You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October, 2007.
I heard a great metaphor in my software engineering class today. We were talking about agile processes and somehow the issue of not relying too heavily on any one member came up. I think the term “heroic programming” was on the slide. It made me think of that one person who tries to take on too much and ends up coding the entire program himself. In my undergrad, that was usually me.
Back to the new metaphor. Bus Number is the number of people vital to a project. That is, if n people were to get hit by a bus, could the project continue? Great term that sums up the point succinctly.
Later, we were talking about the Scrum development method and the point came up that only people on the team should participate in meetings, though others might be in attendance. The TA was presenting the lecture today since the professor was out of town and there was a term on the slides that he attributed to a generation gap referring to people in the meeting as chickens and pigs. Another professor who sits in on classes put it this way (my paraphrase):
It has something to do with how close you are to the project. It’s like a breakfast of ham and eggs. Sure the chicken gives the eggs, but it’s not the same sacrifice as the pig.
So a lot of websites are posting their kids in their Spiderman outfits or an array of really cool pumpkins or just changing their logos. Me? I stick to dogs. This lady brings a mastiff around school all the time and today she had him dressed up as a flying monkey from the Wizard of Oz. She was dressed up herself as the Wicked Witch of the West. Not a bad outfit on a monster of a dog (who is actually quite sweet).
Oh and vote for the frickin coolest pumpkin of all time:
The Call for Papers (CFP) is out for the Student Workshop at next year’s ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) conference. I’ve been playing around with a couple of side ideas, it would be nice to have something to submit to this. We’ll see. Full CFP is below the jump.
Dennis Kucinich is not afraid to say the thing many people are wondering. Is Bush freakin nuts? Does he really think World War III is going to break out if Iran gains the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons? Who are the sides? The middle east versus the rest of the world? Oh and North Korea. Plus a couple countries in Africa so embroiled in their own civil wars, they’d be lucky to send 100 men to fight off this giant.
CNN’s political ticker has this:
“I’ve told people that, if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,” Bush said at a news conference earlier this month.
The Democratic presidential candidate later said he does not consider questioning the Bush’s mental health inappropriate, according [to] the Inquirer’s Web site. [emphasis mine]
I’m about 99.9999% sure that any nuclear weapon Iran acquired would be used for one purpose and one purpose only: deterrence. What Bush is actually saying here is “if you’re interested in avoiding a US invasion of your country, it seems like you ought to be interested in getting a nuclear weapon.” He really can’t see the connection between posturing to overthrow a government and that government’s desire to acquire a nuke to prevent that? This version of diplomacy is like the battered wife who kills her husband in order to escape. Only this husband thinks the wife is going to get a gun and is trying to kill her first.
As usual, Kucinich is the only one brave enough to speak out against this looming evil. The rest are off scrambling around in the dirt for the pennies tossed at them by the corporate patrons. Pelosi can barely look up long enough from the feast of pork-in-a-barrel to notice.
On a side note, I like the CNN editor’s rendering of the bolded sentence above. That’s a direct quote as of 10:00am Eastern time.
I love how art evolves. Well sometimes I hate it, but usually it travels in interesting directions. One of my favorite new trends is art in video games, video games as art, and art in video game advertising. Andy Warhol helped bring art to pop culture and advertising. That hasn’t stopped thousands of hacks from doing a lot of crummy advertising, but every once in a while you get something amazing. The same is true for video games.
There is only so much oil in the world. We are consuming it an alarming rate and that rate is increasing as China adds millions of new cars to the mix. According to the Energy Watch Group in Berlin, the peak point of oil supply passed us last year, much earlier than anticipated. Peak oil is essentially the point at which supply and production levels can produce the maximum amount of oil possible for consumption. Oil supplies have always been diminishing, but by finding new supplies and increasing production, levels were able to increase. Imagine you have a milkshake. At first you use a small straw and can only extract a small amount. You keep increasing the size of the straw until you are drinking a large amount of shake per gulp. This is peak oil. Then you start to hit those pockets of shake where there is still shake in the cup but you’re sucking air. These are oil shortages. Finally you suck it dry. This is the end of the road for the oil industry.
