Monthly Archive

Another cool airship just caught my attention, this one a concept vehicle in the form of a hotel in the sky.  It looks a bit like how I imagined the flying manta cloud creatures from the Black Company books by Glen Cook.

Just stumbled on this really cool site if you like steampunk and Star Wars. Being a huge fan of both, I recommend checking it out. If you’re a Star Wars purist, avoiding it might be healthier. The reimagining of Jabba the Hut and the Death Star are the best imo.

My blogarrhea has tapered off over the past few weeks due to a number of time constraints, stress, and anxiety. The wikipedia article for graphomania actually suggests blogging may be a form of graphomania. Currently, I’m visiting the University of Maryland tomorrow to take a look at the (cs) grad school and the CLIP (Computational Linguistics and Information Processing) laboratory. So maybe I won’t blog anything for a couple days or maybe not.

Anyhow, here are two views out of my hotel room of illustrious Silver Springs, Maryland. The direct view out is the roof of a Whole Foods.

Names unnamed, sources unsourced, a CMU professor told me the other day that the best way to identify the party affiliation of political blogs is to find out who the blogger talks about all the time. Republicans spend their time, not bolstering their own candidates, but denegrating the Democrats. Ditto the Democrats. This is perhaps true on average, but you will undoubtedly find counterexamples the instant you start looking. So what about blogs that are leftist that criticize Democrats and Republicans? I suppose there are the right-wing counterparts, but I avoid those since I suspect they are mostly crackpot cults, white-power activists, and warmongers. Or Ron Paul supporters.

Which leads me to my next point. Ron Paul supporters got really motivated this primary season. It was at first inspiring, followed by slightly disturbing. The last time I saw that kind of fanaticism in white suburban males was when Star Wars Episode 1 came out. And like after Episode 1, their hopes were left like fish to die washed up on the rocks of failure beneath an unyielding sun. The so-called revolution did not come. Nor could it.

Next comes the Obamagasm. He talks a pretty talk, but like all mainstream candidates he has sacrificed a number of his ideals. While a little guy in Chicago, Obama met with the Arab community to discuss the issue of Palestinian liberation. Now he has cozied up to America’s client-state, Israel in an effort to improve his electability. I’m trying to rid myself of the feeling that “a candidate has to stick to one position for his entire career or else he has lost his integrity.” It’s just not human to do that and would represent a serious character flaw if the guy in the next cubicle did it. So why must politicians? Pre-Iraq War I was a Republican, but as I grew older and learned new things, that stance has shifted wildly. Shouldn’t I forgive such wishy-washyness in candidates? One might say it is important for a candidate to know himself, which I clearly did not, but new data comes along and sometimes you just have to change.

Every election of importance since 9/11 brings me to an eventual state of despair. Think of the lines of power in a political system. George R. R. Martin, my favorite fantasy author, has a great illustration in one of his books (which I will now present from memory, so consider this a semi-direct quotation with noise). The Master of Whisperers comes to the newly minted Hand of the King (the guy who does the day-to-day running of the kingdom) and presents him this riddle (paraphrased): “A rich man, a priest, a king, and a soldier are all in a room. The rich man says, kill them and I will give you half of all my wealth. The priest says, kill them in the name of the gods. The king says, kill them in the name of your king. Who does he kill?” The Hand in the story ponders the question, which has no answer (or rather, too many). It depends on the soldier. Who has the power? The man with the sword is nobody.

In a democratic society, are we the man with the sword? What is our allegiance? Are we greedy and side with the rich man, or pious and side with the priest? Are we loyal subjects and obey the king? Who taught us that each of these figures (and feel free to add your own) has power over us? Are these teachers the ones with the real power? Or are they just the front for the people with the real power? Where do the lines lead or is it just a jumbled graph that leads nowhere and everywhere? Maybe the power is an emergent behavior of the system — Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Either way, can we ever hope to change it?

Evil like this deserves a special place in hell.

So what sort of damage would you see if that low-yield nuclear device in your basement “accidentally” went off? What if some government launched a very high yield device on another country? Wonder no more!

The following pics are what would happen if “Little Boy” (the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) went off in my basement. Followed by a 50-megaton, also centered on my place. Lastly, what if the asteroid that theoretically killed the dinosaurs landed in my backyard? Good stuff! (The inner circle is the fireball, the purple is 3rd degree burns, the second and first degree.)

It looks like the sunburn (first degree burns) ring is inside the second-degree radius in the asteroid impact one. Still buggy?

I saw a great bumper sticker today.  Unfortunately, the pic I snapped was blurry as all crap and I felt too nervous to take another one.  Which I shouldn’t have, but I can’t help myself.

We child-proofed the house,
But they STILL get in!

