I don’t hang out at Starbucks much outside of the weekly (or so) stop at the Starbucks-lite in the local Barnes & Noble to read all the magazines for free, but two recent Slate articles on Starbucks Hacking and poor Stanley Fish’s misread (one hopes) and extremely late and lame attempt at some coffee ranting lead to some other links about Starbucks that ate up way too much of my time this evening.

The Starbucks Oracle will provide a custom insult for whatever concoction is your favorite (my Venti Americano with room makes me an asshat. I agree.) to spring on the baristas.

The Starbucks Gossip blog– maintained by Jim Romenesko!– is fascinating… if you want to know what celebrities order (and whether they tip or not), read about egregious abuses of the “Just Say Yes” policy (which I didn’t know existed and which this thread will help the unscrupulous abuse), or read a nearly insane (and insanely funny) rant by a barista who is not your friend– and needs a new job– this is the place. There’s a whole Starbucks vocabulary I never knew existed.

Baristas of many coffee joints discuss their life and craft at the Starbucks Baristas Community.

And, of course, there is the tale of the missing short capuccino, which is unfortunately not available at the B&N pretend Starbucks…

If you are climbing Mt. Everest and leave a struggling climber under a rock to die so you can make the summit, not only should you expect no sympathy, you should be charged with negligent homicide.

So, a student puts up a web page with a link to the school web site, and tells people to follow the link and crash the server. And now he’s charged with a felony? Since when is a good old-fashioned slashdotting a felony? I can just imagine the 30 seconds a case like this will last in court.

The irony is, the school web site (not to mention the Canton City web site) now are down because of all the traffic this ridiculous prosecution has gotten them. They caused much more damage than the student could have. Maybe the prosecutor should be tried on the same charges? Go ahead, try the links…

[ruminate weird]

Had a long, strange dream last night in which wikis had become everyone’s centralized PIM, fed by palm devices, voice, telephone, computers, and the net. Of course they were all linked together into a kind of AI system. Users could only search public records, but the wiki intelligence that ran things could search everything, revealing information to our benefit that it deemed appropriate.

The wiki voice and personae– mine anyway– was the Exit to Eden era Dana Delaney (this vintage not this one).

On one of the only good concept albums ever (_Time_ by ELO) there is a song “Yours Truly, 2095″ in which the speaker– marooned in the far future of the year 2095– talks about the new personal computer:

I met someone who looks a lot like you
She does the things you do
But she is an IBM.
[...]
She is the latest in technology
Or most mythology
But she has a heart stone

She has an I.Q. of 1001
She has a jumpsuit on
And she’s also a telephone.

It was like that. Kind of. And yes, I did pull that lyric completely out of my head. I can recite most of that album by heart and if I imbibe enough (and you are unlucky enough) you might even hear me keen “Ticket to the Moon” in Tiny Tim-like falsetto…

Mugs whose color indicates when the right amount of cream has been added to the coffee. Now that’s functional design.

[tags: ruminate BoingBoing]

See picture of Star Nosed Mole. Don’t sleep well for a week. Read article. Be glad I’m not “small prey.”

Alex Halavais (his blog is always interesting, check it out) recently wrote about intelligence, detecting intelligence, and the SETI project.

In that piece he writes:

“The real proof of intelligence remains the Turing test.”

If you’ve never heard of the Turing Test, it is basically an “imitation game” in which a questioner (who does not know which is which) asks questions of both a human and a computer. If he can’t tell the difference, then the computer has passed the test and can be reasonably called “intelligent.” If you’re a science fiction reader, you’ve probably heard of this staple item!

My objection to this statement has a couple of parts:

First, saying that “the real” proof “remains” the Turing Test implies that the speaker is conversant with the rather intense debates that have surrounded the idea of the test since it was proposed in 1950, and that the test itself has withstood all of them. I didn’t get the feeling that this was the case. Not because I underestimate Mr. Halavais. Just the opposite! I find it hard to believe that someone who seems as reasonable as he would make such a statement without some qualification.

Second, social scientists (second only to my friends, the literary theorists) are exceedingly fond of appropriating scientific theories with little understanding of the science therein. As I wrote to Alex, it’s a fun game to use Godel or Heisenberg to make a point about literature or meaning, but when people start believing that it is anything other than a metaphor, then it gets ugly. Which, again, wasn’t necessarily what I saw Alex doing, but I wondered whether his use of the Turing Test as a criteria was reflective of having a social scientist’s understanding of the test itself.

Now, let me outline what I am not saying:

• I am not maintaining that the Turing Test measures nothing. Clearly it would be a difficult test to pass, and I might even agree that it is measuring a kind of intelligence, though it would be a very narrow kind indeed. Call it mimicry, call it a Turing Quotient…

• I am not arguing that scientists in the hard sciences don’t exhibit similar misunderstandings of theories outside of their areas of expertise. Alex brings up computer scientists talking about social networks and social computing without being familiar with the literature, and I can’t but agree with him. On the other hand, there seems to me to be a difference in degree and scale of the enterprises– I see it happen a heck of a lot more in the soft sciences than in the hard, and in what I think are much more damaging, integral ways, often forming the basis for thought and critique rather than being simply a reference therein.

• I’m not saying that reasonable people can’t disagree. If Alex is familiar with the outlines of the debate and still maintains that the Turing Test “remains” the “real proof” of intelligence… well, what can I say? I would hope that he’d qualify such statements, but that’s up to him. I’m probably as confident as he is in his assessment, so I guess I could just write “Turing Test Debunked” or something…

I wouldn’t care except that I think highly of Alex (through his writing) and there was just something about that note, when struck, that didn’t ring true.

Forty-five percent of Americans also believe that God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago.

That’s just plain scary. I should no longer be surprised…

Says the 20 Questions to a better personality quiz:

*Wackiness: 36/100
*Rationality: 20/100
*Constructiveness: 40/100
*Leadership: 66/100

You are an SEDL– Sober Emotional Destructive Leader. This makes you a dictator. You prefer to control situations, and lack of control makes you physically sick. You feel have responsibility for everyone’s welfare, and that you will be blamed when things go wrong. Things do go wrong, and you take it harder than you should.

You rely on the validation and support of others, but you have a secret distrust for people and distaste for their habits and weaknesses that make you keep your distance from them. This makes you very difficult to be with romantically. Still, a level-headed peacemaker can keep you balanced.

Despite your fierce temper and general hot-bloodedness, you have a soft spot for animals and a surprising passion for the arts. Sometimes you would almost rather live by your wits in the wilderness somewhere, if you could bring your books and your sketchbook.

You also have a strange, undeniable sexiness to you. You may go insane.

[via Phaedral's del.icio.us links]

1. No one in Bethel takes credit cards. Even the cashiers in restaurants that have those little Visa/Mastercard decals on the windows will look at you in disbelief if you present a card.
2. No ATM machines in Bethel will actually dispense cash, nor will they tell you that until you’ve spent ten minutes accessing your account (ten minutes spent waiting for the cashier to get off the phone because it shares the same line as the ATM).
3. Hotels purposefully position televisions and mirrors in such a way that you can watch the television in the mirror while sitting on the toilet.
4. Given the geometry of any room, the phone jacks for your modem will always be located as far away from any table, chair, or electrical outlet as physically possible.
5. If you do manage to reach the phone you’re likely to discover that the telephone system is picking up the overpowering FM religious station radio broadcast.