So we are at the point now where we are sucking it to our heart’s content. Massive gulps. However, we’re going to be hitting pockets soon. Oil production is estimated to drop by about 7% per year. This would only be a small cause for concern if you consider rising gas prices something that we can work around. But here is the problem. Everything we make derives from oil. Solar panels need oil to fuel the machines that transport the supplies to the factories where they are made. For fish, we need boats that run on fuel to catch them or if they are farm raised, we need trucks to transport them. Many types of plastic are derived from oil. When the first shortage hits, and we find ourselves sucking air rather than oil, it will affect every industry in the economy.
So now the question is, how bumpy will the ride down be?
Astronomers have theorized for years that there must be more mass out there than we can see. Based on the movements of galaxies, star systems, and gas clouds the number of stars just can’t account for it all. Enter dark matter. Matter we can’t see. Special stuff. Even a whole Dark Galaxy.
On a side note, I’ve always thought that would make the perfect penal colony for an intergalactic empire.
“Mr. Adams, for your crimes against the Blagoblag, you are hereby sentenced to spend the rest of your natural life exiled to … the Dark Galaxy.”
“Noooooooooo!! Please, execute me instead!”
So a couple of Canadian astronomers (why their Canadaness is important, I don’t know) have proposed a new theory of gravity that dispenses with the need for dark matter altogether. From a strictly lay viewpoint, since I don’t have enough of a physics background to make an informed assessment, dark matter has always struck me as ad hoc. So dispensing with it would be much more elegant, in my opinion. Of course it would mean the end of the Dark Galaxy and my dreams of a vast network of prisons for political dissidents from the Rebel Alliance.
Last summer, observation of a galactic collision in the Bullet Cluster was touted as an event that caused dark matter to separate from the regular matter in galaxies and was considered evidence of dark matter’s existence. Enter Canadian astronomers: claims of dark matter’s existence premature. They have proposed a modified theory of gravity (MOG), which would account for everything observed in the collision. Excellent. Note: they are not announcing the theory, which has been around for a year or so, but the application of the theory to actual observed data.
John Moffat, the lead researcher, makes a great point that mirrors my feelings about dark matter quite well. He compares theories of dark matter to the 19th Century theory of the luminiferous aether, the hypothetical medium of space through which light was able to travel. “They saw a glimpse of special relativity, but they weren’t willing to give up the ether. Then Einstein came along and said we don’t need the ether. The rest was history.” [source]
So I’ve been reading A New Kind of Science
In Chapter 2, Wolfram introduces a fairly simple 2-dimensional cellular automata (one spatial dimension, one temporal dimension). The temporal dimension can be plotted as another spatial dimension producing a nice little spreadsheet style graph. Each cell of the graph can be considered a bit. Depending on whether the bit is set, the cell is either shaded or not. So the single line in the spatial dimension contains some initial setting. Let’s say there is one single bit set in the middle of the line, so it might look like this:
000000000010000000000
A recent journey through the Steel City. And yes I am a menace to public safety. This is downtown, which people from the ‘Burgh pronounce [dɑ:ntɑ:n] instead of the Standard American English [daʊn'taʊn]. If you’re not familiar with IPA, it’s more like donton. But not quite. It’s amusing.
Pittsburgh English is also sometimes called Pittsburghese, a term that I’m not especially fond of. But there is definitely a difference here. Two of the biggest things that people will notice are the use of a the word redd up, meaning to straighten up. That word is actually of Scots-Irish descent. My original suspicion was from the German aufraeumen, but that’s wrong. Pennsylvania Dutch has a strong influence in other parts of Pennsylvania, so it was the obvious starting point. Also, the verb need is used as the passive auxiliary so whereas in Standard American English (and most other dialects of English), you might say
The room needs to be vacuumed.
or
The room needs vacuuming.
Pittsburghers will say
The room needs vacuumed.
Most speakers reject this as ungrammatical. Interestingly, this Pittsburgh dialect also crops up all over Pennsylvania, but not so much in Philadelphia. My wife, who is from the York area (sort of East-South-Central PA), says these things also. They all sound perfectly grammatical to me now as I’ve grown accustomed to hearing them, but I don’t actually say them. (Yet?)
