I’ve been MIA a while, so to kick things back off, here are a few things across the internet I’ve been enjoying recently.
What is the creepiest thing your young child has ever said to you?
She then pointed at the closet and said, “the man with the snake neck.”
Getting stuffed: a tale of love and taxidermy by David Sedaris
The taxidermist knew me for less time than it took to wipe my feet on his mat, and, with no effort whatsoever, he looked into my soul and recognised me for the person I really am
Deep Inside Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Taco
Like any serious renovation, Taco Bell’s started with a trip to Home Depot. It was April 2009. To show executives how the companies could fuse the flavor of Doritos with taco shells, the dev teams “basically went out to Home Depot to buy a paint-spray gun, and then sprayed [Doritos] flavoring onto our existing yellow corn tacos,” recalls Creed, with a chuckle.
My Brother, My Mother, and a Call Girl
Picture George Clooney rendered as a Sesame Street Muppet.
Why Bill Gates Thinks Ending Polio Is Worth It
Why not just settle for the huge drop in polio cases that we’ve seen over the past decade and then spend money on other things that kill so many more kids, like diarrhea and malnutrition? “Polio is special,” Gates tells NPR’s Robert Siegel on All Things Considered. “Once you get it done, you save $2 billion a year that will be applied to those other activities. There’s no better deal economically to getting to zero.”
General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis on the importance of reading email
The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience), i.e. the hard way.
What’s so great about Ron Weasley?
Many of us suffer from what I like to call the “Ron Weasley complex”. This is the conflict that comes with being surrounded by remarkable people.
For no one has yet created, or come close to creating, an artificial general intelligence — a computational system that can achieve goals in a wide variety of environments. A computational system like the human brain, only better. An artificial intelligence wouldn’t need to better the brain by much to be risky.