Come on, we all have a reason to hate the Lakers. If it’s not Rick Fox and his beautiful wife, well, it’s Rick Fox again with his I wear a facemask because I don’t want to hurt my beautiful smile attitude. Or maybe it’s the way that they always squeak out a lucky victory that makes you want to rethink statistics. Or how about Rick Fox? Did I mention Rick Fox? Well, I hate to break it to them, but if you flip the coin enough times, eventually it’ll come up tails, and the entire country will rejoice in your defeat.
The only other dynasty in my sports-watching years was the Bulls, a charismatic team led by a charismatic Michael Jordan. When MJ pulled up for a jumper at the buzzer you were convinced the Bulls would pull it off, and that luck would not be a factor. How can two teams so similar in prowess create such a different reaction from America? My answer: Rick Fox.
I watched the Blazers lose three rough playoff battles (well, rough for me) to the Lakers, and that kind of anguish is bad for a player like Rasheed Wallace. This guy already gets technical fouls without agitation, and you make him guard Mr. Myself-AND-Vanessa-Willams-think-I’m-hot Rick Fox, and you’re bound to give the poor guy a heart attack. It gave me such pleasure tonight to watch Rasheed embarass the Lakers (and Rick Fox) wearing a Detroit uniform. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a team in sports as widely hated as the Lakers, and with this defeat I feel like we can all go to work tomorrow with a little less tension in our shoulders. With only one technical foul tonight, it might even add a few years to Rasheed Wallace’s life (courtesy of Rick Fox).
I feel like my Bayesian spam filter is winning the arms race against spammers, or at least making the filtering process managable. One of the side effects of having my mail presorted is that I can evaluate which of my email addresses are attracting the most attention. Over the past few months I’ve been watching this statistic very closely, and found that two addresses produce an overwhelming majority of my garbage: mit.edu and uchicago.edu. The irony there is that I never use either address. Where are they harvesting my email from? My best guess is finger.
While companies tend to use more sophisticated directory systems, most universities use finger as an open white pages for students, faculty and administration. In the stone age of the internet, it was ostensibly the only way to find a person’s email address, and it still remains as the most effective means of tracking down a user of an academic network. In most cases, all one needs is a first or last name and the university they work for. On most unix systems, simply typing name@host.edu will return a list of entries in the host.edu database matching "name."
This is a veritable gold mine of data for spammers: current students that will be graduating at some point, starting families, and needing loads of xanax, valium and viagra to cope. All the spammer has to do to tap into the finger database is know a first or last name, query the server, and take the email address. Or, alternatively you can just finger all of the names, ranked in descending order of popularity thanks to the 1990 census statistics. Since Cameron is the 336th most common name, it’s no surprise that I’ve been getting a flood of email from my fingerable addresses.
MIT does provide one level of indirection by giving each user an alias, mine being C-marlow. If you turn around and finger C-marlow at mit.edu, MIT responds with all of my contact information. I am in no way a privacy pundit, I just don’t appreciate getting unsolicited email. At this stage in the game, it seems to me that finger must die. Schools that still want to provide a directory service should do it through a web email interface, obscuring the addresses of students and employees. Otherwise they threaten to render their email addresses useless by serving them up wholesale to spammers.
While walking home from work the other day I passed a group of guys emerging from a pizza joint. After a few handshakes and goodbyes they parted ways and made arrangements for their next meeting. And then one of them yelled across the street, "something me on Thursday." His friend looked a little confused, but I knew exactly what he was talking about. He added, "IM, call, email… I don’t care."
Despite our proximity to MIT, these guys did not strike me as the type who wear t-shirts that say Go away or I’ll replace you with a simple shell script or tote around Leathermans in their utility belts. These were just normal people with too many ways to talk to each other.
I’m guessing that we have reached some saturating point in communication technology where the actual medium itself has become unimportant. When I thought about the expression, "something me," I realized that we don’t have a satisfactory, general expression for communicating in our common vernacular. It seems like an issue that will only become more important as we add media and devices to the current equation, but at current I can’t come up with anything better. If you have a better idea, something it to me.
For those of you not familiar with the Time Cube, it’s no surprise, you’re living in an illusion just like everyone else. Discovered by Gene Ray, this is the Theory Of Everything (TOE). Academics have spent years trying wrap their heads around the 4-corners, 1-corner, 1-corner concept, but they have (of course) been educated stupid for too long and still don’t get it.
Well it’s time to let the cat out of the bag. Gene Ray may have invented the Time Cube, but we invented Gene Ray. He is actually an Artificial Intelligence program devised by me and my colleague late one night many, many years ago. And then, before our very eyes this adolescent mind discovered the Time Cube. We were in shock, since we can’t even understand it ourselves.
Well, now that the truth is out there, we might as well make him available. You can chat with Gene directly using AIM. Just send him a message at his handle cubicism. He’ll be happy to entertain you with his theories of the Time Cube, TOE, or just about anything you’d like to talk about.
And if you’re still having trouble understanding the Truth, take a look at the song NIGGAZ BE FEARIN’ THE TIME CUBE TRUTH on the Insolitology site. It’s a very accessable introduction that is endorsed by our AI.
While giving a Blogdex demo today I was startled by the fact that the third site listed was the Wikipedia entry for Jew. After looking at the citations I realized that its position in Blogdex is only a side-effect of a much larger movement to readjust the PageRank for an injustice in the current Google results, namely that a horribly anti-Semetic website maintains the top position for the query.