Rube Goldberg devices are quite fascinating. However, whenever I see one in practice (below), I am nagged the entire time by A) worry that something minor will go wrong, causing failure and a lot of work; B) wondering about how much time this wasted; and C) who is the person who has that kind of time, patience and space in their home to devote so much real estate to something ultimately pointless. That said, they are freaking cool. This is by far the most elaborate one I’ve seen that’s actually real and not produced by people getting paid a lot of money. Of course there is the famous, much more elaborate Blue Ball Machine, which has been known to captivate many a mind (hat tip for first showing me years ago to Josh). Another crazy Rube Goldberg device below the jump.
So you want to automatically parse sentences without having to go through all the trouble of figuring it out for yourself? You’ve come to the right place. This brief tutorial is aimed at students who are interested in computer science and linguistics who maybe want to dip their feet in the water of computational linguistics without having to understand immediately all of the daunting details. In other words, what I wish I had two years ago before applying to graduate school.
I received this email today from Dennis Kucinich’s election campaign (below the jump). It’s a quick poll where you choose your top 3 candidates (democratic) for president if you had to vote today. So I voted Kucinich, Gravel, and Edwards. The (optional) reason I gave was that Dennis is the only principled candidate and is neither a warhawk nor a corporate stooge. The only thing wrong with him is that he’s not good for advertising revenue and so mainstream media outlets ignore him completely. Considering the massive load of dung that constitutes 99.9% of NBC, ABC, and CBS, 100% of CNN and 110% of Fox’s news coverage, this probably isn’t such a bad thing. It should give people pause, at least, if the media allowed them to think for themselves for 8 seconds.
And we all know that ain’t gunna happen.
Anyhow, please Kucinich a hand and vote for him in that poll.
My friend Israel is trying to raise money for laptops for school kids in Tanzania. If you’re on Facebook and have about 30 seconds, why not vote for him? Razoo is a speed granting organization that gives money to small charitable projects. You can view his oh-so-pitiful video below. I’ve suggested he update it by putting on heavy eye makeup and getting under a sheet and lamenting the fact that only a few thousand Tanzanian kids graduate high school every year. They really could use your help, though and this requires you to spend no money!
I caught Randy Pausch on Oprah yesterday (and yes, a dying CMU professor IS the one of the few things that will make me endure watching Oprah). His last lecture focused on the importance of childhood dreams and he mentioned the landing of men on the moon as a pretty fundamental motivator. Heck, it inspires me still and I wasn’t even alive. So I especially love it when NASA gets kids involved in the space program (I’ll return to this after a brief rant). Too much today, launches of the shuttle, the existence of the International Space Station, and probes sent to other planets are just routinely ignored or sidelined by the mainstream press. Discovery launched today carrying the Harmony module to the ISS and it got about 3 seconds on the Today show. The result? People think the space program is totally useless. It doesn’t help when Nobel laureates like Stephen Weinberg call the space station an “orbital turkey” that “has produced nothing of scientific value.” That brings to three the number of Giant Turds with Nobel Prizes (joining James Watson the Racist and Al Gore the Murky-Green Fraud). For a nice rebuttal of the Weinberg gibberish, there is this article from adAstra that mirrors the point by Randy Pausch a bit.
Anyhow, returning from my rant. NASA has announced a contest for school kids to name a place for the Cassini probe to point. Cassini is currently in the Saturn system. It recently left Iapetus, which I indicated looks like the Death Star. Currently it is focusing on Saturn’s moon Titan and will be doing some close flybys of it over the next few months. For students to participate the contest, they need to write a 500-800 word essay on why Cassini should look at one of four possible targets on November 30, 2007. So if you know a kid in grades 5-12, let them know.
Four Targets:
- Mimas (a moon) coming out from behind Saturn
- Saturn’s rings and a lot of moons
- Prometheus (another moon) and the F-ring (Prometheus seems to actually steal matter from the ring)
- Tethys (yet another moon) and its Odysseus impact basin
Google announced that it has abandoned Systran as its translation system for the 22 languages it services besides Arabic, Chinese and Russian. Systran is one of the oldest machine translation companies around. When Microsoft launched its service recently, it announced that it would be supplementing its translations with Systran. Systran uses rule-based systems that have been massively tweaked to produce results that most would agree are still pretty crappy. They get some basic stuff right, but once you start venturing off into uncommon word usages and complex constructions, all bets are off. Some translation sites use Systran and others like freetranslation.com use their own system. Babel Fish is perhaps the most well-known site still using Systran.
