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[ by Charles Cameron — this is / was all written on 29th (“today”), but has been tidied up before posting late today, really a rich day! ]
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Today has been a rich day for me for language, and I’d like to share some of what I’ve found. I’ll use a series of my own tweets for this purpose, since the tweets include both the particular phrases or sentences that caught my eye, and links and images I’d otherwise have to fish for, giving you an idea of the articles themselves in which I found the items of interest..

This one’s pretty fabulous, with plants living inside animals — I suppose we are fauna with flora inside us too, though, but the coral instance really hit home:

"Her professor explained that corals, which are tiny animals, had even tinier plants living inside their cells" https://t.co/4wLox4ARJ6
Ah, the this inside that of it!! Bravo or brava as the case may be..

— hipbonegamer (@hipbonegamer) July 29, 2018

That was the first one that really delighted me, this one cinched (clenched?) the deal:

The stately bird ignores Crowe, reshuffles her storm-cloud-gray wings, and snakes her head gracefully to the ground, looking for something tasty to eat. https://t.co/y8H2Fl2pRe a bird "snakes" its neck, eh?

— hipbonegamer (@hipbonegamer) July 29, 2018

The bird snaking (its neck), which caught my eye as a companion to the coral (animal) planting (inside its cells), I noted in the tweet, making these two taken together a DoubleTweet. What I didn’t mention was the positively Homeric echo in “reshuffles her storm-cloud-gray wings”..

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which leads me inevitably to my other Homeric finds today, with both the Odyssey:

"Odyssey had long since stripped the boat of documents and equipment that could provide clues to the identity or location of the Black Swan. " https://t.co/0Z3CBAGZJK Odyssey! Black Swan !!

— hipbonegamer (@hipbonegamer) July 29, 2018

and Zeus..

Even Zeus, the company’s eight-ton, two-million-dollar remote-controlled deep-sea robot, which is used for lifting treasure from the ocean floor, had been partly dismantled. https://t.co/0Z3CBAGZJK Zeus! aboard the Odyssey!! a robot god!!! dismantled!!!! and treasure, gold, loot

— hipbonegamer (@hipbonegamer) July 29, 2018

And that’s enough for now!

[ by Charles Cameron — better eat a muffin than a dog, stop at a stop sign than blow through it at 45, oh well ]
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It’s cute, sorta, that AIs can’t easily distinguish dogs from muffins:

But STOP!

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What’s not so funny is that the AI in many autonomous vehicles misreads a treated STOP sign —

— as a sign for a 45 mph speed limit. As Ivan Evtimov and colleagues indicate in Robust Physical-World Attacks on Machine Learning Models, “Physically realizing such an attack for road signs can raise concern in human observers.”

I’ll say.

Grab the wheel, conscious entity!

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Readings:

Becoming Human: AI, Why are Marketers All Talking about AI Now?

Wired, Simple Pictures that State-of-the-Art AI Still Can’t Recognize

Car & Driver, Researchers Find a Malicious Way to Meddle with Autonomous Cars

Arxiv, Robust Physical-World Attacks on Machine Learning Models

[ by Charles Cameron — attempting to keep the self-eating serpents in one pen, so they don’t get tangled in your hair and eyes ]
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From Aneurism, a brilliant long-form essay by neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, from his book Do No Harm, and presented in Slightly More Than 100 Exceptional Works of Journalism:

Are the thoughts that I am thinking as I look at this solid lump of fatty protein covered in blood vessels really made out of the same stuff? And the answer always comes back–they are–and the thought itself is too crazy, too incomprehensible, and I get on with the operation.

From Political Tracts of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley via PR Beckman:

The purpose of the historian, to Coleridge, is the same as that of the poet : to convert a series of events, which constitute the straight-line of real or imagined history, into a whole, so that the series shall assume to our understanding “a circular motion — the snake with its tail in its mouth.”

Here’s one more:

Apparently, Donald Trump Jr’s version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma involves defecting from yourself.

— Emma Ashford (@EmmaMAshford) July 11, 2017

And this I can’t resist — there’s hope for humankind!

Our D.C. office building got a security robot. It drowned itself.

We were promised flying cars, instead we got suicidal robots. pic.twitter.com/rGLTAWZMjn

— Bilal Farooqui (@bilalfarooqui) July 17, 2017

There will no doubt be others, which I’ll drop into the comment section. So you don’t need to be troubled by a new post every time I see one.

[ by Charles Cameron — no great fan of robotics, but with fond memories of Afghanistan ]
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Source:

WaPo, U.S. denies visas for Afghanistan’s all-girl robotics team

From that article:

To participate, the girls from the city of Herat in western Afghanistan needed permission to travel to the United States. So, after they convinced their parents to let them go, they made the 500-mile journey to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul to apply for their visas. They did this twice, even though that location was targeted by a deadly truck bomb.

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U.S. denies visas..

So sad! — as one Donald J Trump has once or twice tweeted.

[ by Charles Cameron — John Robb updates Sun Tzu ]
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Two paras from John‘s post:

Autonomous robots and software bots (collectively “bots”) deeply penetrate the opponent’s territory both physically (territory) and logically (their computer systems). Most would be hidden and remain dormant until activation. Some would actively or passively map opponent networks, analyze them for vulnerabilities, and take advantage of opportunities for stealthy exploitation.

When activated, these forward bots conduct a coordinated attack from inside the opponent’s territory and systems. Damaging, degrading, or taking control of computer systems and physical infrastructure. Advanced robots would emerge from stealth to kinetically engage with opponent forces or physically seize points (airports, ports, etc.) to enable the rapid entry of conventional forces.

Oh, and for additional points, it’s “a very zen concept”!!