You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August, 2007.
TechCrunch just posted a story about a hidden feature of Google Earth: a flight simulator. To get there on a PC, just hit Ctrl-Alt-A and on a Mac, it’s Command-Option-A (capital A). You can choose between flying an F16 or an SR22 prop plane. The F16 is fast but the controls are a little pickier, while the SR22 is slow and more stable.
Some key commands to get you going (if you’re impatient, like me):
- left/right-arrow — ailerons left and right (this makes you roll if you’re unfamiliar with aircraft terms)
- up/down arrow — elevator up/down (this makes you go up or down)
- shift + left/right arrow — rudder left or right (this turns you right/left)
- page up/page down — increase or reduce thrust
Game play is a bit sucky, but as TechCrunch points out, the nifty feature here is the fact that you are flying over real images. The downside, of course, is that those images aren’t 3-D. In the screenshot below, I am flying up Broadway in Manhattan approaching Central Park.
Whenever we make up our bed and put all the decorative pillows on it, Willow loves it. After a night of visitors, we came into our bedroom to find Willow passed out beneath a minor avalanche.
This picture was taken with my new cell phone on the highest quality level (1600×1200). The image was too large to send to myself via email so I bought a 1 GB micro SD card off of newegg for about $12. It’s a great way to get around spending extra on picture/video messaging. It won’t be saving me anything, though, since my phone plan includes more free messages than I’m likely to ever use.
Clive Thompson has an interesting article in Wired a short while back that explains why we can all rest easy: there are geeks like Bill Gates in the world who can have compassion on more than eight people at once.
Phew. I can finally get some sleep. I was seriously worrying what’s going to happen when oil supplies start to run out given that the entire world economy depends on it. No more. Oh and global warming? Fahgetaboutit! A geek will save the day because he can think in terms of mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta, yotta — because .. wait for it .. his job demands it. Just to reassure us that he hasn’t just emerged from Gates’ backside, Clive does throw in an occasional aside as to how Gates is a drooling social bafoon — but don’t be fooled. This piece is little more than worshipping at the Gates throne.
A friend of mine sent me an odd story about how Italian police officers are now spending their time: stopping the heinous crime of washing your car windows at a stoplight. At first, I thought, well that’s a bugger-all odd thing to be concerned about (I always think to myself in incorrect, bastardized British slang). Then it became clear:
“Foreigners are also blamed for much of the street crime in a relatively safe country. Most people wielding sponges on street corners are Romanian gypsies, often young women and children.”
And there we have it. The gypsies. For as long as there have been gypsies, the good people of Europe have shunned them. And now they have found one more way of making their lives that much harder. Anyone caught committing this godless act (window-washing) is subject to confiscation of the tools of the trade (sponge, rag, dirty water), fines, and imprisonment. The magnificent mayor of Rome justified these draconian regulations:
“People must realize that behind the window-washers there is exploitation of minors, which is a crime. Like prostitution this is a racket that must be smashed.”
I can just see him banging his fist down on a podium as he says that last bit. So now window washing is on the same level as prostitution, which is exactly what these gypsies might have to resort to if they want to eat.
I am going to say this even though it is not politically correct. Abandon New Orleans. Help the people there move out and establish new digs. It has long been known that New Orleans is sinking. As sediment is poured into the ocean from the Mississippi River, the Earth’s crust (1) bends under the weight. Currently this is resulting in the city sinking at the rate of 1-8 mm per year. So when the next Katrina comes, and everyone agrees that it will, all of this effort and money will have been for naught. Plus more people and pets will probably die.
So why are we down there rebuilding on rotten ground? It seems like there is almost some religious zeal driving people to reestablish this Mecca of jazz, Mardi Gras and debauchery. Is that too harsh or prudish? Seriously, is it just so that we can have a great party town? The arguments I have seen tout the Army Corps of Engineers new plan to protect the city against future disasters. Geologists say this is futile. There is nothing we can do when the whole crust is bending beneath the weight of the sediment dumped by the fourth longest river in the world.
Now granted, there is a lot of historical importance to New Orleans. Preserving that is not a complete waste of time. It doesn’t mean people should be building their homes there. Let me just conclude with these thoughts from Geology.com:
- Hurricanes will repeatedly impact New Orleans
- Sea level is rising and reduces the effectiveness of any levee system over time
- The city is subsiding and this also reduces levee effectiveness
- The current levee system is vulnerable to terrorist attack at many points
Discovery News: “Two Years Later, New Orleans Still Sinking”
(1) Actually it is the entire lithosphere that is bending which includes the crust, the Moho, and the upper mantle.
