"to be continued"

My roommate finally finished watching 'The Wire' last night, so now I am putting up this nice compilation of the 100 best lines from that show.




Also, the 100 greatest OTHER lines from the show:

Supreme court transparency via twitter

A fascinating glimpse into the world of constitutional legal scholarship in particular, and critical thinking in general.

He's no Calvin Murphy, but pretty good for a President

This is great; Barack Obama doing a little color-commentary/analysis during the Georgetown/Duke game over the weekend. I like his line to Clark Kellogg after being complimented on his efforts: "i'm coming for your job; you've either got 3 years or 7 years left...." Also, his answer about having a 'stronger left' is amusing.

Chess and then Advanced Chess

Garry Kasparov reviews the book, Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind, by Diego Rasskin-Gutman, about the complexities of chess and the history of designing and building computers with the aim of defeating humans. He spends less time on the book than he does reminiscing about the various matches he, himself, has played both alongside and against computers. However, I could read Kasparov writing about that kind of stuff for a long time, I think. After reminding us that there are 10 to the power of 120 possible chess matches (more than the number of atoms in the universe) and revealing that, in the end, raw computing power was able to triumph over humans, he moves into some interesting territory:

With the supremacy of the chess machines now apparent and the contest of "Man vs. Machine" a thing of the past, perhaps it is time to return to the goals that made computer chess so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. Playing better chess was a problem they wanted to solve, yes, and it has been solved. But there were other goals as well: to develop a program that played chess by thinking like a human, perhaps even by learning the game as a human does. Surely this would be a far more fruitful avenue of investigation than creating, as we are doing, ever-faster algorithms to run on ever-faster hardware.