Our sweet old beagle passed away today. It seems like it was just yesterday that we took her in. Back then—in late 2006—she was just another foster. My wife and I decided that, rather than fostering lively animals and finding homes for them, we’d pick out the most pathetic dog we could find at the […]
Author Archives: Waldo Jaquith
$500 speech transcription bounty claimed.
It took just 27 hours for the $500 speech transcription bounty to be claimed. Aaron Williamson produced youtube-transcription, a Python-based pair of scripts that upload video to YouTube and download the resulting machine-generated transcripts of speech. It took me longer to find the time to test it out than it did for Aaron to write […]
$500 bounty for a speech transcription program.
The world needs an API to automatically generate transcript captions for videos. I am offering a $500 bounty for a program that does this via YouTube’s built-in machine transcription functionality. It should work in approximately this manner: Accepts a manifest that lists one or more video URLs and other metadata fields. The manifest may be […]
Why fresh-squeezed orange juice turns bitter.
Several times recently I have squeezed a large number of oranges, enjoyed some of the delicious fresh-squeezed juice, and then been disappointed by the rest the next day. It tastes bitter, and becomes worse rapidly. This turns out to be the result of naturally occurring limonoate A-ring lactone (aka "LARL," a tasteless substance) breaking down […]
Everything you want to know about gun violence in the United States.
My friend Jonathan Stray put together an entirely fact-based FAQ on American gun violence for The Atlantic. Everybody can learn something from this. →
That “fresh squeezed” orange juice is anything but.
I’m more interested in orange juice than is probably healthy for somebody who doesn’t work in the industry and, as such, I’m excited to see Bloomberg Businessweek shining a spotlight on the horseshit that is "fresh squeezed," "not from concentrate," and "all-natural." These are all lies. It was squeezed months ago. It was concentrated to […]
Senator Henry Marsh’s big day.
Today was a big day for Senator Henry Marsh. The legislator of twenty years took a rare day off during the Virginia Senate’s 46-day session, to attend President Barack Obama’s second-term inauguration in Washington D.C. For the 79-year-old black civil rights lawyer, attending a black president’s inauguration on Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday is perhaps […]
Muller concludes that humans are behind climate change.
Physicist Richard A. Muller was in the news last year after his Koch-funded study of global climate change concluded that it’s real, surely to the Koch brothers’ dismay. Now he’s penned an op-ed for the New York Times in which he says that his ongoing research has led him to the same conclusion as 99.9% […]
3-D printers are a nightmare for the NRA.
The NRA’s major constituency isn’t their individual members, but gun manufacturers. We are entering the era of 3-D printers (I have several friends who own them), and it’s entirely possible to print a gun. Including counterfeit guns. The stock, the barrel, the receiver—everything. Adam Penenberg explains how this is liable to to have the NRA […]
Turn-of-phrase inflation.
The etymology of “the whole nine yards” is a total mystery. Anybody who tells you that they know its origin is either lying or unknowingly parroting an urban legend. The number of feet of fabric required to make a suit? Number of cubic yards of soil removed to dig a grave? Number of cubic yards […]