The 9th annual Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics is calling for papers. The conference will be held in Haifa, Israel from February 17-23, 2008. Two of the keynote speakers were professors of mine last semester. Alon Lavie works on machine translation (including for low-resource languages) and machine translation evaluation. Kemal Oflazer was a visiting professor here at CMU last semester and advised me for a lab project on Old English morphology. He’s one of the leading proponents of finite state technology for morphological analysis and has done a lot of work with Turkish, which has a very rich morphology.
Submission Deadline: October 15, 2007.
The full CFP is given below:
Well, Chinese internet users are getting the shaft yet again. Beijing police are going to be putting cartoon police officers on the top Chinese web portals. These nifty little guys will warn users that they shouldn’t be looking at illegal websites. Isn’t that sweet? We wouldn’t want all those minds polluted by notions of liberty, religion, or political dissention.
As a big fan of both Star Wars and the International Space Station, you would think that the upcoming marriage of the two would delight me. You would be wrong.
Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber will be flown to Houston, where it will be sent off by Chewie and a host of other minor Star Wars characters, including R2 and some stormtroopers. Then, it will be carried along with the new Italian-built Harmony node to the space station by STS-120 (Discovery) on October 23rd. At the end of the mission, it will be brought home and probably gain a few tens-of-thousands of dollars in value as a result. The reason for this gimmick is the 30th anniversary of the Star Wars franchise.
I suppose the reason I hate this cheap, pointless exercise so much is that I am really angry with people not appreciating the sheer awesomeness that is the International Space Station. Most Americans would be shocked to learn that there are currently people living in space. The fact that they don’t already know it says to me that something has gone horribly wrong in our national psyche. So NASA feels the need to allow this gimmick to proceed, perhaps in hopes of increasing awareness and therefore funding. Maybe it’s not so much anger I feel as it is sorrow, for the futility I sense in trying to change the status quo with such a cheap trick.
Or maybe I’m just being way too dramatic — a charge that has oft been levelled at me. I will not deny it. Probably the LucasArts people wanted to generate some buzz for their franchise and the NASA geeks, having a high probability of being devoted Star Wars fans, accepted gladly.
Space.com: “NASA Shuttle to Launch Luke Skywalker’s Lightsaber”
Last year I worked on a project with my friend Israel Kloss called FreeAlert. The site is not-for-profit and was originally intended to help refugees entering the Washington, DC area find things they need for free. It now covers major metropolitan areas all across the United States and is intended to benefit everyone.
The idea is simple. Enter some keywords and get matching free items off of craigslist for your city sent to your cell phone. You can enter up to 5 sets of keywords and each set has exclusion terms. This makes it so that you can receive notices with the term computer but without the term desk. Israel just took the site out of private beta last week and it is currently in public beta mode.
It was an interesting project for me because it gave me the chance to work in python on some http and smtp protocol code. It also gave me the chance to work on processing xml and rss feeds. Definitely some cool stuff there and it has resulted in a spin-off that will probably be functioning fairly soon. Israel is one of those people with a lot of great ideas and he has the personality to inspire you with them. Plus he is also one of those rare people that actually care enough about the suffering of others to actually try to do something about it, which you just have to admire.
So, please, check it out and let us know how we can make it better.
Much to my sorrow, it looks like seeing the total lunar eclipse that is to happen early tomorrow morning is not in the cards. The eclipse will begin just after 4:51am. At that point, the moon will be 18 degrees above the western horizon, which means I’ll have a hard time getting to a place in Pittsburgh where I can view it free of buildings, mountains (hills), or trees. By 5:30am, when half of the moon is consumed by the partial eclipse, it will be a mere 12 degrees above the horizon. By the time the total eclipse starts, it will be about 6 degrees above the horizon and dawn will already be brightening the sky. If I lived in Los Angeles, the moon would be a whopping 36 degrees above the horizon when the total eclipse began.
