Tag Archives: Google

Google Assistant’s confusing per-device commands

Assistant is so stupid when it comes to which commands are supported on which devices. I mean, how how is a normal person supposed to remember that you can ask your phone, your watch, or the Google Home "Will I need an umbrella today?", but you can't ask your watch "What is the traffic like to work?" and the only device you can ask "What movies are showing this weekend?" is your phone?

Typical Google.

#google #googleassistant #assistant

Originally posted on Google+ · August 14, 2017

Things that cost more than space exploration

A few examples from the below site:

• Money that has 'gone missing' from the US State Department
• Daylight Savings Time
• Tea
• Advertisements for prescription drugs

Things That Cost More Than Space Exploration
As a reference for people who think that space exploration costs too much, here’s a list of things…

Originally posted on Google+ · September 27, 2014

Machine image recognition is nearly as good as humans

But the trend is clear. “It is clear that humans will soon outperform state-of-the-art image classification models only by use of significant effort, expertise, and time,” say Russakovsky and co.

What I find really great about this is that libraries are already available for deep belief networks for us mere mortal programmers.

The Revolutionary Technique That Quietly Changed Machine Vision Forever | MIT Technology Review
Machines are now almost as good as humans at object recognition, and the turning point occurred in 2012, say computer scientists.

Originally posted on Google+ · September 10, 2014

Watching a rock exfoliate in Twain Harte

Originally posted on Google+ · September 10, 2014

Animated graph of income vs. life expectancy since 1800

Neat animated graph of income vs life expectancy for a bunch of countries since 1800.

Click the Play button near the lower left corner to animate it.

http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly=2003;lb=f;il=t;fs=11;al=30;stl=t;st=t;nsl=t;se=t$wst;tts=C$ts;sp=5.59290322580644;ti=2012$zpv;v=0$inc_x;mmid=XCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj1jiMAkmq1iMg;by=ind$inc_y;mmid=YCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj2tPLxKvvnNPA;by=ind$inc_s;uniValue=8.21;iid=phAwcNAVuyj0XOoBL_n5tAQ;by=ind$inc_c;uniValue=255;gid=CATID0;by=grp$map_x;scale=log;dataMin=283;dataMax=110808$map_y;scale=lin;dataMin=18;dataMax=87$map_s;sma=49;smi=2.65$cd;bd=0$inds=;example=75

Originally posted on Google+ · September 6, 2014

SyFy is adapting Childhood’s End as a mini-series

Clarke book, Childhood's End.  

I don't really have any confidence in SyFy to do the book justice, but here's hoping…

Originally posted on Google+ · September 3, 2014

Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the situation in Ukraine

I was just reading this retrospective look at how Hitler invaded Poland and was reminded of the similarities between that invasion and the current situation in Ukraine.  

75 years ago, Hitler invaded Poland. Here’s how it happened.
Looking back at Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, which marked the start of World War II.

Originally posted on Google+ · September 1, 2014

Was the attack on Pearl Harbor brilliant or a junk plan?

Was the attack on Pearl Harbor brilliantly planned and executed or was it successful in only the loosest sense of the word?

Not only was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor far from brilliant, it also narrowly avoided disaster.

This article makes the case that it was a junk plan and barely worked.

Pearl Harbor
Facts, information and articles about the attack on Pearl Harbor, the first battle of World War II Pearl Harbor Facts Dates December 7, 1941 Location Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Generals/Commanders United States: Husband Kimmel and Walter Short Japanese: Chuichi Nagumo and Isoroku Yamamoto Soldiers Engaged United States: Japanese: Outcome Japanese Victory Casualties United States: 3,700 Japanese: […]

Originally posted on Google+ · August 27, 2014

Population of the United States is moving Southwest

Population of the United States is moving Southwest. Since 1900 in particular it has really drifted South.

Originally posted on Google+ · August 26, 2014

Police body cameras should record continuously

In today's world a camera that only records 640×480 and can only preserve 30 seconds of video and costs $400 seems to be setting a pretty low bar.

I don't know how long your average police person's shift is, but say it's 8 hours, you could record video at 2 mbit/s and store a complete stream of that whole 8 hours in 60 gigabytes of flash storage and then you wouldn't be reliant on a cop to press the "hey save what just happened" button on the camera.

What if the officer was incapacitated and couldn't press the button?  What if the officer is behaving badly?  Why in the world would they press the button?

You could even have a button for the officer to press to mark sections of the video so you didn't have to peruse hours and hours of video to find interesting parts.

Now, I'm not saying it would be easy to create such a camera.  You'd have to have sufficient battery capacity and you'd have to think about flash durability, but those are not insurmountable obstacles.

Could This Camera Prevent Police Brutality?
Taser–the world’s favorite non-lethal weapons manufacturer–says its new surveillance device can protect both cops and citizens.

Originally posted on Google+ · August 26, 2014