When you meet a master swordsman
show him your sword.
When you meet a man who is not a poet
do not show him your poem.

Rinzai

back from thanksgiving. crystal and family were good. 'won' nanowrimo, word count as of today is 60k+, but the novel is unfinished, and thus, will not be released at the end of the month. I plan to have it done in the next six months, and publish in some online fora.

a2i2 work is going well, with many interesting projects currently going on. Peter will be presenting at a conference Dec. 11th, so we have near term goal of having an interesting system to look at then, in addition to our current research goals. (we're still hiring, check our website)

Einstein's Mistakes - Physics Today November 2005

"It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers—not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell."

Steven Weinberg

I will write on a huge cement block 'BY ACCEPTING THIS BRICK THROUGH YOUR WINDOW, YOU ACCEPT IT AS IS AND AGREE TO MY DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS WELL AS DISCLAIMERS OF ALL LIABILITY, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL, THAT MAY ARISE FROM THE INSTALLATION OF THIS BRICK INTO YOUR BUILDING.'
And then hurl it through the window of a Sony officer
and run like hell

Sony, if you haven't heard, has been having some problems. First, they installed what could charitably be described as very aggressive DRM on their customers computers (which was technically covered in the EULA, but many people are understandably upset)

The DRM not only caused problems, but allowed other spyware to get onto your computer via the same route.

So Sony decided to put in a fix which would remove the software in question. Which was broken, and caused more problems.

Not a good time to be Sony, in a public relations sense. This speaks to one of my closely held beliefs, which is that businesses should be allowed to do whatever they like so long as it isn't criminal, and the market will sort it out. I'm always impressed by how quickly the public and consumers punish poor behavior in an open environment, when they know what's going on.

18-year-old write-in candidate elected Hillsdale mayor - 11/09/05

Good to see ambition in the young people.

A Paen to Visual Studio!

Oh, the joy of mindless focus!
context magically clear!
my beginnings darkened by an end
the next key predicted, endlessly
success silent
failure immediately forgotten.

My keystrokes refine
proposals rise, thickly
refined, declared
I become an advisor
not that
not that
continue;

The power narrows my eyes
embarassing moments without template
this for contains no new i
and none is suggested.

When this fear of blindness rises
I consider writing in my notepad
pasting in, taking judgement at compile
as memories say I once did do.

I try and pause in horror
as this.
brings
nothing

The FBI's Secret Scrutiny

this is some very good reporting by the Washington Post. Library and Commercial databases being accessed without oversight is a serious problem. You better believe that Google has been served these, whether they fought it or not is hard to say. The only reason I'm not loading up on tinfoil and proxy anonymizers is the fact that no one is really equipped to actually walk a database that big in any reasonable time-frame for any but the most superficial or narrowly defined reasons.

Of course, this is subject to change. And the NSA still has one of the largest communities of mathematicians and computer scientists outside the oversight of.. well, anyone, really. It's not inconcievable that they've spent a good amount of time working on software and hardware tools for sorting such information well.

As something of an enthusiast for meritocratic processes, like capitalist competition and open, iterated collaboration, I tend to believe that they will not progress as quickly as more public organizations. But they gain in their focus. Cryptographers know that the NSA is ahead of the public, because they have the narrowness and numbers to stay ahead. That will be true for some other aims of the NSA as well. In addition, they are not necessarily bound by copyright and patent restrictions. So you can bet they use the best software they can find, buy, invent themselves, or simply steal. In that sense, they take advantage of the best parts of public discourse, and contribute little.

The government organizations may lag behind state of the art in architecture, paradigm, staffing and methodology, but I imagine they are aware of those shortcomings. It's sad when the best we have to look foward to is the incompetence of our Ministry of Justice.

Black Friday 2005 - The OFFICIAL Site for the Hottest Day of the Year

Prepare for the coming shopping apocalypse.

Fight Aging!: $1 Million Donation Made To the Mprize For Anti-Aging Research

Yeah, that's right. The Methuselah Mouse Prize just got a one million dollar anonymous donation.

That's because anonymous donations are the best. ;-)

Let's see the MIT Technology Review spin that one down.

National Novel Writing Month - National Novel Writing Month

Today is the first day. Good Luck, participants!