iDallas!In this Wired interview Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, says some pretty insightful things about the nature of science and technology and some hard choices we all might have to make in the decades to come. He also goes on to talk about his ‘meditation wall’ being designed by world-class engineers for his New York apartment (he lives in Aspen, CO). Interesting fellow.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 was one of my first few Playstation 2 games and gave me reason to worry about my future as I played it almost non-stop for the first few weeks I had it. Pro Skater 4 didn’t inspire quite the same fear for my life, but I still distinctly remember the moments as I unlocked each level.
With much excitement, I bought a copy of Tony Hawk’s Underground the other day. The series has taken a bit of a turn with this addition, going with more of a story-based format. You can read about the specifics on all the usual game review sites.
After playing it for several hours, here’s my thoughts. The addition of multiple difficulty settings is GREAT. Not everyone is a career game player and some people actually like to do their best to avoid frustration in their lives. The story mode is good enough and the dialog has made me chuckle more than once already. The skating is great (of course) and the new trick options are fun. Interestingly, some of the missions involve driving cars or running and jumping instead of just skating (strange, I know). The variety is welcome and the missions are still fun, but those parts aren’t nearly as well implemented as the skating parts. Overall, the game’s well worth the purchase price if you’re a fan of the series and if you’ve never played a Tony Hawk game before this is a good one to start with. It makes new strides in teaching you the moves as you complete the missions.
I heard about this at some point a long time ago, but I never tried it out until now. If you have cable tv service, call up your cable company and ask if they have any promotions you can take advantage of. They probably will and you’ll probably get some premium channels for free for 3 months or something. Easy!
I got an interesting spam today that seems to perhaps be an attempt to reduce the effectiveness of these Bayesian statistics-based spam filters that have become the rage recently. The message contains white text on a white background so it appears to be blank, but the words appear if you run a selection over them all. Once visible, they seem to be all random words. Most of the words are harmless, but some of them are words that are probably common to spam. You lose either way because marking it as spam will add in non-spam type words into the filter database potentially increasing the rate of false positives, but leaving it as non-spam reduces the score of the spam words contained in the message potentially increasing the rate of false negatives.
The ever-popular Spamassassin has a Bayesian component in its arsenal, but uses more traditional content-based filters as well. Apple’s Mail client has a built-in Bayesian Junk Filter, and Bogofilter is a unix-based Bayesian filter that I use myself.
According to this message on the mp3.com site, they have been consumed by CNET and will be taking their site offline on Dec 2. They will be destroying all content so all people with mp3.com sites will need to find alternative hosting. MP3.com will return in another format at a later time. Man, the Internet’s growing up, and I don’t like it one bit.
BBC Article
Some researchers have figured out how to make small amounts (very small) of electricity by simply passing water through very small channels cut into a hunk of glass. It’s not even close to being commercially viable now, but the possibility of being able to power small electronic devices with water is very exciting.
Check out this flash movie spoof on the Matrix. It’s funny and provides information about the current state of factory farming in America. If you want to know where your food comes from, take the red pill…
A co-founder of both Palm and Handspring as well as the founder of a brain research lab, this guy‘s one of the most forward thinking people in technology today. This is my favorite line, haha:
“I have some things to work on that are totally new, which Nokia would never do and Compaq and Microsoft would probably never think of.”
After 17 or so days on the road, I’m finally back in my own cozy house with my own cozy bed. I love traveling and seeing new things and people, but it’s always so nice to return home. No matter how many old friends you catch up with or new friends you get to know, the friends waiting at home are still the best friends of all.
For some reason, one embarassing moment of my life keeps popping up in my head from time to time. It happened when I was in 5th grade, but I can’t seem to get past it. I guess I might as well share it with everyone.
Here’s the story: I was in school and the teacher asked a question something like, “What are the people who ride race horses called?” It probably wasn’t just like that, but that’s the idea. I raised my hand and when called on I said the answer was ‘disc jockey’. Everyone in the class proceeded to laugh and I was awfully embarassed. I was one of the smart kids in school so the laughter was probably intensified as a result.
More details: Earlier that week, I had been reading an Archie or Richie Rich comic and one of the mini one-page comics involved a play on the term ‘disc jockey’. In the final frame, it showed a jockey all geared up riding on a giant record album. There were reins and everything. It was pretty funny for a little comic, but it went completely over my otherwise fairly quick 5th grade head. I didn’t know what a disc jockey was, I guess, and I assumed that the joke was showing how funny it was that people who ride horses were called ‘disc jockeys’. It seemed odd at the time, but Archie and Richie Rich had never let me down before and I took it at face value. I did realize my mistake later, after I had already embarrassed myself thoroughly.
I never really wanted to raise my hand and answer any questions for pretty much the rest of my school life. That situation continued clear through college, though I didn’t actually know the answers most of the time in college so it might not really count. I guess I was an unusually sensitive child and I think that moment really affected me. I was already shy and it sealed that into me even further. Up until now, I hadn’t made this connection, but I had noticed that this disc jockey situation had stayed in my mind for whatever reason.
Maybe my mind will be able to let this go now that I’ve revealed the fact that once in 5th grade I didn’t know the difference between a jockey and a disc jockey. Wish me luck!