Submitted for your consideration, as day-before-the-holiday bemusement…
Ah, the last eight years! How did we ever get through them? A time filled with immortal observations like the following instant classic from Donald Rumsfeld:
“There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.”
But it seems that Rumsfeld may even have been wrong here, for defense contractor Northup-Grumman is patenting a system that claims to detect “unknown unknowns!”
As reported in New Scientist:
Grumman’s patent is every bit as baffling [as Rumsfeld’s observation]. Software fed a long chunk of text on a certain subject will somehow use mysteriously powerful “inferencing algorithms” to work on the facts and extract the unknown unknowns.
The patent is online here, and I can’t make much out of it either.
Anybody have any thoughts on this? It seems to me that by definition an “unknown unknown” is so unexpected as to be unpredictable or unidentifiable. Isn’t this program just identifying “unknown knowns,” that is, things that are knowable in principle but not yet identified?
Is this all smoke and mirrors to collect some big bucks as the Bush regime heads for the sunset? Are the folks who invented the stealth bomber onto something even more mysterious this time? Or is this in the same category of an attempt to prove the unprovable as the “proofs” for the existence of God?
I look for the wisdom of crowds to provide some enlightenment on this.
Or if nothing else, you’ve got something other than the latest cabinet picks to discuss over dinner tomorrow. Have a good holiday!