At least I still have the Aurigids to look forward to this Saturday. We’re going to Donna’s mom’s house, in semi-rural eastern Pennsylvania. The viewing won’t be as good as my uncle’s location in Ohio, but it will certainly suffice. The Aurigids are a meteor shower caused by the passage of comet Kiess in 4 AD and later in 1911 AD. A trail of debris circles the sun in its path and the Earth occasionally passes into this trail. The great news is, it appears that this year we are poised to go straight into the heart of this debris field. The bad news is, it will again be mainly viewable on the west coast. The shower will peak around 4:30 in the morning in the west. The last Aurigid shower had mostly bright meteors that came in vivid colors. The next Aurigid shower won’t be in my lifetime.
NASA: “Strange Lights: The 2007 Aurigid Meteor Shower”
The Aurigid Meteor Shower Viewing Campaign
Update
There will be a team from the University of North Dakota travelling to Las Vegas to provide a live webcam feed of the lunar eclipse.
National Geographic has a nice graphic showing how much of the eclipse will be visible where.
Well, I’m not really into sports of any kind, but I don’t mind seeing games live. On July 4th, I got to see the Pittsburgh Pirates play the Milwaukee Brewers. And then a couple weeks ago, Donna (my wife) was offered tickets for a Steelers game from a friend at work, so we jumped on them. These tickets are very difficult to come by. Donna had no real interest in going, so I invited my friend Eric. The seats were expensive and in the nose-bleed section, but that didn’t really matter. The biggest problem was the fact that this game was pre-season. That didn’t really mean anything to me until it was explained that usually the starting players only make brief appearances and the rest of the game consists of the crappier players. Sure enough, once it was pretty much decided that Pittsburgh was going to win, the lower-ranked players jumped in and the sloppiness increased by an order of magnitude. No one was playing an especially great game. Pittsburgh made a lot of mistakes and really should’ve beaten the Eagles by another 14 points.
But it was great fun. If I get a chance to do it again, I’ll invite my dad, since he’s been a Steelers fan for as long as I’ve been alive.
Poor West Virginia. They have it really bad. Every county in that state has a sign saying “a certified business location”. I always wondered just what the bloody hell that was supposed to mean. They are outright begging people to put a business there. I was amazed to see the unemployment rate is really low, though, at 3.8% (low — by comparison to other states, that is). That’s down from around 7% in 1997. Also, they have a tough time with their public image. I think the rest of the country, when they even remember that this state exists, pretty much considers it to be full of poor, uneducated and inbred mountain-people [see this post re: how I feel about that sentiment]. While passing through WV once, my wife Donna heard this snippet on a radio station:
“WXXX. Giving you permission to bitchslap the next person who calls it Western Virginia.”
They have been doing mountaintop removal mining in WV for years. This type of mining essentially destroys the top of a mountain in order to extract coal quickly and more cheaply. The results are that tons of dirt get deposited in the valleys and harmful byproducts get into the water. In Google Earth/Maps, sometimes it can be hard to tell what you’re looking at in the satellite imagery. If you look at West Virginia, where there should be mountaintops are barren wastelands. Images at ilovemountains.org, an activist group dedicated to ending mountaintop removal mining, seem to confirm that what we are seeing in Google Earth are indeed images of the aftermath of mountaintop removal mining.
To add insult to injury, the Bush Administration is about to issue new regulations to increase the amount of mountaintop removal mining. So more mountains will be raped clean, dumping tons of sediment and the byproducts of the mining process in the valleys. So West Virginia’s best natural resource (beauty) will be destroyed in exchange for its dirtiest (coal). Sure it will give West Virginians jobs, though not as many as conventional coal mining would. And of course, when the coal is gone, and it will be gone eventually, there will be no jobs left anyway. A better option, though not as profitable for big business, would be to offer free training to West Virginians so they can change industries. No solution is easy, but if the Bush administration gets their way, it will leave West Virginia in about the same state as Nauru.
Movie pirate Scott McCausland must switch to Microsoft Windows as part of his sentence for uploading Star Wars: Episode 3 to a BitTorrent site. This is blatantly unconstitutional and I’m amazed any judge would do this. Here is the pertinent line from the constitution expressly forbidding this sort of thing:
Amendments to the Constitution
Article VIII.
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
I love reading an innocuously titled science piece and then coming across an absolute gem like this:
“Australian and French scientists have made another breakthrough in the technology that will drive next generation computers and teleportation.”
Teleportation?
Quantum teleportation as it turns out. Which is much different from the conventional teleportation featured in The Fly or the transporter from Star Trek. Quantum teleportation deals with transmitting the state information of a qubit from one location to another, which I don’t even pretend to understand. So was this just sensationalism on the part of the University of Queensland? Or do I just get my hopes up when I see sci-fi brought to life?
