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Palin and Turing
Thursday, October 23 2008
Perhaps it was the Sarah Palin random-phrase generator that got me thinking about this, but today after reading about an interview she had with Dr. James Dobson, it occurred to me: the Republican Vice Presidential candidate couldn't pass a Turing Test! (A Turing Test is a test where a human is asked to determine if he or she is communicating with a human or a computer. If it's a computer but the human thinks it's a computer, the computer has passed. This has never happened outside of narrow fields of discourse.) Often when I have such a revelatory thought, I'll Google it and be delighted to find that no one else has posted anything about it. With Sarah Palin and Turing Tests, however, people had made the connection as long ago as the Katie Couric interviews. I hadn't yet realized my revelation was far from unique when I posted a diary on dailykos.com about it.
In greenhouse-related news, web development demands kept me at my computer and I didn't have much time to work outdoors, so I only laid block for about an hour and then only installed six of the motherfuckers, finishing the third tier on the south wall (the first masonry wall I have a chance of finishing). At this point the greenhouse pit is a thicket of empty concrete bags, scraps of wood used for concrete forms, tools, and autumnal detritus. As the walls grow higher, it will seem like a deeper and deeper put, and the detritus will surely continue to accumulate. Eventually the walls will rise past the surface of the terrain around them, and some point I'll be able to move all that excavation dirt up against the walls, burying my greenhouse like a bombshelter in the ground.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?081023 feedback
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