Tuesday, February 08, 2011

This Just Blog

This Just In.
NEW YORK TIMES review today says the accident-plagued Broadway production of SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK is really awful. And looks cheesy. The critic at SLATE kind of liked it though. Tickets start at $150.

AOL gets HuffPo
Ariana Huffington will rule the world! Brent Bozell III disapproves! “This proves AOL News has lost its mind,” he said in a statement to CNS News.com, a division of Media Research Center, of which he is president. I guess he was talking to himself.


Sarah Palin weighs in.

AP: “Sarah Palin says the Obama administration must tell Americans what it knows about who will be Egypt's next leader. In a Christian Broadcasting Network interview released Saturday, the 2008 vice presidential candidate says the administration should level with the American people on what it knows about the Egyptian crisis.”

“Palin said the U.S. must find out who is ‘behind all the turmoil’ and that ‘we should not stand’ for a government led by the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Sarah Palin has a hunch, apparently, that President Obama either knows or can find out who’s behind all the turmoil, and already has the next Egyptian leader tucked away in a pocket somewhere. Why won’t he tell us!

Money woes.
So we don’t want to increase the taxes on millionaires, but we do want to trim the pensions of public employees. That’ll fix things right up.


From THE GUARDIAN

From “Comment is Free,” by George Montbiot:

“For his film (Astro)Turf Wars, Taki Oldham secretly recorded a training session organized by a rightwing libertarian group called American Majority. The trainer, Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to ‘manipulate the medium.’ This is what he told them:

“‘Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in “Liberal Books.” I go through and I say ‘one star, one star, one star.’ The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. … This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in “Movies on Healthcare,”I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click. … If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.’

“Over 75% of the funding for American Majority, which hosted this training session, comes from the Sam Adams Alliance. In 2008, the year in which American Majority was founded, 88% of the alliance’s money came from a single donation, of $3.7m. A group which trains rightwing libertarians to distort online democratic processes, in other words, was set up with funding from a person or company with a very large wallet.”

The Twitter Revolution.
Nothing irritates me more than hearing the events in Tunisia and Egypt describes as a Twitter Revolution. We might as well say the American Civil War was fought with telegrams.


According to SLATE…

Nobody’s in charge of the revolution in Egypt. Somebody ought to tell Sarah Palin, before it’s too late. Send her a Tweet!

Also in SLATE:
Dana Stevens is puzzled by Natalie Portman. Writes about it. Huh. Whatever.

Ironic!
Mark “Facebook” Zuckerberg has issued a restraining order against a stalker. Was he a Facebook stalker? Insert poking, friending, etc. joke here. And then be ashamed.


How it works…

“Intel AIM Suite face detection algorithms have statistically learned the pattern of a human face by being trained on an audience database of thousands of pictures of human faces. The demographics of a face can be determined using a similar process to how a face is found, where the patterns being looked at correspond to male or female faces, or certain age brackets (children, young adults, adults, seniors). The algorithms have learned which face features have the strongest weighting for each gender and age bracket. The combination of various facial features such as eye positioning, nose shape, cheek bones, and overall facial structure are among the variables that are taken into consideration during this process.”

The above is Jose Avolos of Intel explaining Meal Planning Solution to Mashable. This is a kiosk, in development by food provider Kraft and Intel. It scans your face and based on that data, lets you know what you want to eat. Because we no longer know for sure. Another spokesman for Intel told Mashable, “We think the technology — anonymous video analytics along with the immersive digital experience in-store, has huge potential.” Just what Safeway needs: an immersive digital experience.