He did a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) a couple of days ago. He was asked this about the attempt to land the booster on a floating platform:
Previously, you’ve stated that you estimate a 50% probability of success with the attempted landing on the automated spaceport drone ship tomorrow. Can you discuss the factors that were considered to make that estimation?
His response:
I pretty much made that up. I have no idea 🙂
And in a discussion of the possible dangers of artificial intelligence, he posted a link to this video:
The right to blaspheme (and otherwise give offense) is essential to the liberal order.
There is no duty to blaspheme, a society’s liberty is not proportional to the quantity of blasphemy it produces, and under many circumstances the choice to give offense (religious and otherwise) can be reasonably criticized as pointlessly antagonizing, needlessly cruel, or simply stupid.
The legitimacy and wisdom of such criticism is generally inversely proportional to the level of mortal danger that the blasphemer brings upon himself.
Point 3 is the key one in this case. He writes:
…if publishing something might get you slaughtered and you publish it anyway, by definition you are striking a blow for freedom,
“The Interview” generated roughly $15 million in online sales and rentals during its first four days of availability, Sony Pictures said on Sunday.
Sony did not say how much of that total represented $6 digital rentals versus $15 sales. The studio said there were about two million transactions over all.
Sony didn’t say, but the math is clear. Solve for X (number of digital rentals):
(6 * x) + (15 * (2,000,000 – x)) = 15,000,000
Not sure why the NY Times can’t do math, that would be about 1,666,667 rentals and 333,333 sales.
When Amazon first announced the Echo, it was invitation only, and Prime members got first shot. Of course I put my name in right away. So I was offered it for half price as a Prime member and it arrived almost a month ago.
I mainly wanted to check it out. For $99, it seemed interesting just for the technology. I decided to put it away and leave it as a Christmas present for the family.
My wife accused me of buying a present for myself (guilty) but I was pretty sure the kids would be into it. “Alexa, play Katy Perry”.
The speaker is quite good. It works as a single speaker for pretty much our entire living area. The voice recognition is excellent. If you are a Prime member, you have access to a ton of Prime music on top of whatever you have in your Amazon music library. It also integrates with iHeartRadio and can stream a ton of radio stations. It also does math and spelling and some other cloud based queries.
It also creates grocery and to do lists. It’s not hard to see where Amazon is going with this, given that they are getting into the grocery business. My daughters asked, “Alexa, play Fifth Harmony” (popular girl group, for those who don’t know them) and we got a playlist from Amazon Prime. But their most popular song wasn’t on the list. Tori said “Alexa, play Sledgehammer” (Tori loves to talk to Alexa). Echo replied, “playing an excerpt from Fifth Harmony Sledgehammer”. Thirty seconds later after the except ended, Echo said, “Sledgehammer is available for 99 cents. Buy now?”.
It’s a very cool device, but pretty obvious where they are going with this…
“They’re like, ‘Sir, there’s something in your bag.’ I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s this box.’ They said, ‘What’s in the box?’ I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does. So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’ I said, ‘gold.’ And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’ ‘The King of Sweden.’ ‘Why did he give this to you?’ ‘Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.’
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 