What the hell is up with fake blue eyes in commercials? Some lousy Father’s Day commercial came on today and I was immediately struck by the little boy with spice addiction. His eyes were glowing blue and when I paused it to get a closer look, it turns out he has no pupils. This crappy [...]
Archive for June, 2009
Spice-addicted child stars in commercial
Posted: 17 June 2009 in UncategorizedTags: commercials, dune, humor, rants, real sci-fi, spice addiction
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Wolfram|Alpha is making kids dumber?
Posted: 16 June 2009 in UncategorizedTags: education, wolfram alpha
While that statement is a bit premature, I guarantee you will hear a chorus of teachers belching that from their 1970′s era podiums in the coming months. One of the coolest features of Wolfram|Alpha, being able to do annoying calculus problems at the drop of a hat, is going to mean cheating galore. This point [...]
Alternative Grad School
Posted: 9 June 2009 in UncategorizedTags: grad school, inspiration, life choices, music, seth godin, twitter
Image via CrunchBase Seth Godin suggests that all these unemployed college grads put themselves to good purpose this year and spend some time really enriching themselves (ht to @johndcook for the link). The laundry list of to-do items includes: Spend twenty hours a week running a project for a non-profit. Teach yourself Java, HTML, Flash, [...]
Sunsets are so beautiful. But their beauty is transient. I sit in front of my window and feel the peace of the moment. I rarely feel peace anymore, so even a moment is a treasure. But it is a peace haunted by the knowledge that soon the gold and peach streaks will flee from the [...]
Two new toys: G^2 and Bing
Posted: 3 June 2009 in UncategorizedTags: bing, google, google squared, image search, information retrieval, knowledge engine, search engines, wolfram alpha
This week has given me two new toys to play with, and you could probably say both were bought at the dollar store. The first was Microsoft‘s release of Rebranded Live, aka Bing. Bing’s search results have been poor (for me), but not much poorer than Google‘s. Just enough poorer for me to see no [...]
It’s official – girls think CS sucks
Posted: 2 June 2009 in UncategorizedTags: acm, computer science, computing, gender gap, girls, minorities, nic, wgbh
New Image for Computing (NIC) is a project put together by WGBH and the ACM to spice up the image of computing professions amongst teens, especially among girls and minorities. They released a study showing that at least among boys, the mission has pretty much been achieved for minorities. Black and hispanic male teens have [...]