Daedalus never rolls in the mud, but he will occasionally roll on something stinky. This mess, however, was not his fault. Curious and dopey, he stood by watching a black lab dance in a giant puddle.
This shot was taken with my new 2.0 megapixel camera phone. Not the best picture in the world, but vastly better than my previous phone, as you can see here.
A see-through squid with yellow polka dots and fake plastic eyes. I could scarcely believe this little guy was real. But apparently, he’s a glass squid found around an undersea mountain range in the Atlantic. Deep sea fish are so bizarre.
Tonight was the reception “TG” for new students of the Language Technologies Institute. TG is the general term given to parties thrown in the department of computer science at CMU. Typically TGs are thrown on Fridays by the student organization Dec/5. So TG as in TGIF.
So anyhow, I tried a new beer that I hadn’t heard of before called Leinenkugels Sunset Wheat. I was given a tip prior to coming to the TG that Leinenkugels was the mystery beer. After a quick search on ratebeer.com, I found that Leinenkugel has one good beer and a whole lot of crap. Smart money was on the crap being the pick. Unfortunately, this was correct. I even guessed the correct specimen of crap: the Sunset Wheat.
So I decided to taste it so I could add another beer to my rating list. My reaction was immediate. Here is the comment I posted on the ratebeer page for this beer:
“I was immediately struck by a similarity to Flintstones vitamins. It was so intense I exclaimed. This beer was really atrocious. On the up side, it didn’t linger very long on the palate. This is a drain pour.”
I stand by this assessment. After I posted my comment I perused the other comments to see if people agreed with me. What I found was great. A few of the tastier specimens I came across are below:
“There are aromas & flavors in this that just don’t belong in a beer. Tastes like the milk left over after eating a bowl of Fruit Loops was poured into my beer. And worse, the fruit taste is very artificial. Maybe it wouldn’t be bad on a hot day, but I think i’m going to avoid this one for now.
“If I got really drunk on beer Friday, woke up on Saturday and ate some Fruity Pebbles then threw up…this is what it would taste like.”
“On tap. Smell is 100% Fruity Pebbles Cereal. It is uncanny - as though it is liquid Fruity Pebbles. Cloudy golden appearance with no lastin head. Reminds me more of a Hefe than an American Wheat. Really distinctive orange flavor. Almost tastes like a candy beer. Very sweet taste.”
“not so good. Had a flavor of jelly beans totally nasty. Might be the worst beer Ive tasted”
Scanning just a few more pages of comments I found 8 more references to Fruity Pebbles. I think the key here is that distinct artificial fruit flavor they put in jelly beans, flintstones vitamins and that cereal. So yeah, it sucked.
Gmail features web clips over the menu bar that you can customize and often spew some sort of advertisement. One such is for the Coffee Fool. They make the claim that fresh coffee should be a sweet drink and that bitterness and flatness are a result of the roasting process. I’ve been very curious to try it out, but the price is anywhere from 50-200% more than Starbucks, which is already expensive enough. I might cave soon, though, as I have been given scientific justification to spend money (and frankly, the thinnest pretexts will do when it comes to spending money). So boffins have concluded that the bitterness is coffee is not due to caffeine as it had been supposed, but due to roasting. It seems the Coffee Fool knows what they’re talking about.
“Battling Bitter Coffee: Chemists Identify Roasting As The Main Culprit“
On an almost completely unrelated note, Germany will be deploying a satellite to go into orbit around the moon. The goal is to create a stereoscopic view of the moon and thereby produce 3-D images. It will also capture 3-D data of the moon’s magnetic field. All this is part of a drive to go back to the moon. With W’s call for a manned moon mission by 2020, the world must surely be seeing a critical need to not allow the US to spread its hegemony there as well. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting the world thinks the US will be taking over the moon, per se, but that early influence will lead to American dominance of the birthright of all mankind (which is itself debatable, I know).