This kid in Australia recently debunked the myth that goldfish only have 3-second memories. He did so by conditioning them to come to a beacon by associating it with food. He also trained them to follow short mazes using multiple beacons. These memories last for about a week, or indefinitely if used regularly. One of his goals was to show that it is cruel to put them in small aquariums/bowls. On a side note, it’s also cruel to put them in a small bowl with no air filter. They need at least one square foot of water surface per inch of goldfish (and multiple goldfish increase this proportionally). If you do less, you’re basically suffocating them slowly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday.  He touched many lives through his writing and his ideas had an impact on me at an early age with short stories like “The Nine Billion Names of God” and movies based on his books like 2010 (which I saw in the theater) and later 2001 (which I saw as a young man).   His novel Rendezvous with Rama is being made into a movie and IMDB is quoting 2009 as the release date.  I thought it was interesting to find out he had been living in Sri Lanka for some time.

I visited my family in Ohio this past weekend and my uncle made a few interesting points.  He’s an old-school spring engineer, meaning he learned coming up through the trade rather than by going to school, and he supervises a number of employees at a relatively small spring company.  My grandfather used to own a spring company called, shockingly enough, Adams & Sons Spring Co.  That was later bought out and a number of the employees were moved to a different plant, including my dad and uncle.  So anyhow, my uncle was telling me a story, which I won’t go into, but the heart of it is that you should not wait for people to hand you “what you deserve.”  If you are a leader, regardless of your job title, then lead.  If you see someone who needs help, don’t wait for them to ask you.  Help.  Show that you have the initiative.  That’s probably fairly obvious, I mean we’ve all heard it before, but it came at a particularly important time for me.

I’ve been on twitter for a while now, though I don’t update it super-regularly like some people.  It’s fun and I hope more of my friends start using it, but I’ve noticed an interesting trend.  Just about anything is open to potential spam.  Friendster is sick with it.  MySpace is abominable.  LinkedIn seems fairly immune and I’ve gotten very few spam friend requests from Facebook.  Twitter has so far been very good about it, but there is a new trend that I’ve found interesting.  You can follow people and people can follow you on twitter.  So your status updates are public and potentially seen by thousands of people.  How do you increase the number of people who follow you?  Follow them, of course!  I’m having random people follow me left and right.  It only helps me, since I don’t follow them back, but it’s interesting to note.

My friend Israel has a passion for helping people. He’s currently working on a grant proposal for a project to bring text alerts to farmers in so-called developing nations. Currently, middle men come to farmers and buy their goods at prices that aren’t always the going market rate. Farmers are often isolated and so getting updated information on prices isn’t easy. The goal is to provide them cell phones (this would be done by another agency) and then to send them text messages with the latest prices. This can be generalized to a wide variety of alerts to help people whose access to information is otherwise limited.

The NetSquared Mashup challenge is providing a group of non-profit projects a chance to compete for funding. All you have to do to help is vote for CellAlert.net to win. So, please help him out, won’t you? (Voting begins Monday March 17th.)

NOTE:  To vote, you will need to register with netsquared on the site and choose at least 5 projects you support.

I just watched Next starring Nicolas Cage and Jessica Biel.  Oh and Julianne Moore.  I liked it a lot, mainly because it brought together a slew of my favorite elements:  people who can see the future (precogs) and nuclear explosions.  And other explosions.  Plus it was based on a short story by one of my favorite writers of all time:  Philip K. Dick.  Now if they had only found different actors than Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore, we might have had a more appealing movie.  Spoilers beneath the fold.  This isn’t so much a review as a statement of what I found cool about it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Researchers in the video below filled an ant colony with concrete and dug it out to see just how exactly the colony was organized underground. The results are just plain awesome. Ants farm fungus and use livestock (aphids), build cities and wage wars. What the video refers to as a hive consciousness is emergent behavior: each ant following a series of simple rules results in a collective behavior that appears to be driven by a single conscious mind.

This reminds me of one of my favorite books growing up: City by Clifford D. Simak. Simak seems to be a virtually forgotten author these days, though you can occasionally find his books in a Barnes & Noble (and of course, widely available online). City was probably his best work and had an incredible vision (it was written in 1952). I won’t spoil much, but he introduces the idea of a colony of ants that is given the opportunity to survive many winters. They learn to produce heat on their own and make several appearances as the tale unfolds over hundreds of years. I highly recommend it and it’s one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time. I’ve also read The Goblin Reservation and The Visitors by him and I can recommend the former. The latter I still enjoyed, but if you are going to check out anything he has done, make that the third choice. Simak has an easy-to-read style that incorporates fantastic elements into what would otherwise be hard sci-fi, raising interesting philosophical questions in the process.

