Sunday, May 14, 2006

Friday, April 28, 2006

The Euston Manifesto - Home

A "new democratic progressive alliance". Perhaps the sensible left can come together. Still, as an anti-socialist liberal, I find some of this a bit too pink for my tastes. But agree with most.

Friday, April 14, 2006

stock.xchng - the leading free stock photography site

stock.xchng - the leading free stock photography site
Whew. hundreds of thousands of free "stock" photos. Hard to sift through but it's pretty amazing in the depth of content.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

SNOBOL4.ORG: SNOBOL4 Resources

SNOBOL, (StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language) is a language for text processing, pattern matching, and much more, first designed and implemented at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. (BTL) in the 1970's.
I am considering using SNOBOL for modules in a chat bot implementation. Given that I have spent about 20 hours on this in the past year, it's not likely to be moving forward soon...

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Government Success Stories

Government Success Stories
Some anecdotes about government programs that work, and failures of the free markets. This is not a defense of socialism (it's claimed). The intention is to help find the line between government intervention and meddling...
the proper role of government is to support and promote the free market, and prevent individuals within it from causing harm to society

Sunday, March 19, 2006

questsin intelligence - AI (Artificial Intelligence) powered tools

Another interesting time sink. Pretty decent collection of search & reference links. I've found it pretty helpful when researching a new area.

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

How to Run Algorithmic Information Theory on a Computer

I missed this talk.
Algorithmic Information Theory is recursive function theory plus program complexity.
Chaitin wants to have a real programming language (pure LISP with some enhancements) and a real computer (a particular Universal Turing Machine) and then actually do real stuff, like list out all possible theorems and score them...
LISP is enhanced with a handful of functions. Most importantly, try
(try time-limit expression binary-data).
What this does is evaluate the expression on the data and return at the earlier of when the evaluation is complete or time-limit is exceeded.

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Find Music You'll Love - Pandora

Find Music You'll Love - Pandora
Very interesting - developing a metric for music so that you can find "similar" artists/songs.

We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006
In case your brain doesn't have enough to do...

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

Friday, December 09, 2005

Song lyrics

So, I needed to know the words to Mott the Hoople's "All the Young Dudes" (it's a long story...). There are a number of sites with song lyrics around for free, but this one seems reasonably complete. Could use a bit more advanced search, but you can find a keyword in the artist, album, song title or lyric contents.

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Bot Hixx

Hixx tries to respond to statements about feelings. It doesn't have much insight, but now and then will respond somewhat cleverly.
Chat with Hixx for a few minutes & see what you think.

Monday, October 24, 2005

Damn cool illusion

Very fun optical illusion. The refractory period of receptors creates a negative image over time. Watch as you process a bunch of pink dots and see them disappear and a green dot appear, but there is no green dot...

Sunday, October 23, 2005

David Cope

Pretty amazing algorithmically generated music.

Moodle - A Free, Open Source Course Management System for Online Learning

The power of programming and networks are being realized at last! This is a way cool tool to help create online learning communities.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

EllaZ - artful intelligence

EllaZ - artful intelligence
A pretty well-done bot site.

Similarity

Similarity
described by Robert Goldstone of Indiana University.

Conscious Entities: leading theories about consciousness, and the mind.

A site with summaries & critiques of theories of consciousness.
Something for me to waste more time on...

Process Information

Process Information
Want to know what all those friggin' process are that are consuming all of your cycles & memory? Are they apps? viruses? spyware?

Here is a resource to identify what they are likely to be.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Moving Ideas Network

Issues, ideas & research in furtherance of "progressive" policy.