I think part of the reason I enjoy programming so much is that there is no entropy in what I create. Information gets out of date, standards change, yes, but that’s just a synchronization problem, not a Universe problem. Or is entropy a bad thing? It’s the enemy of order and structure, yes. But it […]
Category Archives: thought
things elecronic
06-Oct-05emergent road maps and route-finding
28-Sep-05Cold-medicine induced altered mental-state yesterday gave me an interesting idea: Right now all the mapping companies (mapquest, yahoo maps, google maps) use NavTeq to gather data. Once (if ever) cell phone usage data tied to GSM becomes public (a la MIT’s Mobile Landscape), I wonder if you can aggregate data of people going from point […]
Accelerando
26-Aug-05The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0 —Accelerando, a post-cyberpunk novel by Charles Stross A good read, and Creative-Commons-Released-For-Free-Download. Aside from a too-explicit-for-my-puritan-tastes S&M scene near the beginning, […]
Extracting Semantics from Folksonomy?
25-Aug-05So, we have some really nice folksonomies out there now. And they’re really good for humans. But what can machines do with them? Can we use del.icio.us to further the sisyphan goals of the semantic web? More specifically, I was talking to HaoChuan tonight about how one might automatically use a folksonomy to populate an […]
If you derive your cuisine from famous chefs, then you have no cuisine; and if you derive what you call your culture from famous artists … then you do not really have a culture. interesting thought, that true “culture” springs more from the common man than from the elite.
taiwan
24-Jun-05been in taiwan for about a week now. forgot how oppressive the humidity is, and how good the fruits and vegetables are (amazing how things can taste when you breed fruits for flavor instead of resistance to pesticides/long-ripeness for shipping). had dinner with a couple blogger/social-software guys from Academica Sinica a couple nights ago. it […]
Mad Paper-Reading
11-Jun-05Expanding our Eurospeech paper (which we found last week was accepted!) on modeling language learner spoken disfluencies into a full journal paper. Been re-acquainting myself with the masses of related work this weekend. A fun side effect is that I don’t feel so alone in my research any more. Here, where I sit, at the […]
Spam in the Post-Turing-Test World
22-May-05The recent combination of getting a lot of pseudo-conversational-type email spam, and getting to know an online friend whom I’ve never met in real life has triggered an interesting thought: When (if) we solve the AI-hard thing, when we’re able to make virtual agents that can carry on conversations and social interactions just like real […]
Thru Which Lenses?
20-May-05It all depends on which set of glasses you use to look at reality, I guess… Another entry from McSweeny’s lists: Three Items at the Supermarket I See in a New Way, Now That I’ve Read Some Books on Literary Theory. This is brilliant. // TODO: insert witty and sublime metaphor about Supermarkets and Life […]