So Google is switching over to its own statistical machine translation system for all 25 language pairs. Statistical machine translation systems typically look at two different kinds of text: aligned text in two languages (bitext) and monolingual text. The monolingual text is used to build a statistical model of the language so that output will conform to the target language rather than the original. For example, in German, the auxiliary verb comes in second position as in English, but the main verb often comes in final position. Reordering properly isn’t easy and this model helps make the output more natural. Bitexts are texts that have been translated from language to another and then aligned word-by-word. The actual alignment may be done by hand at the sentence level but the vast amount of human effort involved means that at the word level it is usually done automatically. Getting good alignments is an ongoing area of research that is quite far from perfect.
The thing that Google has going for it is that with statistical machine translation, the more data the better. And Google is overflowing with it. It’ll be interesting to see how their systems progress.
Saw this on the blog of Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape. Maybe NSFW, certainly the language is very intense, so if you’re offended by the granddaddy f-word, it makes an appearance about 47 times (rough guess, I’m not gonna bother to count). In any case, it’s a great example of what good editing can do. The best example of this I’ve seen is a classic that everyone has probably seen: Shining.
The shuttle Discovery is set to launch Tuesday to bring the Harmony module to the International Space Station (ISS). The Harmony module, named by US school kids, is a connector that will bring together the various international components of the space station. Specifically, it will connect the US Destiny Lab, the ESA’s (European Space Agency) Columbus module and Japan’s Kibo module. The Italian-built Harmony module has been sitting in drydock since 2003, where it underwent pre-flight preparation.
I’m swamped with homework so my blogging is limited. I feel compelled to post something, though, like a moth to a flame. A friend of mine sent me a link to the Legacy of Chernobyl the other day. Truly one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. It’s easy to forget about it after so many years here in the West, but people still suffer. Chernobyl itself is open to tours and has been vandalized extensively by a French artist (though vandalism is not the right word, decorated may be better). It’s real-world scene of the end of the world.
The web seems to be overflowing with cool stuff these days. If you’re a fan of cellular automata like me, Mushroom Life will provide at least a few minutes of time-wasting fun. Click on the square to add a few initial mushrooms, perhaps trying one of the patterns they have listed. The image below is the result after a few hundred generations from the simplest example pattern.
One of the coolest things in the world to me are fairy rings: naturally occurring circles of mushrooms. There are a couple of theories about why these rings occur. The first theory is that a spore pushes out fungal threads in all directions as it begins to grow underground. As it grows larger, the central part dies off, what’s left is a ring. The other theory is that if neighboring groups of genetically identical mushrooms connect and form an oval or arc, they continue to grow about the center of this object.
Well, the Call for Papers is out for ACL 2008 (Association for Computatonal Linguistics), which will be held in the city of my birth. Columbus, Ohio is such a short drive, it’d be a shame if I didn’t attend, even if I’m probably not submitting anything. The trick is getting someone else to pay for it!
Conference dates: 15-20 June 2008
Deadline for full papers: 10 January 2008
Deadline for short papers: 14 March 2008
The full Call for Papers is below the jump.
I really love the International Space Station (ISS). Living in the city, it’s hard to get a chance to see it in the night sky for a few reasons. City light tends to drown out dimmer objects, so later at night it’s impossible to see when passing over head. Just after dusk or before sunrise would be the best times since the space station is in the sun and you are not. This is not always the case, there are a few times a year when the ISS is in the sun during each pass throughout the night. When the ISS is in the sun, it is very bright due to all of its solar panels.
I just came across a great website that allows you to track satellites and see exactly where they are at any given time. As I right this, the space station just finished passing over Australia and is approaching the southern tip of New Zealand. The great thing about the tracker is that it ties into Google Maps, so you can see satellite imagery of the ground. There is also a Google gadget so you can add it to your iGoogle page if you so wish.
