January 2010
21 posts
Random NYTimes article quotes Media Labber →
This article is about travel and should have nothing to do with the Media Lab, but there’s “Reed Martin, a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., who prefers not to check bags,” explaining why. Cool.
MMP Student Paper →
If you haven’t seen it already, you might be interested in reading a report that I helped put together for the Mind Machine Project.
1 tag
Spam is hard.
(found on Slashdot)
Your post advocates a ( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.) ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email...
“It has for instance been shown that with certain logical systems there can be no...”
– Alan Turing, on the consequences of Incompleteness for machine intelligence
“A lawyer, a doctor, and a type theorist are discussing whether it is better to...”
– Jeremy G. Siek (a type theorist), beginning his POPL 2010 talk
1 tag
"Toy" as a reluctant adjective
Sometimes we hear a non-native English speaker say something like “That problem seems very toy,” where an American would probably say “That seems like a toy problem.” In fact, both speakers are using the noun “toy” as an adjective, but there are many restrictions on how an American would typically use it - only immediately preceding its referent, and without...
2 tags
Madrid, Part 1
[Note: in a departure from my usual use of this website for interesting links and abstract musings, this series of posts will be more like the original sense of a “blog” - essentially a personal diary. Since I’m abroad, it should be more interesting.]
[Note 2: More photos and videos will be uploaded over the next week or two. Please check both here and...
2 tags
Causality and Probability
Here’s something to think about: in our brave new quantum world, any physical event predicate you choose has some nonzero chance of occurring. Yet, even then, not every imaginable cause for such an event’s occurrence is self-consistent. So, for example, while there is an infinitesimal, non-zero chance that the Green Party will win the next Presidential election, there is absolutely no...
“What’s the collective noun for people who work at a bank?
A wunch of...”
– Neil Gaiman
1 tag
“To sit around being happy all the time is not the goal. In fact, that‘s kind of...”
– Ray Kurzweil: The h+ Interview | h+ Magazine (via endlessforms)
“salutation
congratulation
your age is now an integer up to approximation
of a...”
– The Birthday Rap, by davidad
Knowledge is out, focus is in, and people are...
EDGE.ORG recently published its annual question responses, including mine. The question this year is “How does the Internet change the way you think?” An excerpt from my essay:
I see today’s Internet as having three primary, broad consequences: 1) information is no longer stored and retrieved by people, but is managed externally, by the Internet, 2) it is increasingly challenging...
Crazy good cupcake decoration →
Each of these 100 cupcakes represents a childrens’, strategy, or video game.
2 tags
The Case of the 500-Mile Email →
"We're having a problem sending email out of the department." "What's the problem?" I asked. "We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.
Survivor of 2 Atomic Bombs Dies at 93 →
Mr. Yamaguchi was in his Nagasaki office, telling his boss about the Hiroshima blast, when “suddenly the same white light filled the room,” he said in an interview last March with The Independent newspaper.
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
2 tags
The Orient Express Takes Its Final Trip →
How did I not hear about this? What a shame…