You might know that Eric Sylvester is a guest writer here and a great friend of this blog. I’m also happy to say he and I have developed a real friendship over the past year. He’s the top commenter on this blog by the numbers, and he’s also, apparently, a ukelele virtuoso?
Eric, even though good taste and concern for my reputation preclude me from ever retweeting you, I support your pursuit of all things uke. Stop hiding it. You let that light shine. You let it shine.
My wife and I saw a trailer for Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar recently, and boy, does it look good. As we watched, my wife leaned over and told me about Eastwood’s recent GQ musings about human rights in general and gay marriage in particular:
“I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21, because he promised to get us out of the Korean War,” Eastwood tells the magazine. “And over the years, I realized there was a Republican philosophy that I liked. And then they lost it. And libertarians had more of it. Because what I really believe is, let’s spend a little more time leaving everybody alone.”
Make a “get off my lawn” joke if you want, but Eastwood’s right about what the modern GOP becomes when put in the hands of Michele Bachmann and other dominionists in libertarian clothing. Americans of any or no party can certainly be of good will while holding some disparate political beliefs in tension, but we need to be honest about it. There’s certainly no good will coming from quarters that want to curtail gay rights.
When I was looking for our friend Chad Hogg’s Lehigh University profile, I discovered that in addition to the fancy schmancy black Google bar, the search pages now have a red text motif and look streamlined. They even have new icons. Observe:
I’ve decided to call this Google Wolfpac. Yes, Mom, I’m 31 years old and reasonably well-educated, but this is where my mind goes:
Someone hit the Big Kev theme.
Chad Hogg, you honor me!
Friends, if you haven’t spent some time on Chad’s excellent blog (excellently named, by me, The Blogg), you simply must.
More about Chad, in his own words:
I am currently a research assistant and doctoral candidate at Lehigh University, working under Prof. Hector Munoz-Avila. I was a visiting faculty member at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania for the 2010-2011 academic year. Prior to coming to Lehigh I earned my Bachelor’s degree at Ursinus College. I maintain a more personal web presence at http://chadhogg.name/~chad/. [That is to say, The Blogg].
The topic of my dissertation research is learning knowledge artifacts for HTN planning (decomposition methods) from annotated tasks and plan traces. Files and other information on this work can be found at the HTN-Maker project webpage. See below for related publications and other resources. My General Exam document would be a good place to start.
In addition to this primary topic, I am involved in a number of other projects related to planning, case-based reasoning, reinforcement learning, and computer games as part of the Intelligent Decision Systems and Technologies (InSyTe) Lab at Lehigh. I am also interested in pursuing other broad topics in artificial intelligence, including automated planning systems; classification, clustering, and other machine learning techniques; collaborative filtering systems, data mining, and web search; and heuristic music composition.
The humble Mr. Hogg refrains from mentioning that he plays the sickest bass this side of Flea and/or Les Claypool, but let me assure you that he does. Especially exciting to me is the recent news that Chad will be returning to our mutual alma mater, Ursinus College, as visiting professor this fall. Good job, Chad! And thank you for being the most faithful reader and commenter on the various iterations of this blog!
And by computing, of course, I really meaning “everything in the world.”
Sinéad O’Connor has a moving piece up at The Huffington Post. Please read it.
UPDATE: I just said this below in the comments but it really does bear saying here: I should say that I’m one of these typically low-church protestant types, but that I find much to love in the contemplative traditions of the Catholic Church and other Christian communities. I hope my posting of this piece doesn’t come across as anti-Catholic by any stretch. I was just very moved by it, and impressed with its cogency. A far cry, indeed, from what was done on SNL all those years ago.
Chris Cocca 