If you’ve ever played a computer at a game of chess, go, checkers, or whatever, you’ve probably wondered just what the computer was thinking. Sure you know intellectually that it can consider many times the number of moves you can in the same amount of time. But what does it dismiss and what does it look at further? How does it decide what a good move is? Of course, it depends on the system and the game and is rather complex. I have only played around briefly with trying to program such a thing. I wrote a program in C++ to play checkers that looked three moves ahead (via depth-first search) and judged the merits of a move based on the points left on the board at the end. That was back when I was first learning C++, so the code was very sloppy and I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing.
But on one of my random journeys through the interwebs, I stumbled upon Thinking Machine 4. It’s an online game of chess versus a computer opponent. The board is very modern looking, with polygons as pieces. Once you make a move, lines begin springing up all over the board, indicating moves the computer is considering. Depending on how hard it has to think (that is, how many possibilities it must consider), lines are thin or thick as new ones spring up. When the computer is not thinking, the board has a cool little optical illsuion to make you nuts.
Erin McKean, the Dictionary Evangelist, has a post today on the coinage of the term ygology, meaning the study of palindromes.
Her take is that the word was an inevitability of English, demanding birth. No argument there.
But then she also references ambigrams, which are visual representations of words that are somehow symmetric. If you flip them upside down, they form the same word. Or perhaps the negative space in the word forms another word. Probably the most famous such figure is the cover of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach
When I hear a number like 3828, it doesn’t sound all that high. I mean, that’s a fraction of the number of people who died in Vietnam (about 60k, including missing), which was a small fraction of the number who died in World War II (14+ million). And those are just the American and allied military casualties. The numbers for the opponents and civilian casualties dwarf those. But 3828 is a big number. Each one a person with a family, many with children, most of them with living mothers who will mourn them. Each one had a life at home, dreams.
Obleek.com has a very nice flash animation that helps bring this home by animating the coalition deaths as they occurred by day from the start of the Iraq War until 13 February 2007. Data used to create the animation was taken from icasualties.org. Worth a look and a thought, perhaps.
Accelovation has a job for a Computational Grammarian. They are looking for someone with a masters or PhD and the salary will be “commensurate with education and experience.” I would probably be qualified for this job (at least according to the short description) and even more so when I graduate next spring. I have at least worked with building LFG-style grammars in a couple classes and this is one particular area I find entertaining. Building grammars can be tedious at times, but it’s also like a giant puzzle with many sub-puzzles and you have to find a way to put them all together. Same with building finite state transducers.
But I’m always bothered by job postings that don’t list salary ranges. I don’t want to show up for a job interview and have them ask, “what were you thinking in terms of salary?” If I give them a number too low, they’ll think I don’t even think I’m worth much, so they shouldn’t hire me. If I give them a number too high, they’ll think I have a high opinion of myself and am not worth the asking price. I operate on the assumption that these are reasonable thoughts and not just remnants of social insecurity. Am I nuts?
I want some resource that I, as a job seeker, can use for free that will tell me what I can expect to be making at a certain job. When I’ve found the occasional resource, they have things like “Computer Analyst IV” and “Database Administrator III”. But nothing like “Computer Science Researcher” or “Computational Linguist” or “Language Technologies Researcher” or whatever. The closest I have found is Payscale, which let me put in “Computational Linguist”, but then asked me a few questions that basically amounted to “never heard of it.” Scientific Linguist was the closest thing, but not really accurate. When I tried “Scientific Researcher”, I got that there weren’t enough results to compare.
Blerg.
I think it’s only a matter of time before a giant ecological disaster kills multiple millions of people in China. Just recently, the third largest lake in China has become overwhelmed by toxic cyanobacteria. The two million residents of the area surrounding Lake Tai can no longer rely on their main source of water due to industrial and human waste. With the cavalier attitude of Chinese regional officials towards environmental concerns, things can get out of hand fast. Growing industrialism that relies on keeping costs to a minimum will resort to anything — be that setting wages and conditions equivalent to slave labor or dumping deadly chemicals directly into drinking water.
