Looking For The Heart

Conditions: Still Bailing.

One More Thing To The List

At the moment there’s still a whole bunch of things humans can do that computers cannot. Write a poem, fall in love, twerk. However word has come out that one thing specifically designed to be human-only has been cracked by the computers.

Vicarious, a California-based artificial intelligence startup, claims to have written software that can successfully interpret and reproduce the text inside the CAPTCHA image with 90% accuracy.

If it's true, that's better than what a lot of people can do with those skewed letters.

CAPTCHA--the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart--was designed to keep hackers from flooding Web sites with automated responses. By reading and then typing a distorted image of text designed to confuse OCR software, you prove that you're a real human being.

Vicarious claims a 95-percent success rate on reading and decoding individual letters in a CAPTCHA, and a 90-percent success rate on the full, two-word code.

- pcworld.com

At the moment the company is all up in its righteous indignation, with no plans to release their software that would inevitably enable hackers to get hold of it. But seriously, we all know, eventually they will. And so inevitably computers are going to be able to read scribbled stuff we may write down. Which means we’re going to have to come up with a different way to communicate with each other when the computers take over. Thanks, science.



Film Review: Thor – The Dark World

Now here is a movie that just really wants to have fun. Even as it keeps dragging itself back to the plot time and again, and reluctantly spends time with the villain as he goes through the motions (hates everything, wants to destroy universe, blah blah blah), you can see how much it just wants to escape back to the cool characters, and just hang out with them and have fun. And so they go back to Loki yet again, and spring him out of jail to energise the middle act, which works well – albeit to the detriment of the actual bad guy, ...Something the ...unhappy, who wants a mist weapon thing that will give him the power to destroy the universe.

Or something like that. The movie clearly isn’t really interested in it, it’s far more interested in Thor meeting up with Jane and taking her home to meet his folks, and dragging Loki back into the limelight again. It’s hard to grudge the film for that when it all just works so damn well. Chris Hemsworth completely owns his role as Thor, and is totally believable in the role. Likewise Hiddleston as Loki, and the two have some great scenes together. Anthony Hopkins is back as Odin, and thankfully this time he’s fully energised as the old king.

The Marvel movies may have been clever in how they’ve constructed this shared universe. But the problem now is when a film like this happens, you can’t help but wonder at various points where the other guys are. I mean, the universe is about to be destroyed, London is getting messed up, and get no appearance by Shield, or even Stark? There’s a throwaway line about Shield not returning their messages. That really doesn’t make any sense. I wonder if the inevitable result of creating a large shared universe of Marvel movies has resulted in a smaller sandbox for each movie to operate in. It definitely is an issue to be distracted by while trying to watch one of these things as an independent movie.

This isn’t a deep film, or a complicated one – which is a common issue with a lot of these superhero movies. It does a solid job of being fun and entertaining, but you can’t help but wonder if these films are capable of delivering more than that. Oh and stay for the post-credits stinger. I don’t understand why it wasn’t added to the movie itself given the fact that it is the proper end to the film. Three sparkly costumes out of five.



- Peace out