C. Noized

This has to be one of the most fun videos I've seen in a while.
Gogol Bordello - Start Wearing Purple

Lyrics: http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858560196

Current Music: Start wearing purple

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/diaz20071216/

A brilliant parody. Dr. Thog refutes the claims of Dr. Klomp that we are on the verge of the 'Quickening' in which in "the post-simian world, we may develop into a species that is not only intellectually superior to our current state, but capable of feats beyond the comprehension of a contemporary simian." True genius.

Finally a cup holder I'd put in the '91 Maxima. Oddly enough the '91 Maxima has no cup holders! The '92 has seven. I've not found a cup holder that worked. They either didn't fit or couldn't be adapted to the curves in the inside of the car. So after 16 years I've finally seen the cup holder that would work - now if someone in the USA would carry it ... (just in time for me to sell the car too.)

http://www.uberreview.com/2007/07/unique-drink-holder-for-your-car.htm

Current Mood: amused

The Early Signs of the Long Tomorrow

"We deployed the simulator on a 4096-processor BlueGene/L supercomputer with 256 MB per CPU. We were able to represent 8,000,000 neurons (80% excitatory) and 6,300 synapses per neuron in the 1 TB main memory of the system. Using a synthetic pattern of neuronal interconnections, at a 1 ms resolution and an average firing rate of 1 Hz, we were able to run 1s of model time in 10s of real time!"

Current Mood: quixotic

Imagine that every car on the road was required to have a rear sticker that told you with a number what gas mileage it achieved. Then color the background of the sticker into four groups: red, orange, yellow and green. Green would be for those cars above the average, yellow for those around the average, orange and red for the gas guzzlers. Red would say this car does worse than half the average. Incorporate this into the car license plate or as part of the registration.

I wonder how long it would take for people to change their preference for "greener" cars?

As people bought more economical cars the average should also go up.

I'd also work out a conversion for electric cars that drew power from the grid based on the gas required to generate the power.

Current Mood: busy

This is exciting as it shows how the switching on/off of the production of certain proteins within neurons can account for our long term memories.

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Neurobiologists have discovered a mechanism by which the constantly changing brain retains memories--from that dog bite to that first kiss. They have found that the brain co-opts the same machinery by which cells stably alter their genes to specialize during embryonic development.
...
In this process, molecules called methyl groups are attached to genes, which switches them off. Conversely, lack of methyl groups enables the genes to remain activated.
...
Using drugs that inhibit methylation, the researchers showed that methylation was necessary for rats to form such (fear in a certain location) memories.
...
The memory suppressor gene they studied is called protein phosphatase 1, and the memory-promoting gene is called reelin.
...
they noted, abnormal epigenetic regulation (the use of methylation during embryonic development to selectively deactivate genes) has been seen in cancer, some types of autism, and schizophrenia
...
Reference: Miller et al.: "Covalent Modification of DNA Regulates Memory Formation."
Publishing in Neuron 53, 857--869, March 15, 2007. DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2007.02.022.

Science Daily Article

Current Location: home
Current Mood: chipper

IP rights cover your ability to play, use, remix and create new technologies content. Audio, Video, Midi, Art work, photography, writing, blogs, they are all affected. Lawrence Lessig presented a fantastic talk to the Berlin hackers conference 23C3. He explains just how far out of sync the law is with current culture and more importantly what we can do about it. You can watch the video from google.

I originally found this through BoingBoing on Jan 3rd and only recently got around to seeing it all the way through.

Current Mood: chipper

Boing Boing has an entry about the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods in which various visualization techniques have been illustrated using the form of the chemical periodic table.

While the entries are fairly cool -- roll the mouse over to see an example of the technique -- the whole notion of forcing them into the form of a periodic table is total nonsense. Why should their be a one-to-one correspondence between chemical elements and
visualization techniques.

They totally missed the point of the element table, instead they made top to bottom increasing complexity and chose the number of examples to make it work. The table doesn't provide any further insight unlike the chemical table which helped scientists predict missing elements. I wonder how many visualization techniques were missed because there was not enough chemical elements.

This is so wrong headed I'm not going to continue breaking it apart any further ...

Current Mood: annoyed

Greg London answers: "Why would it be a bad thing if you wrote a story, upon having the idea for one?"

The whole fascinating thread is about authors reading the reader comments at Amazon.com and how that leads to insanity, lack of courage etc. The other participants are nearly all current authors.

Current Mood: stressed

The kitchen cabinets arrived today. They are now all packed into the garage waiting for the rest of the remodel to occur. I'll be posting lots of photos documenting the whole mess. I have subs doing the electrical, plumbing, counter-top and window. I'll be doing the tear-out, the sub-floor, the walls, the stub-wall for the counter, sheetrock, cabinet install and trim, the cork-floor and final hook-up. I also have to file the damn permit with Edmonds.

