Archive: July 06, 2002
Via MetaFilter, some philosophical humor. A lot of this is very funny, but some of it I don't understand enough. Shows I need to brush up on my philosophy.
I'd love to be a philosophy professor and give some of this stuff as a test to my students, and say "Why is this funny?", and have them explain.
"It's like we're all involved in a massive experiment combining Attention Deficit Disorder with Alzheimer's Disease." Whoa.
Now I know why people link to Doc.
"Why not, indeed? You listening, cable guys? This is your market talking. We're making our own TV now. We're our own Kodaks. Deal with it."
Not that there was any reason people shouldn't link to him, it's just that I'd never read him before. But now, I have my aggregator, which rocks.
I only show what's new since the last time I updated, so at any given time I don't have that much to read, and I don't even have to look at what I've read before. Maybe if I e-mail myself a dump of this three times a day I can reclaim some of my day and not have to surf anymore?
I want the last 10 minutes of my life back! Via C:\PIRILLO.EXE, Madshrimp's Extreme CD-ROM testing (WMV movie). Marginally funny.
- I want that guy's car
- What was up with the neon purple and blue smoke?
- The shock testing was the best
Chris Langreiter relays that Oracle just bought Steltor. I've never heard of Steltor before, but they seem to make software they want you to use instead of Microsoft's Exchange. Hopefully this'll get interesting down the road. 
Xkot gets comment links (and MT continues to impress me). They're the next big thing . I wonder when they'll be default on some templates?
I have them, LGF recently added them (though I can't find a post explaining when they showed up), but I haven't seen them anywhere else. Oh yeah, except Slashdot!! Anyone else have them? It seems to be possible in most forum software, but in my experience they don't seem to actually give you a link.
See this comment.
Jason Kottke points out exactly the plot hole that I referred to before, but didn't want to spoil. I wouldn't have said it the way he did, but he got the gist of it.
Via Madville.com, NewScientist.com: Bigger is better when it comes to the G spot. No more sexual puns please
From the article:
The term G spot, coined by Ernest Gräfenberg in 1950, refers to an area a few centimetres up inside the vagina on the side closest to a woman's stomach (see diagram). Buried in the flesh here are the Skene's glands, the female equivalent of the prostate gland.
Researchers had seen evidence of nitric oxide activity in the clitoris before, but no one had actually looked for PDE5 enzymes or knew exactly where they might be. "It's ridiculous but true that we've waited till now to really know the female anatomy," says Jannini.
So how do you tell if you've got a G spot? Sadly, because Skene's glands are so well hidden by the surrounding tissue, no visual examination can reveal if a women has them or not. Only personal experience can do the trick.
But even for those with a small G spot or none at all, Viagra-type drugs might still have some effect, as PDE5 is found in the clitoris too. And other drugs that stimulate arousal via the brain could soon become available. But Jannini and Whipple both agree that the female orgasm is so complex that drugs alone won't work for everyone.
The even have a picture.
Via Slashdot (the first good link found via the new, first useful version of my aggregator), someone did research to discover an efficient keyboard arrangement using a genetic algorithm:
In the United States, the most common keyboard layout for computer keyboards remains the one designed by Christopher Sholes for the original Remington "Type Writer" in 1876. This layout is commonly called QWERTY after the order of the first few letters on its top row.
Other layouts exist. I have been using the Dvorak keyboard layout for about a year now. I like it a lot for my daily work, which involves a lot of typing. I used to feel a numbness of the backs of my hands after a long day with QWERTY, but I don't with Dvorak. And quantified measurements bear out its efficiency relative to QWERTY.
But Dvorak designed his layout in the 1930's without the aid of computers. It contains a couple annoying features that lead to common errors in my typing. Could a modern genetic algorithm and a huge input sample discover a better arrangement? I had to give it a try. The results surprised me!
This is right up my alley. I've used the Dvorak layout for years, and I never want to go back to QWERTY. Now I can be even more iconoclastic by using an even rarer layout.
Or not. After reading the article it turns out he wound up with something surprisingly like Dvorak! And it was only marginally better according to his program than Dvorak is, although QWERTY was about twice as bad as the average between the new computer generated layout and Dvorak.
As I was reading and I looked at the first keyboard he listed, thinking that it was his final version, I thought it was crap. The 'e' on the left pinky?? I thought, "He didn't take finger strength into account", but then I noticed that wasn't his final version, and in his current version the 'e' is exactly where it is in Dvorak.
Here are his current scores:
' , . p y f g c r l Dvorak layout
a o e u i d h t n s 32129548
; q j k x b m w v z
q w e r t y u i o p Sholes' layout, with quote replacing /
a s d f g h j k l ; 59514344
z x c v b n m , . '
k , u y p w l m f c Best evolved layout
o a e i d r n t h s 28281895
q . ' ; z x v g b j
Also, very interestingly, IBM had already done research in this area. The poster links to some research papers as well as the ATOMIK layout for keyboards on handheld devices. It's interesting, because this has different requirements than normal-size keyboard layouts. Dvorak prizes switching back and forth between hands, whereas on handheld devices you typically use a stylus, which is like using one finger to type.
Finally, a very interesting post from a piano player challenging some of the assumptions of both the Dvorak layout and this new computer generated layout.
From memepool, check out http://www.popechart.com/, where they have a:
Poster-sized illustration (40" by 28") of the history of the Papacy showing on one page the "unique direct link" Catholics have to Jesus. This full-color chart, printed in Italy, features a biographical sketch and a medallion-sized image of every Pope, all 263 successors of St. Peter, who was given the job by Jesus.
It's a lie I tell you!
I can't believe they're gosh darn making a Terminator 3. Watch the teaser trailer. The movie is scheduled to come out July 2, 2003. I really hope it's not awful. I really like the Terminator movies. Please God don't let it be bad.
Yahoo's Launch is absolutely awesome. You listen to music, you rate the music, and then it learns what you like. It's sort of like Amazon's recommendations, except it'll just go ahead and play music for you that it thinks you'll like. It's learning pretty quickly that I don't like rap and stuff.
When I signed up, I don't think there was a category for 70's stuff, like FUNK, so I had to go into the 70's station and start telling them that I like some of that stuff. Now I'm listening to Papa was a Rolling Stone by the Temptations (one of my favorite songs ever).
It hasn't played any Boston or any Rush for me yet, so I told it that I like them
The cool thing is that this should just keep getting better the longer I use it for.
Oh, and they had some really funny comedy on there too! This thing's awesome. I couldn't be much more impressed - we'll see how my recommendations get better. My only gripe is that a few seconds before each song ends it skips because of whatever it's doing to prepare to switch to the next song. Not a big deal. Now if they would only make it work in Mozilla.
"Papa was a rolling stone. Wherever he laid his hat, was his home. And when he died, all he left us was alone." - wacka wacka, chacka chacka, wonk wonk (funk sounds).
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Saturday, July 6, 2002
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I hate ASP.NET
I hate ASP... I was doing wonderswith PHP, then suddenly one of myclients...
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