Tag: code

When Bronwyn told me a couple of days ago that she planned to write about Spirit Boxes, a part of many ghost hunters' arsenal, I was reminded of the fact that a few years ago I'd started a project to write a browser-based software version of a spirit box. The idea was to stream a handful of internet radio stations, switching between them rapidly to emulate the scanning of a spirit box. However, the project was never finished, and the code had been left in a semi-working state.

October's shaping up to be a great month for skepticism - not only do we have Halloween at the end of the month, with both spooky nonsense events and rival Christian nonsense events, but also on Tuesday the 13th it's International Skeptics Day, which is being celebrated this year by running the annual online Global Skeptics in the Pub event. And, if that's not enough, the Decult conference is happening on the weekend of the 24th and 25th of October. There are more details on both of these events below, including an awesome 2 for 1 deal for Decult tickets.

For those who have been around in skeptical circles for a while, you're probably aware not only of skeptic Brian Dunning and his Skeptoid podcast, but also of his conviction for wire fraud, in a case where he was accused of cookie stuffing. Wikipedia summarises it nicely on Brian Dunning's Wikipedia page:

Given that I had dusted off my copy of Stable Diffusion to generate an image of a 500m tall Jesus, I remembered that I don't think I've yet shared a project I did last year where I generated a set of QR Codes all pointing to the NZ Skeptics website. Using Stable Diffusion, Controlnet and some other software, I was able to produce some fun skeptically-themed images that all function as working QR codes - or at least, I managed to get my phone to successfully read each of them at least once. Your Mileage May Vary when trying to scan these yourself, but for what it's worth here they are.

Previously I wrote about the Therapeutic Products Act which was due to replace the Medicines Act 1981 and the Dietary Supplements Regulations 1985. The NZ Skeptics Society made a written and oral submission.

You'd have to have been living under a rock to not have noticed the rise of AI (artificial intelligence) technology recently. It seems that hardly a day goes by without some new announcement about it, or some controversy caused by it.

One of the types of AI that is progressing at speed at the moment, in places like Google's AI labs and at a company called OpenAI, is Natural Language Processing algorithms. These deep learning algorithms are pieces of software that are “trained” by getting them to process (read) lots and lots of human written text, and try to infer a set of rules for how to create new text like it's been reading. This source text is usually documents from the internet (using software that crawls through websites, linking to new sites and saving all the text it finds). Once the AI has been trained, when given a new piece of text, like a sentence, it will try to guess which word is most likely to come next. When it does this repeatedly, it can form entire sentences and paragraphs, guessing as it goes - and because its learning algorithm has figured out not only the rules of grammar but also the ways in which humans usually communicate (which words are relevant to a topic, etc), the most recent NLP algorithms do a really good job of coming across as human. They can also use this same technique to draw pictures - Dall-E 2 is amazing at creating unique images given a prompt like “a cat dressed as Napoleon holding cheese” - with the phrase “a propaganda poster depicting a cat dressed as french emperor napoleon holding a piece of cheese” giving this result:

Although Bronwyn's put together this week's newsletter, I couldn't help myself and wrote a small piece about the protesters' obsession with Nuremberg.

I'm sure most skeptics will have heard of QAnon by now - the anonymously named Q who posts online about shadowy organisations, and talks about how president Trump is fighting dark forces in the US. QAnon tends to use lots of code names and obscure references, including the oft used acronym used as the title of this section - it means Where We Go 1, We Go All. Here are a couple of examples of QAnon messages:

The Pharmacy Council has (finally) published their new Code of Ethics 2018.

The Pharmacy Council recently ran a consultation about a new proposed Code of Ethics, after they tried to weaken their code a couple of years ago to remove the requirement that pharmacists could only sell alternative medicines where there was evidence that they work.

In early October the NZ Skeptics submitted a response to the Pharmacy Council's consultation on a proposed change to their Code of Ethics. It had recently been pointed out to the Pharmacy Council (by the Society for Science Based Healthcare) that many pharmacies sell unproven health products, in breach of their current Code of Ethics. The Pharmacy Council's proposed solution is to alter their code to remove the part of the clause that is being breached.

A Pakeha student whose necklace was forcibly removed by a teacher -- even though Maori students are allowed to wear their taonga (treasures) -- has quit school over the incident. Megan Church complained to the Human Rights Commission about the Marlborough Girls College dress code.

This Bravo Award-winning item originally appeared as the editorial in the March 23 issue of the New Zealand Medical Journal

The Bible (or, more precisely, the Torah) is a heavenly word-find puzzle, according to Israeli mathematicians.

When I received through the mail a coloured brochure from Time/Life advertising a series of videos and cassettes titled "Growing Younger", I was surprised to see that I could learn from Time/Life via their series how to develop an "ageless body". In addition I could learn to "help reverse ageing" and that the series could "open the door to a life free from the effects of aging" (sic).