Goodbye HAL, you were wonderful

Anyone who has watched the film 2001: A Space Odyssey will never forget the voice of HAL 9000, the computer that was the real star of that film. Douglas Rain, the Shakespearean actor who provided the voice, died on November 11 at the age of 90. That somber, flat, atonal, imperturbable voice, concerned and yet somehow menacing, is etched in the memory and I can recall it easily and immediately. For those who cannot, here is one key scene. (Keir Dullea’s performance is often overlooked. He deserves a lot of credit for his reaction shots to a disembodied voice.)

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Watching plants move

There is something fascinating about watching time-lapse films of plants that show them moving. Plants move so imperceptibly slowly that they seem inert so it is disconcerting to see them growing and moving towards water and sunlight as if they have a sense of awareness. Here is a case where an almost dead plant comes back to life after being given water.

(Via Rusty Blazenhoff)

White nationalist Jewish Republican loses in New Jersey

I wrote earlier about the strange phenomenon of extreme right wing parties in Germany that have been associated with xenophobia and anti-Semitism actively wooing the Jewish community and having some success, to the consternation of the major Jewish organizations in that country, surprised by the willingness to support a party that is overtly against their own community.
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The strange world of advertising

I normally do not watch commercial TV but for the past six weeks, I have been watching season 3 of The Good Place on NBC rather than waiting for about a year to watch all the episodes commercial-free on Netflix. As expected I have found the commercials to be annoying though I understand the business model that requires TV networks to use them to pay for the programming. I just wish the commercial breaks were not so frequent. Maybe fewer but longer breaks, say one at the beginning of a half-hour episode, one in the middle, and one at the end.
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World Chess Championship live!

The second game in the 12-game contest between champion Magnus Carlsen and challenger Fabiano Caruana is currently underway in London. The first game was a marathon seven-hour game with 115 moves that ended in a draw, with analysts feeling that Carlsen had a chance of winning while playing black but blundered late in the game.

You can watch the second game via a livestream below along with commentary by two analysts. The actual board is in the small box with the large board being used by the analysts who seem, along with Carlsen, to have been taken by surprise by the 10th move by Caruana who is playing black. There is also a live blog of the game

It has been a long time since I played chess seriously, or at all for that matter. I am not sure of the rules of these championships. Given the power of computers now, are the players during their breaks allowed to consult computers and friends or are they kept isolated from all contact with the outside world? I would expect the latter but just don’t know.

Ranked choice voting in Maine, reversing gerrymandering, and other positive results

A joke that is making the rounds is that for Democrats this has been more of a Hanukkah election than a Christmas one in that each new day seems to bring new gifts.

Maine had introduced ranked-choice voting, something that should be adopted everywhere. This is where people mark their ballots in order of preference for candidates. If no one wins 50% of the vote, then the second choices of the voters who voted for the last place finisher are taken into account, and if that does not produce a clear winner, then the third choices, and so on. There are various ways of doing this but all these methods enable people to vote for the people they like best and not fear that they are ‘wasting’ their vote by voting for someone who has little chance of winning and thus enabling the person they hate most to win.
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