This time I’m in Ohio, so no new posts for a little while.  One thing I’d like to note, if anyone wants to leave a comment on this blog, I normally approve it.  The exception I make is no valid email address.  You don’t need a website, but I want an email address.  You know who I am, after all.

Lest we forget [source].

Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic are working on creating characters for Second Life with the reasoning abilities of a four-year-old. They currently have a character named Eddie that can reason about his own beliefs and make choices based on them. This is interesting progress in AI. Children four and under haven’t learnt to build models of other people’s behavior. So in the example in the article, a child is shown Person A placing a teddy bear in a cabinet. Person A leaves and Person B moves the bear from the cabinet to the refrigerator. Person A comes back in and the child is asked to predict where Person A will look for the bear. Because they don’t have this model yet, they will say the refrigerator. Eddie does this at first, but then learns the correct model with an additional iteration of the process.

The problem here is the venue. Second Life is a den of sexual deviants. If it’s not the furries, it’s child molesters. One disturbing phenomenon is people with child avatars who want to be molested. So, is it really wise to put a simulated child character in this world?

So I was recently asked (and gave a very bad answer to) a question that has been haunting me ever since.  What is the subfield of computer science where I am the strongest?  First of all, in my undergraduate training, I was never really introduced to these ideas of subfields of CS explicitly.  I knew intuitively there was a difference between people working on databases or on operating systems, programming languages or algorithms, but it wasn’t emphasized as a choice I would ever need to make.  This is perhaps because I went to a relatively weak school in CS for my undergrad.  But now that I’m in a rather strong CS school and pursuing a CS-related masters, the question should probably have entered my mind before now.

So when asked, I floundered about for an idea and spluttered out “algorithms” just because it seemed like it was hard to go wrong there.  Well, I’ll leave the details out of this little memoire, but suffice it to say, I was wrong.  A better answer would have been “none.”  Where does natural language processing / computational linguistics fall in the list of subfields?  Is it its own?  Or is it part artificial intelligence, part algorithms, part whatever?  I’ve seen it lumped with AI more closely in the past, but unfortunately AI escaped me as a possible choice when called upon in this high-stress scenario.  Moreover, I haven’t really compartmentalized techniques as belonging to “AI” or “databases.”  Is it useful to do that?  I guess I do sometimes, but when people ask me to make big picture assessments of things I haven’t thought about much, it takes me a while to process it.

I hate interviews.

I’m out of town until Sunday night, and I had a crapload of homework this week, thus explaining the uncharacteristic lack of posts. I think since I started blogging, this has been the longest period sans post…

Perhaps you’ve seen the “FAIL” meme that’s going around the tubes. If not, search on google images for “epic fail” and you’ll hit it soon enough (I won’t link to them). Basically it’s a bunch of pictures of people screwing up or things built wrong or whatever. In short: failures. So tonight when we parked outside of a restaurant and our parking meter said this, I had to get a shot.

No spoiler review.

Last night I watched Beowulf, the recent Robert Zemeckis version. My review can be summed up simply: it blew. Hardcore. Before it was over, I wanted to tear my eyes out. And sadly, it is true that what is seen, cannot be unseen.

Tonight, Donna and I watched The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Something I had heard as a kid about movies was that the longer the movie title, the worse the movie. Nothing could be more wrong in this case. What I say in this review should not be considered a spoiler, since the facts are a matter of historical record. Plus the title gives away the crucial plot point, so it’s not like you were going to be surprised when Robert Ford kills Jesse James. I won’t go into further details about the specifics of what happens.

What struck me as truly powerful in this movie was the development of Robert Ford’s character. Casey Affleck did a great job and deserved his Oscar nomination. Brad Pitt didn’t detract from the film, either.  I highly recommend it if you love westerns, though it wasn’t really a western in the conventional sense.

At one point in the film, there is a guy in a bar singing a song that struck me as particularly cool. Lo and behold, it is a real song: “The Ballad of Jesse James.” Does it mean I’m getting old that I like folk songs so much? I’ve included the lyrics below the jump.

Jesse James was a train and bank robber who killed at least 17 people. He went by the name of Thomas Howard in order to escape the law. While still alive, he inspired the popular media so much, people were publishing made-up stories of his exploits. Children grew up idolizing him. When he died, he was transformed into a Robin Hood figure. The ballad portrays him as a man who stole from the rich to give to the poor. What was it about him that so captured people’s hearts and minds? I think we can’t resist the idea of that kind of freedom. He was beholden to no man. He had no boss and he thwarted the powerful. He had his own cunning and skill and the bravery to use them. He was a murderer and a thief, and people wished they could be him. He is still famous over a hundred and twenty years after his death.

Read the rest of this entry »