Feb 092011
- TV pilot season continues to offer intriguing possibilities for next fall. The CW has ordered a pilot of L. J. Smith’s (author of The Vampire Diaries) series of books about witches, The Secret Circle. Much of the current team from the television version of The Vampire Diaries are already on board the new project.
- Julia Roberts is now currently attached to play The Evil Queen in one of three separate film versions of Snow White targetted to be released in 2012 and 2013.
- The Atlantic has a good article by a guy who won The Most Human Human award in last year’s contest for the Loebner Prize in which chat-bots are put up against the Turing Test. I still secretly hoped that it would be revealed at the end of the article that it had been written by an AI.
- Some mostly good news from academia. A recent study shows that many academic disciplines have reached male/female parity in the awarding of advanced degrees. Math-based sciences are, however, still lagging. My guess is that the old-school sexism exemplified by a few my professors at Stanford still hasn’t washed out of the system. (We had one professor in my Ph.D. program in the 80′s who would come to the weekly coloquia, select a female Master’s student to sit next to and plop his hand on her thigh. We worked up through the Engineering School’s academic disciplinary procedures for years to get him to stop it.) Anyone want me to explore “Math and the Occult” in some blog entries?
[...] also fits into the strange category observed last year with Red Riding Hood and Scott’s Jugglinks concerning the “deluge” of Snow White-driven flicks (including this summer’s Snow [...]