My brother-in-law recently visited Taiwan for his company, unknowingly helping them outsource his factory (unknowing, since they lied to him). While there, the plant officials wanted to dump a variety of wastes into a nearby water supply. Among the chemicals they were planning to dump (and thereby avoid the cost of doing the right thing) was cadmium, which is a known carcinogen and can cause a variety of health problems including kidney failure and softening of the bones. A mass cadmium exposure in Japan led to a condition called itai-itai disease (”ouch-ouch” disease), so named for the screams of pain by its victims. My brother-in-law, an all around excellent chap, went over the heads of a number of people attempting to do this coverup to the plant heads and challenged them on this, threatening to report it otherwise. They gave in and now who knows how many people’s lives were saved or are better because of his actions. Taiwan supposedly has strict environmental restrictions and yet something like this might have still been able to happen.
Switch to China where such restrictions exist only if they are politically expedient. Environmentalists are considered threats to the state and are imprisoned. The New York Times has a long piece today on Wu Lihong, an environmentalist who challenged the Chinese government to clean up Lake Tai. He was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison on a series of trumped up charges. So as pollution steadily increases in China, voices of dissent are silenced and progress towards a catastrophe never before seen may continue.
Update
I forgot to post the link to the NY Times article. Also, the cyanobacteria contamination occurred back in May.
If you were going to build a death star, then hide it, what would it look like? SciAm Observations today has an array of desktop backgrounds of the moon Iapetus, which orbits Saturn. Iapetus is an especially fascinating moon for many reasons. For starters, it has a giant impact crater. Also there is an equatorial ridge which encircles the entire moon, making it slightly resemble a walnut. The moon is heavily pockmarked with craters.
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Image courtesy of NASA and JPL. Taken by the Cassini probe. |
I find myself using dictionaries a lot. Because I generally subscribe to the view of language as a fluid construct embedded in the mind of individuals and as an emergent phenomenon of a group of speakers, I don’t believe dictionaries are the final arbiters of correct word usage. In high school, things were different. I remember having arguments over word meanings and then resorting to the dictionary to make claims such as “it can’t mean that” or “that word does not exist.” Now I find those statements to be rubbish. If a group of people uses a word a certain way to communicate (and they understand each other), then that is a correct usage of a real word. This is different than when I say “I sent my check to the university ombudsman” when I meant to say “I sent my check to the university bursar.” This case is an instance of performance failure, where I accidentally used the wrong word.
The dictionary I use most commonly nowadays is dictionary.com. Their advantage is the fact that they draw on many different dictionaries simultaneously (though the results are presented separately). You can see the definitions given by Random House, Merriam Webster, American Heritage, WordNet, and a bunch of others. I just noticed today that they have added the Kernerman English Multilingual Dictionary. You are given the word in an array of languages including Arabic, Chinese, Korean, French, German, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic, Hungarian, etc. Most common European languages are included and a few of the most common Asian languages. Noticeably absent is Swahili, nor is any other language from Africa included. Also included is the Online Dictionary of Computing, which is a nice touch. Look up the word tickle and you find a text editor for the Mac.
October 6th was World Ecological Debt Day — the date on which the world officially begins living beyond its means. Renewable resources are used up and we begin eating into natural resources. According to nef, where I got the wonderful word clonetown (meaning the big shops in suburbia that you see everywhere — and it all looks the same), World Ecological Debt Day comes earlier every year. If the entire world lived as those in the UK do, we’d need three planets.
I also stumbled on an ecological footprint quiz. Answer a few questions and it estimates your ecological impact. If everyone lived like me, we’d need 3.2 planets. That’s almost half of what the average person in the US requires, though, so that’s good. I think I win big in the transportation department, since I use public transportation and carpool almost exclusively. Plus I don’t usually travel very far. School is only just over a mile away.
Take the quiz and let me know what you scored in the comments.
Well, this ain’t no Federation baby. Unlike the world of Star Trek, where money isn’t much of an issue for your average Star Fleet officer, money is an issue in our world. And soon to be off our world, as well. In one of those bizarre, possibly pointless moves, some scientists have created a currency fit for space. Paper bills and metal coins just won’t work. If a metal coin develops a jagged edge, that could be deadly in space. Plus, ever try counting dimes in a spacesuit while the Galactic Burger King drive-thru guy looks at you impatiently? Never again, says I!
