The PC shop installed XP onto my 120GB hard drive. I took it home. It’s working beautifully. I install the basics: Office and Outlook. I’m rebuilding my directories from my backups. I’m on the phone for a minute so I know my hands are off the keyboard, and Boom, it goes to black and reboots.

I have the minimal peripherals plugged in: USB mouse and USB keyboard, ethernet cable, monitor. I am running a minimal set of stuff. No virus protection, no ad blockers, no fancy dancy drivers. And yet I still got a big, scary crash. It’s a new motherboard and RAM.

Suggestions other than to get a Mac? I’m at my wit’s end. (Fortunately, that’s a short walk for me.)

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The local PC store has performed every conceivable test on my broken computer. With a new new motherboard and new new RAM, it works fine…except if they put in my 120MB hard drive where Windows XP lives. They cloned that drive to another and still get blue screens of death. Hence, my installation of XP is corrupt, possibly caused by the faulty memory they’d installed originally.

So, this afternoon I get my PC back with a new mobo and RAM, and with a reformatted drive with XP installed. And so, for at least the 4th time in the past ten days or so I will be spending 30+ hours setting up my work environment again.

Why do I have the suspicion that when I’m done it’s still going to work for 2 days (i.e., just enough time for me to be finishing up the re-insall) and then start crashing?

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Matt Prescott says that the Mines Advisory Group reports dozens of children are being killed every day by landmines and unexploded bombs in Iraq. Landmine Action has a petition here.

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Ed Nixon, referring to a blog posting of mine about a fallacy in Ray Kurzweil’s thinking about selves, points to John Searle’s reply to Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines. Ed comments further here. Searle, of the famous Chinese Room thought experiment (Kurzweil’s response is here), hammers away (successfully, from my point of view) on the fact that computer programs are symbolic; the ones and zeros that are Deep Blue calculating a chess move are only about chess because we have so invested them with meaning. This is the real difference between atoms and bits.

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From Miles at TinyApps.org:

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

Thomas Jefferson, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 6, H.A. Washington, Ed.,1854, pp. 180-181.

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I just heard this story, probably well-known to many of you.

For many years, the leading automatic translation software worked on a Chomsky-ian theory that to translate between two languages, you parse the grammar/syntax of the portion in language A, look up the words in a dictionary, then apply B’s rules to them. The results have been mixed at best.

Then IBM began the Candide Project. It took hundreds of thousands of pages of Hansard, the bilingual record of the Canadian Parliament. The project did nothing but associate words and phrases by position in the French and English versions. It had no dictionary and no rules of syntax. And it did better than the rule-based technique. (In this case “better” means that human readers gave the IBM project’s translations a higher score.)

This appeals to me because I’ve always resisted the idea that humans understand things by interiorizing rules and maps. On the other hand, this makes the argument against AI harder, for if computers and human brains are now both working associatively, we’re forced to argue about what probably can’t be argued: whether thought is necessarily an organic function, something that living flesh does, whether you have to be alive to think/experience.

(See here for a history of computational linguistics.)

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President Bush, trying again to explain the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, said on Saturday that suspected arms sites had been looted in the waning days of Saddam Hussein’s rule. — Reuters

So, our invasion of Iraq resulted in the uncontrolled distribution of the weapons of mass destruction that we invaded to make ourselves safer from? Oh joy. I continue to feel just safer and safer because of this war.

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Both Halley and Chris Lydon are reminding us that no generation invents the world anew. “Harold Bloom and others say that we are all Emersonians by now, willy nilly, for both good and ill,” writes Chris towards the end of a perfectly lovely essay. And Doc would remind us that we’re all Whitmanians. And damn if I haven’t been finding a whole lot of America worth loving in Sandburg and Frost.

Chris’ voice is a unique addition to the blogosphere. You might want to try dwelling at his place for a while.

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Horst Prillinger explains why he doesn’t like anonymous blogs. It’s a good explanation, and I too tend to prefer blogs where I feel like the person has some “skin in the game.” But there’s plenty of room for every gradation of anonymity including:

Hiding all biographical facts but using your real name (= shy blogger or professional journalist blogger)

Making up biographical facts using your real name (= liar blogger)

Making up biographical facts while using an obviously false name (= fictional blogger)

Telling the truth about biographical facts while using an obviously false name (= informant blogger)

Telling the truth about biographical facts while using a false name (= witness-protection blogger)

Hiring someone to boast about your life and sign it using your name (= CEO blogger)

Surely this just scratches the surface…

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After having done absolutely no research beyond reading the papers that I read and then forgetting what they said, it seems to me that the US media in general is neglecting to do investigative reporting of what has to be the biggest story about the current administration: Did Bush lie to us in order to get a war that he wanted?

I get the sense that if the Congress drops the issue, so will the journalists. The media are covering not the issue but the Democratic pursuit of the issue. Investigative journalism, in contrast, would be out trying to track down information on its own.

Is my fact-deprived perception correct? If so, why aren’t there journalists out there digging into this story the way a dog digs into a bowl of fresh Pulitzer Prizes?

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