This strikes me as a fascinating use of the Googlebomb. I’ve known PageRank to be used in jokes, hoaxes and for advertising, but this is the first example I’ve come across where the goal is to correct what most would consider an act of discrimination captured by Google’s index.
I’m sure that most people would agree that hate speech does not deserve top results for common words, and webloggers will adjust the statistics and impart justice on Google’s index. But what happens in the case where a debate is more hotly contested? Take abortion for instance. The first four results are unbiased representations of the debate while the fifth is the leading website for the pro-choice movement. Pro-life ranks in at number 10.
To me this implies one of two things: that the authors on the web are generally more liberal than conservative or that PageRank is skewed towards the left end of the political spectrum. I wouldn’t be surprised if this sort of political Googlebombing becomes a more regular part of weblogging, adding to the set of identity tools already incorperated into most blogs (blogrolls, link lists, etc.). Add one more list to the sidebar: political words I endorse.
I’ll admit that I’m a total sucker for supermarket sale items. I’m not an avid coupon-clipper but when someone puts a giant yellow sign with a price on it next to an item it greatly increases the odds that I’ll buy it.
My latest impulse purchase was a product called Green Tea Soymilk at a price of $0.99 (on sale from $1.99). I was a bit skeptical when I pulled it out of my grocery bag, but d-dang this stuff is the bomb and I can’t hype it enough. It is obnoxiously green and quite creamy, but it tastes just like the green tea ice cream. Every time I drink it I can’t help but feel like I’ve just eaten a large and satisfying sushi meal.
It’s smooth, not too sweet, and has the perfect amount of tea flavor. It’s healthy and I fancy it for a hangover cure. And yes, I work for Vitasoy.
Vitasoy: Green Tea Soymilk
A week ago I read an interesting article in the New Scientist about a savvy conversational robot that was watching chat rooms to make sure that everyone was on their best behavior. Reading the dialog generated by the robot, I was floored by its sophistication and savvy. With nuanced jokes, the ability to parse colloquial language and a substantial knowledege of the world this thing blows most of my friends out of the water. I had to talk to it.
After emailing its creator Jim Wightman, we agreed for the robot to meet me in the #chatnannies room on an irc server at 4pm EST today. I shot the breeze with the nanniebot "Caroline" for about a half hour asking her about her childhood, some real world problems, and introduced her to my friend Nathan, a human pretending to be a rival chatbot. You can read the full transcript if you’d like.
I’d like to discuss exactly what I think it would take for a computer system to achieve the interaction we had from a 50,000 feet. This is not meant to prove I was talking to a human, indict its creator, or be slanderous in any way. I just want to unpack this interaction from my limited knowledge of artificial intelligence, information retrieval and computer science. Since an analysis of the entire dialog would take days, I’ll focus on a small passage where I interact with Caroline about a hypothetical predicament I’m struggling with.
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I have invented a game to use up the massive number of text messages that T-Mobile allots me every month. It’s called T9 roulette. It goes a little something like this:
- Pick someone in your phonebook, preferably not mom or your boss. For the purpose of this description we’ll call her Maurice.
- Write "Maurice is a"
- Mash buttons until you have constructed a word of desirable length
- Send
I’ve had countless hours of fun already, and apparently it is so awesome that it inspired Rusty Foster to upgrade his 4 year old phone. Give it a try!
Over the past week I’ve been working on turning weblogs into an art installation. I really wanted to visualize in some way the current activity within the weblog world. Riding an early title from blogdex (”wired vox populi“), I thought it would be interesting to see what the voice of the people actually sounded like. To accomplish this feat, I enlisted some simple off-the-shelf linux tools. The result is Radio Vox populi.
The system takes the update monitor from blo.gs and crawls them using a simple perl robot (LWP::Parallel); in the event that RSS feeds are provided to blo.gs, these are crawled immediately, and for others RSS autodiscovery is used to find RSS feeds. The first post from each RSS feed is then saved.
The text of these posts is cleaned up (and abbreviated in the case that it’s exceptionally long), and run through the Festival Speech Synthesis System using a number of different voices. These corresponding voice-posts are sent out to the sound card in the order that they were received, punctuated by a few different radio-tuning noises (thanks to Andy). The output of this sound is streamed to the web in real time using the Icecast streaming media server.
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It’s bitterly cold outside today. I’m not exactly sure what the high was, but I’ll bet that I could count it with my fingers. And the wind is a searing whip of pain that cuts through all types of clothing, even those labelled wind-proof or wind-blocker. I’m prepared though, having spent 4 years in Chicago as an undergraduate, and my experience has led me to all sorts of wonderful, futuristic materials (most anything that ends in ene, tex or max). Despite all of this, I’ve still been saying to myself quite a bit today, "goddamn it’s cold! But I’m sure it was colder in Chicago…"
In November of 2001 the National Weather Service changed their calculation of the long time standard wind chill index to diminish the effect of wind on perceived temperature. Apparently their original tests were based on empirical studies done on a glass of water while new tests were conducted on real humans in a chilled wind tunnel. The new formula, for those who care:
Wind Chill (°F) = 35.74 + 0.6215T - 35.75(V0.16) + 0.4275T(V0.16)
where T = air temperature (°F) and V = wind speed (mph)
National Weather Service: The wind chill index