The moon is basically a giant nugget of gold protected in the deepest cave and guarded by a pack of crazy monkeys. It’s damn hard to get at, but whoever does will be rich. The moon is loaded with Helium-3, which — if fusion does become possible — will be the fuel. So there’s a bit of a chance here and potentially worth billions. Now we just need to get fusion working…
Now here’s something that ought to be visually stunning. Walls made of water in an outdoor cafe. When the cafe is not in use, the roof is lowered via its piston supports. When it is in use, a multitude of valves send sheets of water down its side to form the walls. A computer controls all the valves so patterns can be made in the water as it flows. Also, since some of the water will evaporate, this should reduce cooling costs. This last point or so-called advantage is problematic for me. Aren’t the energy costs from pumping all this water far in excess of what it would cost to cool a conventional building of a similar size?
In any case, it should at least be beautiful and offers a new way of looking at architecture. The Digital Water Pavilion will be unveiled next June at World Expo 2008 in Zaragoza, Spain.
Dr. Amit Almor of my alma mater and his team have used fMRI images of the brain to see just what is going on when people use pronouns versus proper nouns. They found that the spatial area of the brain lights up when proper nouns are used, implying that the brain builds a new representation each time. When pronouns were used, these areas did not light up.
So representations for proper nouns are merged as processing goes on. However, too many of them can result in disruption in the processing of new input. Interestingly, a similar phenomenon occurs in users of American Sign Language. Signers point to a space in the air as a reference point for proper nouns, a function similar to pronoun usage in spoken language. Pretty cool.
If you don’t know which candidate agrees with you most, there is a great blind test that will match you with the candidate who most agrees with you (link sent to me by my good friend at the Wrathful Dove). You simply indicate whether you Support/Oppose/Other an issue and then whether that issue is no big deal (meh), important, or key. The test was quite accurate for me in choosing my top two, which I suppose is confirmation that I choose my candidate based on the issues. I’m curious to see who really does agree with most Americans.
Take the test yourself and please drop me a comment with your results.
My results:
- Kucinich 68
- Gravel 54
- Obama 30
- Paul 29
- Edwards 28
- Clinton 28
- Richardson 25
- Biden 25
- Dodd 23
- Brownback -15
- Cox -22
- McCain -27
- Thompson -28
- Huckabee -28
- Tancredo -51
- Hunter -60
- Giuliani -60
- Romney -61
Well, the now-former editor-in-chief of that great citadel of Microsoft-brown-nosing PC Magazine, is now swearing off Vista. You know when Microsoft’s lackeys begin jumping ship that something is wrong. This should certainly convince anyone if the fact that most businesses are reluctant to switch to Vista or that China will use XP for computer systems relating to next year’s Olympics.
I love this quote from the Olympics tech guy at Lenovo:
“At the Olympics, we need the most reliable and stable systems.” (source)
That just says it all.
Full disclosure: I do not use nor do I plan to use Vista.
Note: I was informed the PC Mag link isn’t permanent, so I have linked to the digg article instead.
I came across an interesting difference in usage between British and American versions of the word assurance. The word typically means a promise or a guarantee in American English. So when I came across this ad on the Scotsman it caught my eye. Hell yes I want my life assured! Turns out, to the Brits, it just means insurance. Pity.
Now this will be a nifty little device if they can get it to work. It’d be great to not have to charge your cell phone as frequently. Though the logistics of having a patch on your body with a cord running to your phone might be a little dicey. You could at least power your bluetooth ear-piece with it, though.
Sometimes journalists say the damnedest things. “Giuliani’s Gaza Analogy” caught my attention because I haven’t been following the Republican candidates very well and was curious what his take on Israel/Palestine was. Alec MacGillis goes through some moderately interesting points about Giuliani’s 17-page foreign policy proposal, trying to say that he will deviate from the neo-con stance that democracy should be established whenever and wherever we go, regardless of the cultural and political climate in the countries we (will) invade and/or influence unduly. Personally, I think this is whitewashing. Just because he recognizes that democracy won’t take root in a place like Iraq or that it will elect “terrorists” in a place like Palestine doesn’t mean he has left neo-con behind.
ScienceDaily is reporting that some scientists have managed to erase some long-term memories of tastes from rats. These were the oldest memories ever removed purposely. The researchers also discovered that the brain actively maintains memories and failure to do so results in memory loss. There is still a lot of work to be done before this translates into a viable therapy of any sort. With the recent media hype about traumatic-memory-erasing drugs as treatment for victims of PTSD, this will no doubt find a use in therapy. Why be shackled with the memory of Uncle Herb molesting you? Just zap it.