The Solution
Rather than using paper, which isn’t durable, or metal, which isn’t safe, or credit cards, which have magnetic strips that may interfere with certain electronics (or be destroyed by the solar wind), scientists have settled on using polytetrafluoroethylene, aka teflon. This currency was developed by a group funded by Travelex, a currency exchange firm. The name is a bit grandiose and nauseating at the same time: QUIDs. Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination. A single QUID will be worth about $12.50 US (£6.25, €8.68). So despite being a bit of a pun, it’s also just plain overstretching. Intergalactic? Not unless we develop FTL (faster than light) drives sometime this eon.
Besides being a load of hype, there could be an actual application for this currency. If Virgin Galactic gets off the ground (or one of the other contenders), and space tourism becomes a real thing, these chips will come in handy. And I propose we nickname them chips. How sci-fi that would be.
Not only are honeybees disappearing, but bumblebees are going the way of the dinosaurs too. Bumblebees pollinate roughly 15% of crops, which are worth about $3 billion dollars. While there isn’t a definitive cause yet, the National Academy of Sciences has reported that a combination of habitat loss due to housing developments, intensive agriculture, pesticides, pollution and disease are contributing to a worldwide decrease in pollinators. I wonder how long before global warming is added to that list?
A couple of quotes caught my attention from the article in Discovery News:
“We have been naive,” said Neal Williams, assistant professor of biology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. “We haven’t been diligent the way we need to be.”
“We are smart enough to deal with this,” said Laurie Adams, executive director of the Pollinator Partnership. “There is hope.”
Well, I hope Laurie Adams is right, but I don’t have much faith in the intelligence of mankind. Pollinating insects are one of those things that most people don’t even realize we depend on. Probably given the choice, many people would rather do without bees altogether, except for the honey they make. I know I’ve said something to the effect of “I wish all bees would die” after getting stung. I hate it when trite sayings like “be careful what you wish for” come true. Why didn’t my wishes for no mosquitoes come true instead? I suspect they will only continue to flourish.
The problem with our two-party system is that it encourages uniformity. I am becoming more and more convinced that the only difference between the parties is their rhetoric. An observation that led me to vote Green in the last presidential election. When the Democrats took control of the House in the last election, there was much rejoicing with people celebrating as if the Endless Summer had come at last. There would be no more pain and war and suffering. Total crap. I was happy, but my expectation was failure and weakness and I have not been disappointed.
So now Congress looks to be extending the Bush administration’s wiretapping privileges. Way to stand up for the so-called mandate you were touting, Dems. You suck. From the NY Times:
As the debate over the eavesdropping powers of the National Security Agency begins anew this week, the emerging measures reflect the reality confronting the Democrats.
Although willing to oppose the White House on the Iraq war, they remain nervous that they will be called soft on terrorism if they insist on strict curbs on gathering intelligence. (emphasis mine)
A Democratic bill to be proposed on Tuesday in the House would maintain for several years the type of broad, blanket authority for N.S.A. eavesdropping that the administration secured in August for six months.
In an acknowledgment of concerns over civil liberties, the bill would require a more active role by the special foreign intelligence court that oversees the interception of foreign-based communications by the security agency.
A competing proposal in the Senate, still being drafted, may be even closer in line with the administration plan, with the possibility of including retroactive immunity for telecommunications utilities that participated in the once-secret program to eavesdrop without court warrants.
Reminds me of those Hefty trash bag commercials: “wimpy wimpy wimpy.” I think that makes for a good analogy, because it’s time to take out the trash. With the exception of Dennis Kucinich, I am giving up on the Democratic party. Dennis is the last principled person there. The rest are Republicans in donkey’s clothing. From here on out, I’m voting straight Green (though actually this isn’t much of a change since I never had much faith in the Sheepocrats and voted Green when I could anyway).
Predict the following:
- How long will Michael Vick’s prison sentence be?
- How many iPhones will Apple sell by year’s end?
