Archive for the 'Tha Intarweb' Category

The Singularity Summit at Stanford, Part 1

Published on May 21, 2007 in Memes, Moving Pictures, Science, Technology, Tha Intarweb and The Future. Closed

I’ve been watching and enjoying the talks given at the Singularity Summit at Stanford. The talks are given by a group of very smart people who’ve been doing a lot of thinking about The Singularity. They’re really quite thoughtful and often insightful.

Wait, what’s The Singularity? From Wikipedia:

The Technological Singularity is the hypothesized creation, usually via AI or brain-computer interfaces, of smarter-than-human entities that rapidly accelerate technological progress.

Most speakers assume the Singularity to include Strong AI (as developed as human intelligence), Nanotechnology (the ability to manipulate atoms and build atomic-scale machines), and often some form of brain-computer interface, allowing regular humans to upload their consciousness into digital (and non-degrading) form. All in all, it’s a major event and one that will change humanity forever. As such it deserves a good deal of thought, and that’s what these people were there to talk about.

For those of you who don’t have the time to watch the talks (and you should, most are only 20 minutes), here’s my (lighthearted) summary of a few:

The Singularity: A Hard or Soft Takeoff?
Ray: Hey there, my book is great! Have you read my book? It’s really awesome. My book talks about all these really cool things. It’s quite convincing. See here I’ll show you some illustrations from my book. Oh by the way, I made a handheld device that reads text for blind people; wanna hear it? here it goes:

Reader: RAY KURZWEIL IS AWESOME. HIS BOOK IS GREAT. HAVE YOU READ IT? HERE’S SOME TEXT.

Ray: Yeah so read my book, not like you really need to because I’ve just presented all the major points. Did I mention my book is cool?

Trying to Muse Rationally about the Singularity Scenario
Doug: Hi, I’m Douglas R. Hofstadter. My name has a middle initial, so I’m more important than everyone else. In fact, I’m so important, I’m the one who organized this whole thing. I’m going to now bitch for 20 minutes about the fact that I organized everything and people screwed it all up last year. I really hope people don’t screw it up again this year, even though I’ve changed the name and everything. I’ve even made blood sacrifices upon the altar of Ray Kurzweil.

Ray’s Reader: ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY AND POWERFUL KURZWEIL.

Doug: So anyway, thinking about this new world of powerful AI and nanotechnology and stuff is really hard. Nobody, even Kurzweil himself can really know what’s going to happen. I even think Ray’s quite off his rocker on some of these things. In any case, I’ve assembled some really smart people to come here and talk about what’s going to happen to us. Listen to them because they’re great. I’m still the greatest though and I get to have my picture at the top of the page.

D&D Ability Scores Test

Published on March 27, 2007 in Gaming, Memes, Tha Intarweb and Travel. Closed

According to This D&D Ability Scores Test, These are my character stats:

STR: 10
DEX: 16
CON: 13
INT (pt1/pt2): 17/18
INT: 18
WIS: 15
CHA: 12
And no, I didn’t cheat; although you could pretty easily by reading the javascript running the page.

Btw, anyone in MD, I’m here for the week. If you want to hang out, drop me a line :)

Cory Doctorow

Published on March 8, 2007 in Books, Technology and Tha Intarweb. Closed

Recently I’ve been working through Cory Doctorow’s writings. For those of you who haven’t heard of him before, he’s a science-fiction writer who, among other things, writes regularly for Boing Boing. He has a lot of really interesting ideas, and I generally agree with his stances on society and technology. If you have 5 minutes handy, go read Printcrime. It’s from his recently published collection of short stories, Overclocked.

I read through Overclocked in eBook form on my Smartphone. Reading it in that format was a m interesting double-dose of the future. I used the Mobipocket Reader, which presented the book well on the high resolution screen that my Treo 680 has.

Overclocked was an incredible collection. It covered a wide range of potential future scenarios. Anyone who’s interested in science-fiction or even just the future in general should read it. I’ve also read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which was excellent, and I’m now reading Eastern Standard Tribe. After the first few chapters it’s turning out very well, too.

Finally, if you’re not a paper junkie, I can’t stress how great Boing Boing is. It’s a blog that links to all sorts of eclectic things, but its post-to-interesting ratio is at probably 80% for me. That’s way above any other site out there. Go check it out and learn about such things as knitting Space Invaders socks, free speech issues, international socio-political flame-wars, and way more.

Game Music Test

Published on January 22, 2007 in Gaming, Memes, Music and Tha Intarweb. Closed
Game Music Deity
You scored 88 % video game music expertise!
I’m impressed, you got a great deal of these questions right! You have the natural ability to remember most of the game music you hear. You probably also find yourself humming video game songs in your day to day life (and in no way is that sad, my friend). Hooray for that!
My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:

free online dating free online dating
You scored higher than 99% on expertise

Link: The Great Video Game Music Test written by JohnTheJubilant on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Arr, Talk Like a Pirate Day

Published on September 19, 2006 in Memes and Tha Intarweb. Closed

Yarr, in honor of this most magnificent of days, I’m posting me true an’ powerful Pirate Name:

My pirate name is:

Iron John Flint

A pirate’s life isn’t easy; it takes a tough person. That’s okay with you, though, since you a tough person. Like the rock flint, you’re hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you’re easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.

A few links for today

Published on July 18, 2006 in Moving Pictures, Science, Technology and Tha Intarweb. Closed

Some guy made his own watch from scratch, and posted a bunch of stuff all about it. Pretty neat, and tough! That’s some hardcore fabrication skills.

This movie looks really neat. I guess it’s by the guy who did the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Free TV! streaming and stuff, worked 80% of the time for me ;)

Lastly, here’s an interesting disease: Argyria is caused by the ingestion of silver. Wikipedia has more on the subject.