Mt. Everest, that bastian of adventure that draws thrill-seekers and wall street brokers with nothing else left to accomplish alike, is three times more likely to kill people over 60. No kidding. Actually this shouldn’t be as obvious as it seems to be, since apparently old people adjust to higher altitudes more quickly and have more experience. So why do they die? Who freakin knows. Thanks to Wired’s less-than-completely-informative-article, I’m in the dark. They hint at the proliferation of older people in these expeditions, but really shouldn’t that have been adjusted for in the statistics?
However, there is an up side. Fun facts:
- 1.5% of climbers under 60 die attempting Everest
- 5% of climbers over 60 die
- 31% of climbers under 60 make it to the top
- 13% of climbers over 60 make it to the top
Just something to consider if you’re old and seeking to conquer the world’s tallest mountain.
More sad news from the Endless War. The New York Times is reporting at least 250 dead in an attack on two Kurdish villages, Qahtaniya and Jazeera. As they always do, these numbers will surely rise. As of the time of the Times report, at least 40 obliterated homes had not been searched for casualties.
Reading these stories is enough to make you weep. They also report on a Kurdish woman stoned to death by her own people for dating a Sunni man. Sunnis then killed 26 Kurds in response. And then to hear the US Ambassador spin it: “This indiscriminate and heartless violence only strengthens our resolve to continue our mission against the terrorists who are plaguing the people of Iraq.” They are plaguing Iraq because we brought them there. As long as we are there, they will continue to plague Iraq.
It’s time to leave.
Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape, has an interesting post on his blog about luck and entrepreneurship. My entrepreneurial genes are currently switched off after a few years of wheel-spinning, but this is good info to store against a future need. He describes the four types of luck written about by Dr. James Austin in his book Chase, Chance, and Creativity:
- pure dumb luck (I)
- keep busy and luck (II) will find you
- luck (III) will find the prepared mind
- who you are and how you behave draws out luck (IV)
So type I is the kind of luck that most people associate with the word luck or chance (Austin refers to all of these as types of chance). Type II luck is the kind of luck that happens because you stumble upon it. It doesn’t often happen to people who are inactive. Type III luck is the kind tailored to a person specifically prepared for it. Andreesen gives the example of Sir Alexander Fleming who discovered penicilin. Type IV luck is the kind of luck that happens because you are pursuing your hobbies or interests in your own way. This luck won’t find someone else because that person would be doing things differently, presumably.
Here is a word that has gone through the wringer in the past few decades. Originally it meant a monstrous offense or excessive wickedness (American Heritage). However, its similarity to the word enormous has caused it to be used by an ever growing number of people to mean immense size. With all things language, attempting to turn back the natural tide of almighty usage is futile. For example, the title of an article just posted on the National Geographic website is “Angkor’s Ancient Enormity Uncovered“. I was disappointed when the story wasn’t about a mass sacrifice or other such atrocity.
Wired has a story on the fact that almost all the mice used in laboratory research today are descended from a few inbred mice about a hundred years ago. It seems like there are advantages to having inbred mice in terms of experimental control, which may have been part of the original motivation. The fewer factors that change from experiment to experiment the better you can isolate /attribute causality. But of course, the criticism here is that the lack of diversity in test-mouse genetics may be the reason that problems with certain drugs didn’t become apparent until after the drugs hit the market.
All this interesting stuff about mice aside, we are then given a quote by the illustrious Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena:
“To make an analogy between mice and humans, using the classical inbred strains is like doing studies on 10 people selected from one small town in Appalachia.”
As I mentioned in a previous post, I visited my family in Ohio this past weekend. The Perseid meteor shower peaked Sunday night/Monday morning, but the shower was going fairly strong Saturday night/Sunday morning. For the first time since the early 90’s I got a chance to sit out beneath the stars in perfect weather with no moon to watch a meteor shower.
While this is good news, it’s not great news. This is but one head of the hydra and she will live on.
The Perseids meteor shower peaks around August 11-12 every year. This year I’m going to visit my dad and uncle (and their families) in rural Ohio. There is absolutely no light from cities there so this should be a great viewing this year. I’ve only been able to view the Perseids from a remote location once before, sometime in the early 90’s, so I’m looking forward to it. Also, there will be no moon, so viewing will be optimal. Unfortunately, I’ll be viewing them Saturday night and the peak is going to be Sunday night/Monday morning. Right now the weather forecast is extremely favorable, calling for clear conditions. I hope (and pray) that this time the meteorologists get it right.
