I make things on the internet
Ottawa uses dynamite to clear up ice in the Rideau river. It’s the first time I’ve heard about this program.
Since mid-February, specialist workers have been using buzz saws and amphibious ice breakers to cut channels and long grooves in the ice. The next step is to drill holes, pack these holes with sticks of dynamite, and blow apart the sheets of ice.
Basically, it helps prevent massive flooding in the spring time.
Update: Another article from The Globe and Mail.
Street Art View is a collaborative project to catalog street art that is visible on Google’s Street View.
The Art Project by Google allows you to get up close and personal with well-known pieces of artwork. The project has street-view style walkthroughs from a number of museums, with large resolution versions of many paintings. A portion of the paintings have a very-high zoom level, allowing you see them in minute detail. The crop above is from The Bedroom by Van Gogh. The site requires Flash.
There’s an interesting interview with Hugo de Garis in h+ magazine. From the beginning of the piece:
Hugo, you’ve recently published an article on KurzweilAI.net titled “From Cosmism to Deismâ€, which essentially posits a transhumanist argument that some sort of “God†exists, i.e. some sort of intelligent creator of our universe – and furthermore that this “creator†is probably some sort of mathematician.
We’re just tiny bits of a big equation being used to determine the optimal baking time for a quiche in the unfathomably large oven at a cosmic dinner party.
At the famed “Mother of All Demos, Douglas Engelbart presented the mouse and keyboard that we know, as well as an input device called a chorded keyboard.
A computer input device that allows the user to enter characters or commands formed by pressing several keys together, like playing a “chord” on a piano. The large number of combinations available from a small number of keys allows text or commands to be entered with one hand, leaving the other hand free.
Ah, it’s similar to playing piano chords, that’s probably why the thing never caught on… raise your hand if you bombed out of piano lessons in spectacular fashion. I’m sure with years of practice on a chorded keyboard, you could become a machine. For now, I’ll stick with my keyboard. It may be inelegant, but so is marching around the apartment naked while banging pots and pans together. Sometimes you just need to make music.
If you want to try a simulation of the device, check out Engelbart’s Chord by Paul Tarjan.
George Kokkinidis posted photographs of his iPad after using various apps. Don’t know if I agree with his title, most screen-based UIs will disappear after you turn them off–the main difference in this case is using the screen directly, and in a way that leaves evidence behind. Regardless of my pedantic criticism, I like the idea and you should hop on over to check out the rest of the photos.
Today’s xkcd comic seemed oddly familiar. Now, I’m off to find some womp rats.
I was reading Jeremy Singer-Vine’s article about data-mining Jeopardy’s history and came across J! Archive, a fan-created archive of the show’s games and players, for the first time. There’s your triviagasm for the week. Hopefully that concludes our Jeopardy! coverage and we can return to our regularly scheduled abuse of the semi-colon.
Old state archives from Rome, show that Caravaggio had somewhat coloured past.
He had frequent brushes with the police, got into trouble for throwing a plate of cooked artichokes in the face of a waiter in a tavern, and made a hole in the ceiling of his rented studio, so that his huge paintings would fit inside. His landlady sued, so he and a friend pelted her window with stones.
Tack on a murderous brawl and you’ve got yourself a fine upstanding citizen.
The recent set of Jeopardy! matches between Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter and Watson, IBM’s question-answering machine, has been entertaining. Sure, there’s a lot of self-promotion going on, but that’s par for the course with the show. As a trivia nut and computer scientist, this challenge appealed to me on multiple levels. As much as I would have loved to see our carbon-based brethren dominate, I’m not surprised by Watson’s victory. The format of the show presents some challenges. Watson bombed some questions in spectacular fashion, but for straight-up knowledge questions, the machine was dominant.
If you want to read more about the match, there’s lots of commentary, so I’ll leave it at that. However, there is a particular article that I wanted to point out. In his answer to the final question, Jennings riffed on a classic Simpson’s line in welcoming our new computer overlords. Ben Zimmer takes exception to the comment in his piece about the match for The Atlantic.
Elsewhere, Ferrucci has been more circumspect about Watson’s level of “understanding.” In an interview with IBM’s own magazine ForwardView, he said, “For a computer, there is no connection from words to human experience and human cognition. The words are just symbols to the computer. How does it know what they really mean?” In other words, for all of the impressive NLP programming that has gone into Watson, the computer is unable to penetrate the semantics of language, or comprehend how meanings of words are shot through with allusions to human culture and the experience of daily life.
We still have a long way to go before we have computers with true natural language processing.
Baker’s undoubtedly right about that, but we’re still dealing with the limited task of question-answering, not anything even vaguely approaching full-fledged comprehension of natural language, with all of its “nuance, slang, and metaphor.” If Watson had chuckled at that “computer overlords” jab, then I’d be a little worried.
After the Toronto answer to the question about U.S. cities, I remember thinking that Watson must be joking. I actually thought the machines were mocking us on national television. It concerned me. Time to figure out where I put that red pill.