TM in the Real World

My fellow computer science nerds-- look:

A functioning Turing machine! OK, it doesn't have an indefinitely extensible tape, but you get the idea.

Software Composes Original Music

From the article:

Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because he’d [David Cope] managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?

There are two excerpts from pieces the software composed a short way down the article

Helpdesk to the World

I love The Oatmeal, but this comic makes me want to both laugh and cry:

That's what I'd click.

Click it for biggers.

Also, it's from Lore Sjöberg's comic strip, Bad Gods.