Month: March 2004

geekman

GeekMan action figure with accessories

GeekMan is 15 cm tall, made from plastic, and comes with 5 accessories (his weapons of wisdom and tech gadgetry):

  • Geeky Glasses (the Geek Visual Input Device)
  • Handheld Computer / PDA
  • Notebook Computer / Laptop (the Cerebral I/O Device)
  • Coffee Mug (to re-energize super powers)
  • Wristwatch

For badboys only

“For Bad Boys Only” is an unconventional detective agency which specializes in helping clients to search for reunite with their first loves. The agency is managed by King Chan (Ekin Cheng), a flirty Casanova, and his partner, Jack Shum (Louis Koo), a perfectionist, with King’s younger sister, Queen (Kristy Yang), who has a soft spot for Jack, being the only employee. Recently, Taiwanese tycoon Yung Wing-hing (Ko I-chen) hires the agency to search for his ex-lover, Koon Ching (Shu Qi), whom was Asia’s premier female air force pilot. At the same time, a young man named Tin-ngai also hires the agency to search for his missing girlfriend, Shadow (Shu Qi). To King and Jack, Koon Ching and Shadow look strangely identical. Making matters more bizarre, King meets an amnesic girl named Eleven (Shu Qi), who also looks identical to Shadow and Koon Ching. The amorous-natured King also falls in love with Eleven. While searching for Eleven’s true identity, King and Eleven were attacked multiple times before Eleven was captured by a group of gun-wielding mysterious men. At the same time, Tin-ngai also finds Shadow, who was disfigured. It turns out that Shadow was captured by Japanese scientist Taro Sakamoto (Mark Cheng), who retrieved DNA from Koon Ching’s body and injected into Shadow, hoping to create a female pilot with similar skills. However, the experiment failed and Shadow was disfigured. However, Tin-ngai’s love for Shadow did not change and decides to spend the rest of his life with her.

After King and Jack learns of this, they proceed to rescue Eleven. The two of them successfully sneak into Sakamoto’s base, where they find dozens of clones that look identical to Eleven, each of them with different mutations. They were all named by numbers, with Eleven being the only perfect experiment with no mutations. However, Sakamoto manipulates Eleven to go mad to kill King and Jack.

A taste of HK movies to come? There’s fanfic for your entertainment, too.

Memetic networks


Valdis Krebs is mapping out memetic networks by analyzing Amazon buying patterns.
Jon Udell has some additional thoughts on how to apply these findings:

Filling the “structural holes” in networks, and creating large audiences from sets of smaller ones, is a fascinating idea — though I’m sure it’s easier said than done.

Visual tools to aid memetic engineering? Elsewhere, memetic networks are seen as a new form of infowar.

Non-leaky abstractions in physics

i talked to prof. eberhard hilf yesterday. hilf is a retired professor of theoretical physics who is now working on the problems around long-term storage of electronic scientific data. we talked about the change in semantics as science moves forward, and the need to not only port content from old storage media to new ones, but also the need to transcribe the content itself to make it accessible to scientists of another age.
hilf demonstrated how equations as jotted down by einstein in 1905 would be almost incomprehensible to modern scientists today. over the years, verbose notations have been replaced by increasingly more succinct ones, new symbols have been introduced. i immediately had to think of leaky abstractions. hilf was adamant that physics was not prone to those problems because it is grounded in solid math.
good for them physicists, and too bad computer science cannot claim the same currently.

nooface

i finally found the feed for nooface, a site which purpose is

to support the exchange of ideas about next-generation user interfaces, focusing on approaches that go beyond the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointing Device) method on which most current user interfaces are based. The goal is to promote out-of-the-box thinking on how user interfaces might evolve to accommodate new classes of users and devices outside of the traditional PC domain.

ie 7

IE7 provides Microsoft Internet Explorer with support for W3C standard CSS. It supports the following CSS selectors:
o namespace|selector
o parent > child
o adjacent + sibling
o [attr], [attr=”value”], [attr~=”value”]
o .multiple.classes (fixes bug)
o :first-child, :last-child
o :hover, :active, :focus
o :root

ingenious! the parent > child selector is especially useful. it may even be possible to extend javascript DOM support in internet explorer to make bxe run.