A silly project for another time:
Describing the process of baking cookies in the fashion of a formal scientific journal article, complete with an abstract, background, methodology, results, and discussion. Perhaps a bibliography for good measure.
Maybe I’ve been in research too long, but the notion of parsing just about anything mundane into the language and format [...]
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Posted in Computing, General, Musing, tagged Asynchronous Bayesian Classification Database, augmented reality, broadcasting, computer vision, geosynchronization, lifestreaming, mobile web, object recognition on April 30, 2008 | No Comments »
I’d like to peek around the next corner in technology. Specifically, what technological challenges and solutions will arise following the advent/ascension of the mobile web. Let’s fast forward about five years, give or take some technological optimism.
Assumptions
Broadband wireless internet is widely accessible in the developed world.
Mobile audio and visual data capturing devices with day-scale battery [...]
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A break from the usual tech-talk, here’s a short poem that popped to mind this morning. If your art-glands hurt afterwords, blame the inspiration for picking crappy a poet.
new-wrought buds of leaves
in neon em’rald they bloom
against the concrete
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For those outside the know, lifestreaming is the phenomenon of more or less continuous recording and transmission of observations about one’s life. It’s the log of a perpetual twitterer, the live webcam someone wears on their hat, the flickr account of a geotagged-mobile-phone-camera-addict.
The side of lifestreaming everyone talks about is the fact that you get [...]
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People remember images more easily than they can remember complex strings of words. Furthermore, images can automatically evoke complex sets of associated thoughts and emotions. We should leverage the associative power of images to help sort through thick information sets.
I’m talking about web-searching with an unconventional “semantic” twist.
The tools to make this work are all [...]
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Posted in Art, Computing, General, Musing, tagged backgrounds, design, desktop, eyes of a chile, Productivity, wonderment on April 28, 2008 | No Comments »
Back as a grade school kid, I was impressed by the array of neat options we had for decorating our desktops on the old Macs. Patterns! Colors! Eventually… whole pictures! “Cool beans” at the times, really. Even back then, I was wondering how we’d be entertaining our eyes in between games of Super Word Muncher, [...]
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If there is such a thing as a universal truism, is there a way to communicate it universally?
Some working definitions to guide the thought process:
Truism
A bit of wisdom about life. More specifically, wisdom that can be practically applied.
Universal
Applicable and understandable at some point in any given person’s life, regardless of cultural circumstances. Caveats added for [...]
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A truism or two about how assorted careerpeople respond to the professional imperative.
A Researcher’s Motto:
Publish or perish!
A Blogger’s Motto:
Post or perish!
A Preacher’s Motto:
Parish or perish!
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Terrible, every single one of them.
Constellation of Bone
Death Triad
The Sidewalk Lickers
Black Glass Shards
Drowning in Magma
Sven and the Seven Deadly Songs
Shut Your Life Hole
Hedgehog Eats Ferret
Shanks and his Bloody Knives
Ennuinvincible
If any of these names actually end up being taken, I’d definitely go to a concert or two just to see the people who have the guts/psychoses [...]
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A hearty congratulations to the forward-minded people at the Sunlight Foundation for their most recent effort, a highly-comment-able version of the Transparency in Government Act of 2008.
While one certainly can’t expect all legislation to become this accessible in a heartbeat (especially those with even more arcane references to older bills), the very act of crying [...]
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Posted in Business, Computing, Musing, Silly, tagged alliance, gaming, guild, management, morale, multiplayer, team-building, World of Warcraft, WoW on April 12, 2008 | No Comments »
Wouldn’t it be a good morale-boosting strategy for corporations to encourage the development of in-company gaming groups? For example, could mean formal all-company-member World of Warcraft guilds, Team Fortress sides split up by department, or giant free-for-alls in any old multiplayer game.
Certainly seems more entertaining and lower-hassle than the old-fashioned notion of corporate softball leagues. [...]
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Telegyresis.
The ability to alter the direction and magnitude of the spin of an object at a distance.
Huh?
It’s a “special ability.” You know, the kind found in stories about mutants and warlocks or robots and morlocks. Telegyresis is a specialized branch of telekinesis, the general ability to move things or apply force at will from a [...]
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Posted in Art, General, Silly, tagged humor, graph, chart, robot, gynoid, research, ghost in the shell, star trek, battlestar galactica, terminator, number six, motoko kusanagi, seven of nine on April 7, 2008 | No Comments »
A graph showing the relationship between the amount of effort humans put into making robots and the amount of sexy female robots found in popular culture.
The graph is fictional, but I’m not convinced the relationship is false.
P.S. Yes, I know that humorous graphs are all the rage these days. I couldn’t help myself in this [...]
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Posted in Computing, Devices, Quantification, tagged analysis, audio, class, course, easy, Education, learning, notes, recording, summarization on April 5, 2008 | No Comments »
How about an application that made reviewing what you learned in class easy?
People already record lectures for later review, but listening to a whole course worth of class might take way too long. Students need a way to summarize these audio recordings so that they can better focus their studies.
One technique would be to use [...]
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Posted in Musing, Society & Politics, tagged algebra, automata, Education, engaging, high school, junior high, Math, regular expressions, secondary, teachers, teaching on April 2, 2008 | No Comments »
Perhaps an enterprising secondary school math teacher could lead the charge by introducing regular expressions in Algebra class.
Regular expressions are algebraic, useful for logical theory and, eventually, handy for programming manipulations with real language. I posit that introducing students to regular expressions at the same time that they’re learning the axioms of algebra would be [...]
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