Zombie

thanks to William Jones of Llanfihangel Tre'r Beirdd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jones_%28mathematician%29

very sorry for your loss, Val. It's strange how sometimes we come to understand our feelings for people only after they're gone

"We cant help but wonder why we're here and they are gone." The cold randomness of life. Maybe the most difficult thing to come to terms with.

I'm guessing this guy has satisfactory statistics...

She gets executed yet the boyfriend, who actually murdered the guy, merely goes to prison and may get out on parole in 8 years. Strange justice.

Hey, I love polemics. It's a Point of View. That's the whole point What this kind of stuff does is get you thinking, responding and reacting. And that's all good I don't see merit in castigating someone for being blunt about expressing views based on their own personal life experience, especially as the interweb has democratised the ability to do that ourselves and to find our own audiences. In fact many of his points make sense to me. For example the need to be well and widely read if you strive to be an excellent writer. Show me any excellent musician who has not spent a good chunk of their life closely studying and learning from the work of many other excellent musicians. You gotta put in the work. You can learn technique but you cannot learn creativity - because that comes from inside. What you can learn is how to express creativity in a way that appeals to audiences other than yourself, using techniques that can be taught. Let's face it, in terms of artistic ability we are not all created equal. Sad but true. The only point I really take issue with is you have to start as a teenager to build yourself the "neural architecture" - surely a winning entry for Pseuds Corner Wrong too - we know that the brain continues to develop throughout life according to how we use it. It's never too late to grow ourselves some new brain connections

the BBC link article is focused on Britain. We have a real problem in Britain where so many schools are allowed to operate outside government control in terms of what students are taught and how they're taught - that's left to the individual schools to decide and will reflect things like parents' wishes - which means they are not required to give sex education, including sexual health such as HIV prevention. Such schools will include religious schools, for example. It's tragic. Actually, I'd say it's criminal

Good taste, Drak An important tradition of British comedy is subversion, which doesn't often travel well in foreign markets. Yes, Peep Show is brill!

colour? Who cares....?

nope definitely powder blue and gold

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-31659395

Agreed.

English is such an irregular language it's surprising its dominance is so great (heheh, including those pesky apostrophes ). Then, assuming grammatical correctness has been learned, there's the problem of vernacular - because it's not enough to be able to write correct English, you have to understand when to use idiom, and when to be ungrammatical. "Whom" is a good example because the reality is that in 2015 it's become virtually obsolescent. Certainly in the "mother country" where using it means you're likely (oooops, I mean "one is likely" ) to be regarded as a pedantic old fart shuffling around in tartan carpet slippers and sipping Horlicks from a commemorative Coronation mug

Isn't that bundled in as standard with the ownership deal?

props to the penguin!

don't see why a queer book club should be any different to any other book club I think it would last as long as the members want it to, just like any other club really

thanks again, Drak - really helpful

What Mike said, very helpful Drak Just a couple of queries Video player - I've always used VLC and found it to be pretty stable and seems to play most formats Free anti-virus - I've had Avast for some time and it seems pretty effective as real-time protection. I've also got MalwareBytes which you have to update and run manually - but then you can't have two real time AVs running together anyway LibreOffice - is this better than OpenOffice which I've always used? Thanks again for the blog

I can see the controversy of designer babies vs. removing preventable genetic diseases to prevent suffering and death becoming a wider-reaching hot button subject since this decision has been reached As you rightly say, it's only to correct defective mitochondrial DNA and not to allow "designer babies". That whole thing was predicted by Aldous Huxley 80 years ago in his novel Brave New World and, certainly in the UK, it's had a lasting impact. Which is probably why human fertility medicine is so strictly controlled in the UK by a government regulator, and that will include the new technique. In fact the USA pioneered 3 person IVF back in the 1990s Then Dubya banned it Seems a no-brainer to me provided it's properly regulated and the science proves it's safe. If we have the science and skills to prevent children suffering from a terrible genetic disease then why wouldn't we want to do that? I just don't understand bible bashers wanting to stop us using human skills to prevent children suffering - why would their God have bothered giving us those skills? And I don't buy the hysteria about children being "psychologically damaged". I believe around 30 children were born using the US technique and they seem to be living "normal lives".

So the android Ava was merely a robotic sex doll.

yeah, but that's the sex thing again. How can a machine have gender?

it's gonna be a while before machines are having sex - so, that kinda kicks sexuality into touch. In the meantime, that just leaves the question of gender assignment. Which is presumably more than just sticking a pair of "tits" or "bits" on the thing .

this British movie, released tomorrow in the UK, deals with A.I. and the Turing Test. Here's the IMDB synopsis Caleb, a 24 year old coder at the world's largest internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at a private mountain retreat belonging to Nathan, the reclusive CEO of the company. But when Caleb arrives at the remote location he finds that he will have to participate in a strange and fascinating experiment in which he must interact with the world's first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful robot girl. So, what exactly makes a computer / A.I. female? Or male? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/

ha! that would be telling

shan't lose sleep over a guy happy to poison his customers - mainly children - with toxic transfats so he could make more bucks