- How much will Hillary Clinton raise in funds during the fourth quarter of 2007?
How accurate is the crowd? Futures markets have done a good job at predicting how the market will go for certain commodities. This fact inspired DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to create a project that sought to build a futures market around terrorism. People would be able to bid on where and when terrorist events would occur (or be attempted). The public backlash from this idea was enormous. Senator Barbara Boxer raised quite the furor and demanded that the then Information Awareness Office director Admiral John Poindexter be fired. He did lose his job over the affair, but like most Washington insiders, soon found a job on a board of directors.
I actually don’t think the Policy Analysis Market (as it was called) was such a bad idea. It seemed that the three main critcisms against it were
- it would encourage bidders to actually encourage terrorist acts in order to earn payoffs
- it’s grotesque and immoral
- pure vitriol
As for point (1), I can kinda see where they’re coming from. That would definitely be a bad side effect if it were to occur. However, I think the fact that the government knows exactly who is bidding on what, it’s also very dangerous for that person. Also, the thing had $8 million in funding. Not exactly winning the lottery considering that that money had to be spread around creating the system and as a payoff for each particular security to be traded. It was basically an advanced tip service that takes advantage of collective wisdom. Point (2) I’m also not so sure about, since we’re only talking speculation here. Is it immoral for me to predict that another soldier will die in Iraq tomorrow? I’d argue instead that the market, if it did anything at all, would save lives. And as for (3), the level of outrage coming from Senators Boxer and Wyden at the time (this all happened back in 2003) was disgusting. You’d think that DARPA had suggested we start using our babies as a food source.
I could see a worst case scenario cropping up if such a market existed, though. What would happen if this market suddenly predicted that Iran would launch a nuclear attack on American troops in Iraq (or a conventional attack for that matter)? If the market had experienced success before and gained some credibility, this could be considered a justification for war. That would be a very bad thing indeed.
So anyhow, after meandering way off point on a 4-year-old digression, let me come back around to my main point: Predictify. This is a new website that seeks to capitalize on crowd wisdom by predicting events ranging from the mundane to the presidential election. Users can predict outcomes for free and premium users can post polls that collect extra demographics from the users. Certain polls come with prize pots ranging in the hundreds of dollars.
After playing around a bit and making a few predictions, I’ve found it mildly interesting. There are slight problems with the interface. For example, if you’re browsing political predictions and submit a prediction, you’re presented with a link to go back to predicting. This link takes you back to the main page rather than the subtopic you were just at. I found this to be annoying since I had to go back to browsing the topic. Also, the top polls on the main page are starting to get slightly spammy. Predict the outcome of some motorcross race in Las Vegas this weekend for example. Predict the yearly earnings of some company no one has ever heard of. Predict how many speed dates SpeedDates.com will have by the end of the year.
I think Predictify will have to do something to prevent this sort of detritis from clogging up the site. The interesting polls that will bring in the visitors are getting lost in the clutter of these junk pedalers.
Apparently I’m the last one to hear about this since I was the 3166th Digg, but Andy Woerner and a group of friends have built a working X-wing fighter powered by solid-fuel rocket engines. This bad boy is 21 feet long and complete with a model R2D2. It was set to launch yesterday. The results were about what you’d expect. I don’t think R2 managed to eject though, poor little droid.
While listening to Pandora a few months ago I heard “Mrs. McGrath” by Pete Seeger and found it catchy, but like most songs I hear on Pandora, it passed and didn’t come again for a long while. But today I was sitting around and started singing the chorus:
Would you too-rye-ah
Foddle-diddle-dah
toorye oorye oorye-ah
Would you toorye-ah
Foddle diddle dah
toorye oorye oorye-ah
Feeling the need to pursue the song and listen to the full version, I found the name and then found the version I liked on iTunes. Of course, sharing is difficult, but I did find a version on YouTube by Raymond Crooke, bless him. The way Pete Seeger sang it was a little more clean and having the crowd singing the chorus in the background stirs me deeply in a way that Raymond doesn’t quite capture, but his version is the more traditional one. Pete Seeger was singing that concert at Carnegie Hall in 1963, and I’m guessing the audience was a bunch of hippies.