies do not disappear simply because they’ve been retrcated. They continue to be cited “unwittingly“: Just by citing a zombie publication, new research becomes infected: A single unreliable citation can threaten the reliability of the research that cites it, and that infection can cascade, spreading across hundreds of papers. A 2019 paper on childhood cancer, for example, cites 51 different retracted papers, making its research likely impossible to salvage. AI relying on undigitized medical knowledge from 1853 may seem unlikely. But relying on 40,000 retracted studies still floating around?
‘Tis the season, so I designed a card. (You may purchase it here if you like. Or any other comparably inappropriate product. I do feel more people ought to confound loved ones by gifting them my socks.) On to further scholarly matters! Ludwig Wittgenstein, his friends said, insisted on ‘soupy’ Christmas cards. In Wittgenstein in […]
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Doctor Who, CM Punk, Invincible, Agatha: Darkhold Diaries, True Detective, Peacemaker, Scott Pilgrim & more!
We’ve raised approximately $4,200.
I’ve recently been revising my book “The Creation of Reality” and it occurred to me that I’d like to release some chapters as part of this fundraiser. The book is written, just not completely edited, so rewards will be released during the fundraiser as the goals are reached.
The first five chapters at $6,200:
1. Introduction (why this matters);
2. Why do our societies make so many miserable?
3. The Social Facts Which Rule Us (Why and how the reality we created bends us to its will.)
4. Being Aware (Until you understand how reality is being created you can’t change it in beneficial ways.)
5. Human Alone (How are our personal reality is created)
Some of these chapters are short, thus five of them rather than the three in the other two tranches.
Chapters six through eight at $8,350.
Indigenous Justice on Movement Memos On November 23, thousands of Indigenous people and allies participated in the annual Indigenous Peoples’ Thanksgiving Sunrise Gathering on Alcatraz Island organized…
. Ein besorgniserregender Aspekt des Wokismus ist seine Besessenheit von Viktimisierung. Die Wokisten konzentrieren sich auf kollektive Viktimisierung anstelle des Individuums. Sie klassifizieren Individuen nach ihrer Zugehörigkeit zu Identitätsgruppen und weisen ihnen einen Opferstatus gemäß diesen Kriterien zu. Diese Herangehensweise reduziert Individuen auf ihre Gruppenidentität und untergräbt so ihre Autonomie und ihre Fähigkeit, sich als […]
Doctor Who: "The Star Beast" was a winning return to form from Russell T. Davies, David Tennant, Catherine Tate, and director Rachel Talalay.
And can you blame them? TPM reports: Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is experiencing some political repercussions for dumping gasoline on his fractured party’s descent into dysfunction when he ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for the sin of keeping the government open. While the congressman is still popular in his Panhandle home district, his standing in Florida overall is in a state of disrepair. The Florida Atlantic University Mainstreet PolCom Lab released the results of statewide polling it conducted between Oct. 27 and Nov. 11 last week. It found that 57 percent of Florida voters are unhappy with Gaetz’s job as a congressman. That means that just 21 percent of voters surveyed approved of the congressman’s performance in Washington. About eight percent were “neutral” and 14 percent indicated they didn’t know how they felt, per the poll results. When broken down by party, his approval rating is only a little less bleak. Among Democrats surveyed, almost 83 percent said they disapprove of the professional antagonist.
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
The opening sequence to the Beep the Meep-starring Doctor Who 60th Anniversary episode "The Star Beast" credits Pat Mills & Dave Gibbons.
If you don’t watch Fox, as you shouldn’t, you miss the incisive reporting and analysis they provide. Yes, the radical left commies, Marxist thugs like you and I hate pies. We really do. Especially apple pie which is, as you know, American. Because we hate America and don’t want it to be great again. (Nobody wants to “take away” anyone’s gas stoves. The idea is that in the future new gas stoves will not come online and instead modern technology will be delivering a superior form of gas stove that isn’t going to kill the planet. Because we hate everyone.) In case you are wondering what this is about, Kamala Harris and her husband Doug posted a picture of themselves on Thanksgiving with a pie in their kitchen, (at the Naval Observatory where they live? I don’t know.) This has turned into a viral sensation among the right wingers because it shows that they have a gas stove which makes them monstrous hypocrites who hate everyone and want t=people to suffer without any pies. This is what we’re dealing with. Snotty, stupid. nasty little mean girls spouting nonsense. Tens of millions of people think this is awesome.
Making its debut during "The Star Beast" earlier today, here's an official look at the new opening title sequence for BBC's Doctor Who.
Here's the trailer for the next episode in the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary, the Tom Kingsley-directed, Davies-penned "Wild Blue Yonder."
Debuting during Doctor Who: "The Star Beast," the BBC show released official images showing off the new interior of the TARDIS.
In all senses of the word Via Axios: Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) said Friday he won’t resign from Congress but acknowledged he will likely be expelled as he lobbed salacious accusations at colleagues and called the chair of the Ethics Committee a “p***y”. A growing number of lawmakers in both parties who previously voted against expelling Santos have flipped and now say they will vote to remove him following an explosive Ethics Committee report. Santos said he knows he is “going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor,” adding: “I’ve done the math over and over, and it doesn’t look really good.” In an X space hosted by journalist Monica Matthews, Santos said he is “not going to resign” because “[if] I resign, I admit everything that’s on that report.” Santos said he will defend himself “to the end of time,” criticizing the Ethics Committee probe as biased and goading Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) to “stop being a p***y” and force a vote on his expulsion resolution. Rep.
Looks like it… Ed Kilgore on the latest: Until recently, Democrats’ biggest concern about the 2024 youth vote was that millennial and Gen-Z voters were so disappointed with our octogenarian president that they might not turn out in great enough numbers to reelect Joe Biden. Young voters were, after all, the largest and most rapidly growing segment of the Democratic base in the last election. But now public-opinion surveys are beginning to unveil a far more terrifying possibility: Donald Trump could carry the youth vote next year. And even if that threat is exaggerated or reversible, it’s increasingly clear that “the kids” may be swing voters, not unenthusiastic Democratic base voters who can be frightened into turning out by the prospect of Trump’s return. NBC News reports it’s a polling trend that cannot be ignored or dismissed: The latest national NBC News poll finds President Joe Biden trailing former President Donald Trump among young voters ages 18 to 34 — with Trump getting support from 46% of these young voters and Biden getting 42%.
As a lead up to Doctor Who: "The Star Beast," David Tennant & Catherine Tate share a personal recap of the Doctor/Donna Noble story so far.