...well, perhaps 'try men's souls' is a little dramatic, but not entirely wrong, either. It's been a hectic day, starting with my daughter insisting at breakfast that nothing would do but that the registration for her attendance at the anime convention be made right away! Then the television table -- a solid piece of woodwork, weighing about 225 pounds -- arrived; the transport company had neglected to ship it on a liftgate-enabled truck. My, manhandling that off the truck and into the house was fun. The unit is quite nice, if somewhat, um, darker than I'd thought it would be. Oh, and when I was looking at their site to see if that truly was the color we ordered -- it was -- I noticed that they'd just dropped the price by 10%. My wife says she'll call and see about getting that money. I cooked a pizza tonight; the dough was good, but I could not for the life of me get it to have that tang that pizza needs to have. Back to the drawing board. And finally, this evening, my daughter informed me that since the girl who's coming with her has as a requirement from her mother that there be parental supervision the whole time, obviously that meant that we had to get a ticket for the convention for my wife, too. Which, I admit, made sense, but: holy hell, this is turning into an expensive proposition.
But on the bright side, I did some reading in artificial intelligence today, and I learned a little bit. Part was that the people who write up patent applications aren't required to speak gracefully, or even, on occasion, to speak English; the patent I was looking at kept saying 'conscience activities' when they clearly wanted to say 'conscious activities' . Still, the patent was generally interesting. I think the thing that grabbed me was that although it was badly written and worded, it still had some core of useful information. I always tend to assume that information is delivered predigested -- I suppose with that attitude, I should like Fox News -- so it was a bit of a surprise to find that I had to tease things out of the writeup, generate my own understanding of what was possible, and what was being proposed. I have to watch it, though: doing that leads me almost inevitably to thinking well, hell, I can do that! when the truth is, no, I can't. But I'd like to.
But on the bright side, I did some reading in artificial intelligence today, and I learned a little bit. Part was that the people who write up patent applications aren't required to speak gracefully, or even, on occasion, to speak English; the patent I was looking at kept saying 'conscience activities' when they clearly wanted to say 'conscious activities' . Still, the patent was generally interesting. I think the thing that grabbed me was that although it was badly written and worded, it still had some core of useful information. I always tend to assume that information is delivered predigested -- I suppose with that attitude, I should like Fox News -- so it was a bit of a surprise to find that I had to tease things out of the writeup, generate my own understanding of what was possible, and what was being proposed. I have to watch it, though: doing that leads me almost inevitably to thinking well, hell, I can do that! when the truth is, no, I can't. But I'd like to.
2 comments:
If you are now reduced to reading patents...perhaps you should visit your local library? ;-0
Nah, its just what popped up when I was doing a search for applications of artificial intelligence. This particular one sounded intriguiging. Dynamic security monitoring is a difficult thing to do.
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