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There’s more on this sine wave speech effect (including further examples) here.

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This is the Question

Marry

Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with. — —better than a dog anyhow. — Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chit-chat. — These things good for one’s health. — Forced to visit & receive relations but terrible loss of time. —

W My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.

Marry — Marry — Marry Q.E.D.

Not Marry

No children, (no second life), no one to care for one in old age.— What is the use of working ‘in‘ without sympathy from near & dear friends—who are near & dear friends to the old, except relatives

Freedom to go where one liked — choice of Society & little of it. — Conversation of clever men at clubs — Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle. — to have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling — Loss of time. — cannot read in the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one’s bread. — (But then it is very bad for ones health to work too much)

Perhaps my wife wont like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool —

Following this scientific analysis, he went for marry.

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Because the idea of making a good video is new to so many of its users, YouTube offered a list of suggestions including:

• Have some reason for making a video other than ‘I own a camera’.
• Make sure the subject of the video can be seen, and
• Shoot the video while sober.

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Google are using search trends relating to flu to predict the spread of the virus.

We’ve discovered that there is a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening, and are therefore good indicators of flu activity. Our estimates, based on up-to-date aggregated Google search data, may indicate flu activity up to two weeks ahead of traditional flu surveillance systems.

It’s kind of reminiscent of Kevin Kelly’s ideas of the future of science, based on finding patterns in the huge amounts of data generated every day (rather than the traditional experiment):

In large bodies of information with many variables, algorithmic discovery of patterns will become necessary and common. These exist in specialized niches of knowledge (such particle smashing) but more general rules and general-purpose pattern engines will enable pattern-seeking tools to become part of all data treatment.

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I wouldn’t argue with that.

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A study has found that only 1 in 12,500,000 pharmacy spam emails on the Storm botnet actually leads to a purchase.

According to Wikipedia, over 100 billion spam emails are sent every day, of which approximately 13% are health related. This means that about only about 1,000 purchases are made as a result of these messages every day, translating into less than half a million purchases every year. Is this really enough to make the whole thing worthwhile?

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Well, I’m sure everybody’s heard the big news from last night by now: that’s right, CNN now has a fucking hologram. Cooooool. And perhaps a bit pointless.

Science: don’t take anything for granted, no matter how messy an experiment promises to be.

[From The Lancet of 12 February 1916.]

People in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.

The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence.

…

Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.

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