Undusting History
During my packing for a move to UCI, I’ve come across the following items (all covered in dust): A newspaper clipping titled The Surreal Life, about Mark Chorvinsky and his magazine, Strange. April 1987 issue of Computer magazine, with feature…
Audience Question at Conferences
I’ve been watching the videos of last year’s Singularity Summit and noticed that, along with all other conferences I’ve watched, questions from the audience are completely inaudible to the sound recorder. There is a very simple solution that I haven’t…
Some Wisdom from Minsky
I was briefly reading Minsky’s Society of Mind and found these passages memorable. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. That’s why it’s almost always wrong…
More Accurate Speedometer
I’ve been sitting on this idea for at least a year, and I’m not really sure why I haven’t blogged about it yet. It turns out that car speedometers are not very accurate. In fact, they can be on the…
Markov Coincidence
I was chatting with one of my friends recently. He was telling me about a Markov chain program (I think 5th order) that he had just finished. This gave me an interesting idea. Suppose that you were to measure the…
The GNU’s Thumb
Alright, So I’ve been thinking about keeping my home directory in git recently. I have a machine that I can dedicate to storing a ‘master copy’ and I’ve no problem with creating scripts and minor utils to help things along….
Hardware Failure
Hardware fails from time to time. And, unlike software, it can’t be fixed by typing or scriptic incantation. One of the harddrives in my primary computer failed. Fortunately, I set up that machine with 2 500GB drives as a mirrored…
Bounding Problution.
Problutions (noun, pl.): the problems that are an inherent part of solution to a very difficult and complex problem. These problems arise from within the solution itself, and are extrinsic to the original problem. Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit…
Eclectic Tastes in Music
I don’t usually listen to music at all, The only band that I know for sure that I like is Rush (and that’s primarily because they have works inspired by Rand, in addition to a light sprinkling of non-traditional psychedelic…
Graph of the English Language
Dictionaries are really great tools, but they can only go so far. The really good ones (The OED) will give the user a really good ‘feel’ for the word, a sense of the connotations that go beyond the straightforward definition….