i have spent some time recently trying to do deep searches (the kind that give less than 10 results), and i noticed that the link farming/spamming has become so bad that search engines are falling back to circa 1995-levels of accuracy and duplicate removal. as ben hammersley notes, yahoo is the new google, what with openly publishing research into better search algorithms.
Month: March 2005
Pencilneck
“I’ll tell you what, I did not wanna put that thing on after I heard what happened to that poor pencilneck, Gunter or…uh…Gregor, yeah, Gregor Rothfuss. But you know, the guys, uh… they were kinda hasslin’ me and jokin’, you know, givin’ me crap, so I sucked it up and put it on. Hehe…hasn’t eaten me yet. I swear I’m gonna pound those little grey smurfs for making me put that thing on. It’s weird stuff, man, we shouldn’t even be touching it. Pop the bugs
and leave their toys for the scientists, that’s what I say. You don’t put it on.”
it seems that i have become a character in a remake of Atari’s (formerly Microprose) turn-based strategy classic: X-COM: UFO Defense in a new game entitled Xenocide.
Spore
will wright unleashes another bomb, spore. more notes here, and screenshots here. i heard will talk about sculpting possibility space at accelerating change 2004. it all makes sense now. this is the future of gaming (and by extension, movies and entertainment in general considering that games are already grossing way more than movies..)
open source community building
matthias stuermer completed his paper on open source community building (more praise here) it looks very complete, and builds nicely on my earlier work from 2002, a framework for open source projects. matthias, make sure to add it to the MIT opensource site and spread the word about it.
Road to reality
i got to hear sir roger penrose talk about his new book the road to reality. (review)
penrose has this knack of dropping mind bombs with a couple short sentences (that is, if you know some physics). he spent some time (both in the book and the lecture) to comment on some of the theories du jour, from quantum gravity to superstrings.
i especially liked his objection to how thermalization is used to make the case for inflation. arguing with the 2nd law of thermodynamics, there is a 10^10^123 likelihood for the initial state of the universe (basically, it requires very very low entropy while singularities have very high entropy). yet inflation has happened, so what gives? surprisingly, this kind of reasoning hasn’t been used for inflationary cosmology…
i am sure there were lots of other references like that, but my physics were not nearly strong enough to understand what he talked about 🙂
Gregor J. Rothfuss 