That’s all for now, back to your daily grinds.

All About RSS

Published on May 24, 2006 in Memes, Meta and Tha Intarweb. Closed

RSS stands for Reallly Simple Syndication. It’s basically just a standard file format. What it allows is for websites to publish a standardized feed that RSS aggregators can consume and present to the user in a standardized format. Everything has a unique timestamp and global id (guid). These let the clients keep track of exactly what a user has or has not read and what’s new etc.
I read a lot of RSS feeds. It’s where I get most (if not all) of my news, in fact. In my opinion RSS was the best thing to happen to the web. I no longer have to keep a list of bookmarks, go check them all and try and figure out what’s new on my own. Instead I use a RSS aggregator that looks at each feed and keeps track for me of what I’ve read or not. I use Akregator, which IMO is the best client ever, but it’s Linux only. Windows people I know have had good luck with RSS Bandit. Mac people have Safari and a whole slew of other options. There’s even a RSS screensaver for the mac ;).
I thought it would be interesting to share with everyone what I subscribe to. If you want to import all my feeds at once into your agregator, here’s my feeds.opml

  • Slashdot (feed): It’s Slashdot. If you’ve never heard of it, get out from under your rock! ;) It’s the oldest tech news aggregation site out there. While I feel that it’s perhaps getting a bit old and slow, when a story I’m interested in does make the site, I know the reporting will be thorough and the discussion meaningful.
  • Digg (feed): Digg is sometimes labeled the Slashdot killer. I don’t think it’ll do away with Slashdot, but I love the fact that it’s a democratic reporting model. I see more interesting news faster on digg than I do anywhere else. The one drawback is there’s more noise sometimes than signal (damn mac fanboys). It’s always worth my time though to at least skim the headlines.
  • Nectarine News (feed): This is the newsfeed for one of my all time favorite internet radio stations, Nectarine. They play demoscene music ’round the clock. If you don’t know what that is, there’s a reasonable explanation on Wikipedia. The news here keeps me vaguely apprised of what’s going on in the scene in relation to music.
  • Virt - music releases (feed): Virt is a simply astounding composer. I’m constantly amazed by his work. This feed lets me know when he has new stuff out.
  • Daniel Beck.net (feed): A friend’s blog. He has some nice photography and art, as well as interesting essays sometimes :).
  • Inkberry (feed): Inkberry is an organization around here that’s dedicated to forwarding reading and writing. They often have interesting or entertaining free readings and lectures, so I subscribe to this feed to keep apprised of them.
  • Post Secret (feed): Every week people anonymously send in artistically rendered postcards containing secrets they’ve had. I think postsecret helps people more than anything else I’ve seen online. There’s great power in opening up what you’ve kept locked inside.
  • The Official Google Blog (feed): Google lets us know what’s going on with this blog. As a techie (read: dork), I like to stay on top of what the world leader in tech is doing. There’s often cool tools they let us know about on there too! :)
  • Cute Overload (feed): OMG!!! PONIES!!!!!! everyone needs some cute :)
  • Yahoo! User Interface Blog (feed): I was going to use some of their API to do some ajax stuff, but it turns out that it kinda sucked. I’m almost ready to remove this feed, but they do occasionally have some interesting info about ajax usability.
  • IPac (feed): IPac is a PAC (political action committee) committed to ‘preserving individual freedom through balanced information policy.’ I tend to agree with their goals, so I like to know what’s going on with them.
  • Comics:
    • Goats (feed): Goats is one of the longest running webcomics, and it’s somehow managed to stay funny that whole time. The stories can get drawn out, but I get drawn into them so I don’t mind :)
    • Diesel Sweeties (feed): Combine pixel art, robots, satire, and a good dose of just plain strange and you might begin to approximate Diesel Sweeties. They have awesome t-shirts too ;)
    • User Friendly (feed): I think everyone in this strip works for an ISP.. it’s been so long I don’t remember anymore. What I do know is they’re mostly a bunch of geeks and that it’s usually pretty funny :). Did I mention it’s also been around forever?
    • The Joy of Tech (feed): This one gets a bit mac heavy, but there’s entertainment there too ;)
    • Sinfest (feed): I’m not sure how to generalize Sinfest, except to say that it’s da Bomb. The art is cool too.
    • Dilbert (feed): What can I say? It’s Dilbert :)
    • Penny-Arcade (feed): Gaming news, graphic style. Sorta. If you don’t already read Penny Arcade, I don’t think you’ll get it.
    • Ctrl Alt Del (feed): Yet another Gaming comic. I didn’t used to subscribe to this but I was linked to it too often to keep ignoring it. It’s about 60% my book :)
  • CmdrTaco’s Journal (feed): CmdrTaco started Slashdot. This gives him special geek powers, so reading his journal is often useful.
  • Overheard in New York (feed): It’s what it sounds like. Another 60%.

too funny

Published on March 30, 2006 in Art, Memes and Tha Intarweb. Closed

Diesel Sweeties has some awesome t-shirts! a few of my favorites:

Check out the Comic too, it’s bizzarely hilarious ;)

Bah! Myspace won’t let me link to anchors (fucking hashes become ..’s!!) so you’ll have to scroll in the doc to find each shirt :P:P:P:P:P

the strangest thing on the internet right now

Published on March 29, 2006 in Memes, Tha Intarweb and Video. Closed

passing this on from the great Daniel Beck..

To reddish girl, forest is peaceful joy — this thinking is false

This is the strangest thing on the internet right now.

(And no, it’s not just because of the engrish. Keep watching.)

Neko

Published on February 24, 2006 in Memes and Tha Intarweb. 1 Comment

I used to have this little app in windows waaay back in the day.. this is an awesome little javascript version. The site even has code so you can put Neko on your website :)

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