(before photos on Flickr), (packed garage photos).

Can anyone tell me why the tags in LiveJournal don't automatically get picked up by Technorati?
Or why LiveJournal doesn't recognize itself while spellchecking entries.

Current Mood: confused

If SWMBO and I buy a CD of music either of us can listen to it legally.
We bought it together. We own it together. We can both download a copy
to our mp3 players.

Now iTunes and the like want to restrict that to only one of us is
buying a song. If we both want it we'd have to buy it twice. If a family
of four was in the same situation then they'd have to buy it 4 times!

Seriously, the music industry needs to address this, either enable it
or drop the price of music downloads.

CDs are much more economical for SWMBO and I.

Current Mood: happy

So, Tim Berners Lee only thinks he got the double slash wrong in URLs.
How about the whole bloody thing? Complete bollocks from the word go.

A URL really should have been like this:
//com.company.subdomain.server:http:80/users/cnoized/
or
//com.ibm/product/info

instead of the mangled thing it is now:
http://www.server.subdomain.company.com:80/users/cnoized/index.html

For a start the "//" says it's a URI instead of a local filesystem pathname, such as "/home/cnoized"

The top level domain (TLD) should have been first and then the rest of the sub-domains ending in the server name.
There's no need for any 'www' at all, infact there is often not difference "www.server" is just an alias for "server".
It was only everyone following Tim's bad example that caused thousands of aliases all known as "www".

The ":" introduces a protocol (http/ftp/feed...) and hence the port number, unless you want to override that.
The default could have been ":http:80" and left out.

Then the path name to the content, no ".html", we know that it must be html/xml because of the protocol.
It's also included in the header of the http protocol what type the contents are (MIME types).
There would be no ".cgi", ".asp", ".php" etc. No reason the user should ever care, the server should hide that sort of detail completely.
In fact any name in the servers pathname could possibly invoke a program/cgi without the browser needing to know at all.

As for all the stuff following the "?" at the end of the URL, scrap that too, forms can hide it, and any program can generate a correct form as easily as generating the query string, the only thing a little harder would be bookmarks which is why he added it I'm sure (an easy hack).

In short current URLs/URIs are horrid engineering, and for that he's called "Sir Tim"!

PS. Don't get me started on HTML either.

Current Mood: cynical

I've been enjoying a discussion with some fairly serious writers about genetics and population growth hosted on a site called QuickTopic
It's very easy to use, free, simple, offers email updates and rss feeds for the topics and various levels of privacy.
Every topic has it's own unique hard to guess URL, by controlling who gets to see it essentially controls who can post/see the topic. Simple privacy.

I started a topic so you could see what it's like. Try to keep on-topic though ...
The social responsibility of wealth countries

Current Mood: awake

From Uber-Review: Top 10 Most Annoying Alarm Clocks

This is my favorite: #2

You lob it into the person's room. They have to find you to get it turned off.

Current Mood: geeky

Way to funny to ignore

A menu from China with incredibly bad literal translations into English. There's a comment later on by a professor of Chinese literature showing exactly how the bad translation comes about.

Current Mood: amused

Harold Pinter won the 2005 Noble prize for Literature. His acceptance speech is a blistering account of the behaviour of the US. You can read the transcript here.

Go on read it.

Fred Gratzon on The Lazy Way to Success wrote the following rules for successful creative teams:

1. For maximum success, everyone must have the utmost respect, love, tolerance, patience, and trust for everyone else. And everyone must feel those things coming to him or her from everyone else.


2. Whenever "cracks" in the group coherence begin to show, they must be fixed immediately until Principle #1 reigns supreme. The fine feeling level must be protected above all else.


3. Talking behind another's back is prohibited unless of course one is expressing love, joy, appreciation, admiration, and awe for that person.


4. There is no such thing as a bad idea. Frivolity, coming out of left field, and/or talking off point should never be discouraged or put down in a way that makes the frivolous left-fielder feel bad. The more comfortable everyone is, the greater the creativity that will occur. Each person should feel absolutely comfortable before, during, and after making a boneheaded suggestion. There is a chance that so-called boneheaded suggestion contains the seeds for a huge success.


5. The group should not move forward until everyone is comfortable with the choice. If someone is not, then that person should never be made to feel bad that he is holding things up or being stubborn. Sometimes, a lone holdout can convince an entire group to come to his point of view. Frequently, however, a solution emerges that synthesizes all sides and is infinitely better than any of the original sides.



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I agree with him and believe that these are all necessary. I would add one more:



6. If a person is unhappy with the group they should be removed quickly before they poison the team.