1. For a robot, the hard thing about cooking won't be learning the recipes, but grasping the tools.

"We believe that the grasp type is an essential component for fine grain manipulation action analysis. In future work we will (1) further extend the list of grasping types to have a finer categorization; (2) investigate the possibility of using the grasp type as an additional feature for action recognition; (3) automatically segment a long demonstration video into action clips based on the change of grasp type."

+ Our bodies are amazing. Robots can crush us in chess, but have a hard time doing things we find effortless, like manipulating a spoon.

2. Fine-grained analytics have unintended creative consequences everywhere they touch, as in, say, animated films.

"Upon first seeing it, I guessed (correctly) that exact gag would be repeated 2-3 more times in the movie, depending on how well the test audiences had enjoyed it. They would be spaced out for maximum effect, at 20 minute intervals.  And that it would be seized upon by the marketing department, either in the trailers themselves, the TV ads, or a twitter campaign (it was, as you can tell by the above video). I even guessed that it was inserted fairly late in production (which, best I can tell from what my Disney friends have said, is also true). I would not be surprised if it was one of many such moments that were tested out... I don’t have a good word to describe this phenomenon, so I’m going to term it 'hashgags.' This is a joke in an animated movie, usually input at the behest of marketing forces, that is used to sell the movie. It’s usually inserted late into production and test screened to within an inch of its life.  Some are used repeatedly, some are one-offs that do well with trailers. And it is crippling the entire industry."

3. Aphex Twin's Richard D. James hired a coder to create evolutionary music-making software.

"I’ve actually recently hired a Chinese programmer to make a music software for me. It’s taking the concept of mutation into music software. You give the program some sounds you made and then it gives you six variations of it and then you choose the one you like most and then it makes another six and it kind of keeps trying to choosing the variations by itself. It’s a bit like that, but more advanced, but basically it starts with a sound, analyzes it, then does different versions of variations. It randomizes, it compares all of them to the original and then it picks the best one. It sounds totally awesome, but it needs to be tweaked a little bit. I will continue with this. I have a whole book full of ideas for software and instruments."

4. A transcription of all the places mentioned in 2000 hours of television, alphabetized.

"For nine months, I compulsively recorded the places I'd heard about—for every one of the thirty shows I'd been watching. Concrete locations, thermal points, points in time, things described as subjects gestured to them in space, answers to the question Where?, aspirations, vectors, states. Relentlessly mining lines from shows about relentless extraction. With no intention of refinement."

+ The companion book with foreword.

5. The Alaskan town where everyone lives in the same apartment building.

"Whittier, Alaska, is a town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in a 14-story former Army barracks built in 1956. The building, called Begich Towers, holds a police station, a health clinic, a church, and a laundromat. Its hallways resemble those of a school or a detention center. One can often find residents shuffling around in slippers and pajamas. The only way to get to Whittier by land is to drive through a two-and-a-half-mile, one-lane railroad tunnel that shuts down at night."

cute. (From acute.) Colloq., clever, shrewd. US colloq. attractive, appealing, as a child.

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Answers to the Question Where