April 2011
3 posts
is everything logged these days? →
bitcoinnews:
Check back throughout the day for the latests developments in Bitcoin.
Tuesday, Apr 26th, 2011
Security alert: Liberty Reserve Transactions made using Liberty Reserve causes information, including IP address, to be shared with Amazon AWS and visits are tracked using Google Analytics. LR…
augmented reality for safer driving. →
“Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and...”
– Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950
March 2011
8 posts
http://nice, but "plus"/"plussed" is more likely... →
i’ll devote my life to developing software that can solve the original Myst game with (1) no human interference (2) no using the little hints from the CD-ROM booklet.
esperiments
put a bag of green tea over a cup and filter espresso through it. resulting product has a nice flavor and some theanine.
“Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up these...”
– Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning, There Was the Command Line, 1999.
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write,...”
– Alvin Toffler, Rethinking the 21st Century.
by my buddy soundsofsilvazws. somewhere in between...
February 2011
12 posts
List of lists of lists - Wikipedia →
draxiom:
This is exactly what it sounds like, and yes it does actually contain itself.
“Everyone has a right to be proud of where they’re from …. and Angelenos are no...”
– Taken from Hidden LA. (via dwol)
3 tags
this is article is very misinformed all up in the... →
so, the opening several grafs on rule-following vs. rule-breaking are a pretty tiresome rhetorical handwave. but what the rhetorical hand ends up settling on a “confused idea”:
(1) humans are able to break rules by analyzing their importance in context! (2) computers are not able to break rules because they are unable to process context the way we are!
THE OBVIOUS CONCLUSION (3)...
confessions of a prep school college counsellor. →
“Part of my problem in getting on board the college frenzy was that I genuinely believed that any one of the colleges on our approved list of a hundred or so was capable of providing students with a good, even a great, education. The funny thing about teenagers is that very often the best of them, the most interesting and curious, are rather lousy high school students. They have other...
“The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines...”
– Howard Rheingold, The virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier (1993), p. 63.
“I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and...”
– Sinclair Lewis, an American satiric novelist and social critic, became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1930), and was born on this date (Feb 7) in 1885. (via canisfamiliaris)
Google, Bing & searching searches. →
The cheating analogy expresses a clear opinion on who’s wrong and who’s right in this mess. It frames Bing as the dumb jock cheating off the smart kid’s test (and anyone who cares about this debate enough to read this far is likely to associate with the smart kid). But it doesn’t capture the full subtlety of what exactly has been going on between Google’s search...
“Ireland’s financial disaster shared some things with Iceland’s. It was created...”
– michael lewis, when Irish eyes are crying.
“Many writers who grew up reading in the 1980s are just now starting to have...”
– lawrence person, notes toward a postcyberpunk manifesto
January 2011
15 posts
De Wahl's rule
suppose you have a bunch of similar languages. now suppose you’d like to invent a language such that, if someone were to speak any of several of these related languages, they’d have no problem understanding text in the language.
how do you simplify common features in an algorithmic way to create a mutually intelligible product?
in this case, we’re talking about the...
full width at half maximum →
Au-ch →
Gold Tea is a brand of ice tea that is originally from the Confederate States of America in the 19th century. It was famous for containing large quantities of small flakes of gold in each cup. This was done not purely for aesthetics, but as a means of smuggling Confederate gold through Union blockades.
the ragbag: words wholly related →
ragbag:
tulip & turban
when maury povich handed out english’s paternity results, few in the audience were surprised to learn that the language was the bastard child of german and latin parents (with an occasional ménage à trois with the french maid). but what maury never told you, indeed what the…
fuck yes
Semantic satiation →
readmorewikipedia:
Semantic satiation is a cognitive neuroscience phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. For example, say: “smile smile smile smile smile smile smile smile smile smile smile smile smile smile….”.
Swedish Lesson #1
ckck:
Gift [jif:t]
In Swedish, the word gift has two meanings:
being married
poison
3 tags
(more efficient) simple prime number check in C.
this code is a more efficient simple C primality check than the other one that is readily findable on the internet. notes at the bottom.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <math.h>
int main (void)
{
int x;
//get input x
printf(“Enter integer: “);
scanf (“%d”, &x);
printf(“%d”, x); //output the number to...
elsehow's perfectly reasonable predictions about...
by 2020, I predict with near certainty that humanity will have:
cured some number of diseases
made taller buildings
flown faster
found bigger prime numbers.
Potentially the best Google Voice transcription of...
nathaliebfr:
2 key. Pantsuits mommy calling you because you’re with the two to exit, get to Difference tonight. Thank you, too. Just all so I wanted to. Thank you. Love and hugs and hope that link to Chico it’s good. Okay love you bye. Yeah.
some day, when my friends and I have helped to make natural language processing suck [even a little bit] less, I will show people how stupid computers...
“In the context of most organizations, a non-networked computer is just a very...”
December 2010
12 posts
the first person ever diagnosed with autism. →
An old acquaintance named Buddy Lovett, who resides one town over, in Morton, Mississippi, told us that Donald had assigned him the number 333 sometime in the late 1950s. […]
[T]hose who receive a Donald Number seem to remember it for the rest of their lives. An indelible distinction, a recognition they’ll never have to share—it may feel akin to an honor.
That is almost certainly not...
the luxury of slowly falling apart. (sapolsky... →
amusing words about this article from ideafestival:
Having been implicated in a host of chronic conditions, stress is the repeated sweep of the horizon, the bug in our code, the shallow breath of our pell-mell lives.
Mindful? Most days, I’d settle for remembering where I left my keys.
Describing this thoroughly modern state of affairs as “the luxury of slowly falling apart,”...
“maður er manns gaman”
– fuck yeah old norse.
“In fact, West’s paper in Science ignited a flurry of rebuttals, in which...”
– Jonah Lehrer, A Physicist Solves the City.
the article "nondeterministic algorithm" on... →
read it, it’s cool.
“I wonder what the smallest garbage can I could put on my curb is that the...”
– Demetri Martin, Person.
“A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph...”
– Marvin Minsky, Why Programming is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly-Understood and Sloppily-Formatted Ideas
Watchthis project is drawing closer to completion.
How an 11-Year Old Girl Convinced Lincoln to Grow... →
theatlantic:
In what has to go down as one of the all-time great moments of political image consulting, an 11-year old girl suggested to a fresh-faced Abe Lincoln that he grow a beard. And then he did. The website Letters of Note even has copies of the girl’s letter and Lincoln’s response. Beyond being the cutest historical footnote of all time, Ms. Grace Bedell, had some solid reasoning...