As a break from Artificial Intelligence ponderings, I was recently mailed a sampler of darjeeling oolong teas so that I could participate in an “on-line tasting”. Thanks to T-Ching, and Phyll Sheng for arranging the tasting. And, finally, a huge thanks to Lochan Tea for providing the leaves, and for pioneering this new form of […]
Monthly Archives: February 2007
Darjeeling Oolongs
28-Feb-07“Where is my cure for this disease?”
12-Feb-07Thinking a bit about AI this weekend. 30 years ago, we tried to imagine what life would be like in 2010. Intelligent Agents, Strong AI, etc etc. It’s a bit disheartening that the pinnacle of AI that we have to show for our efforts are things like PageRank and phrase-based statistical machine translation. Not to […]
Building a Smarter Feedreader
10-Feb-07I ran across Leonard Richardson’s Ultra Gleeper again yesterday. I hadn’t seen it for a year, and it’s been good looking at it with new eyes since I’ve begun hacking in earnest on machine learning problems and measuring “interestingness” of RSS posts. The project is interesting because he aims to solve the same problem I […]
Car Buying
07-Feb-07Bought a car over the last two weekends, and it was surprisingly painless. Here’s the 4-step process: 2 weekends ago we set aside Sunday afternoon to see what make/model/color/options we wanted. We knew we weren’t going to buy anything that weekend, just see exactly what we wanted. Having decided on a Civic, we compiled a […]
Visualization of Academic Papers
01-Feb-07Earlier this morning found a wonderful bit of information visualization, graphing the patterns in academic publication over 3 centuries (!). Chris Harrison‘s “Visualizing the Royal Society Archive” (found via Information Aesthetics). Beautiful graphs. I have a little criticism for his methodology (why not remove stop words? why graph on a 45 degree slant? why not […]