My friend John (the Wrathful Dove) pointed me to a great article today about Barack Obama, who is turning into quite the warhawk. This comes as no surprise. All of the mainstream candidates are clones of W with a different set of pretty noises to placate one special interest or another (be those the religious right, gays, fiscal conservatives, pro-abortion, wev). War is a business and big business backs all of the mainstream candidates. By pocketing them all, they ensure a win-win.
There was a big thunderstorm this morning that totally drenched my feet. However, in the darkness I did see something that I thought was quite cool. The Cathedral of Learning at Pitt with its crown shrouded in clouds. Unfortunately my piece of crap cell phone doesn’t do it justice.
They have compiled a great list of nutty captchas caught in the wild. The best is certainly the Russian one, as many others have agreed. Captchas are particularly interesting to me since it looks like I’m going to be working with Dr. Luis von Ahn next semester on the GWAP project (games with a purpose).
Ok, I feel the need to plug a Facebook app. First of all, most apps suck. They chew up space on your profile and are largely useless because for them to be any good you need like a dozen friends using them, which never happens. There are a few exceptions, like Books, which is cool on its own (though I wish adding new books were a little easier). However, one app that really impressed me is Dogbook. Dogbook lets you create profiles for your dogs. Your dogs can have their own friends (other dogs and people) and pictures added from your profile. Also, you can search for dogs in your area, so if you were ever wondering who owned that dog you met in the dog park, now you can (assuming they use Dogbook too). This is especially useful since people hardly ever exchange names at a dog park and you only know them by the names of their dogs.
And surprisingly, a large number of people seem to use it.
Now here is an interesting word. The Language Log has a few examples of its usage and a couple of theories as to how it came about. The first is that the archaic word howsomever, which was an alternate form for however, changed through metathesis to howmsoever. I’m more inclined to the theory that it is derived by analogy from whomsoever/whosoever. I can imagine a scenario where someone wants to drag out however to make what is about to be said more significant (or some such scenario). It seems like howmsoever would fill that need nicely. But who knows..
social operating system - n. A social networking site like Facebook or MySpace that seamlessly integrates activities, including entertainment and shopping, to become a platform for online living. (Wired News)
I’m always on the lookout for new words. This one isn’t especially innovative, but the last phrase caught my notice. Online living. Indeed. Now I like Facebook and actively maintain a profile as a way of keeping in touch with family and friends. But online living? I think that day is still a long ways off.
Extreme Weather Making History — Discovery News
Of course this comes as no surprise and years like this one are probably going to become the norm. I’m actually kind of hoping for the weather system to do some crazy flipflop and plunge us into an ice age. That’ll show those big corporations and the evil politicians who support them!
(courtesy of the ever-awesome xkcd.com)
I mean, aren’t they just crazy cute? Unfortunately they are also crazy. Willow has been dividing her time between dropping balls at my feet, pestering Daedalus (which makes him squirbble like mad), and trying to dig under our couch. Balls keep rolling under there, so when she’s bored, regardless of whether there’s actually a ball there, she tries to claw her way under the couch.
It appears that Facebook has just had another lawsuit filed against it, this time for patent infringement. Cross Atlantic Capital Partners (hereafter referred to as the Patent Trolls) claim infringement based on patent 6,519,629: “System for creating a community for users with common interests to interact in”. So it appears they are targeting the Groups functionality. I don’t pretend to know anything about patent law, but from what I have read in the patent, it does appear they have a case. However, I believe this is just one more example of how issuing patents for software is fundamentally flawed.
Well the Department of Mysteries at St. Andrews College has done it again. Last September they described a way to make objects invisible. Now they have found a way to make objects levitate. It doesn’t seem like we’ll be seeing levitating cars any time soon, but it does look like this may be the sort of revolutionary discovery that will take computing, robotics and manufacturing to the next level.
Well, I have registered mendicantbug.com for this blog. This is in part an effort to ensure I will actually stick to blogging this time. I was slightly surprised the domain wasn’t taken, though I probably would have been more surprised if it were. The advantage of crackheaded naming.
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
- Albert Einstein
Therefore, I propose a new, more correct name for the Internet: the Intercat. There will one day be a battle for the real name of the Information Superhighway, between the Einsteinians (advocating the Intercat), Stevensians (advocating the Intertubes), and a coalition of smaller factions known collectively as the Blagonites (advocating Blogosphere, the Interbla