Eggcorn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eggcorn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Somehow these amuse me greatly.

The Frontal Cortex : The Certainty Bias

The Frontal Cortex : The Certainty Bias
Uncertainty -> Fear
Reduce Fear
thus Reduce Uncertainty

The Gapminder World 2006, beta

The Gapminder World 2006, beta
Cool tool!

Political Compass

Yet another quiz to help place you in the political spectrum. This one constructs a two dimensional space, with economic "left-right" on one axis, and "authoritarian-libertarian" on the other. I end up slightly left on economics and substantially, but not extremely, towards the libertarian end. Comrades appear to be Gandhi and the Dalai Lama...

Right Way to Draw Legislative Districts

How The Iowa Process Works: Under chapter 42 of the Iowa Code, enacted in 1980, the Iowa legislature has the final responsibility for enacting both congressional and state legislative district plans. However, the nonpartisan Legislative Services Bureau starts the process. The Bureau must develop up to three plans that can be accepted or rejected by the legislature.

The four criteria for the Bureau's plans, in descending order of importance, are:

1 - population equality,
2 - contiguity,
3 - unity of counties and cities (maintaining county lines and “nesting” house districts within
senate districts and senate districts within congressional districts), and
4 - compactness.

Neuroethics

From the description:

Philosophers have long sought to answer questions about who we are, where we come from and where we’re going. Stephan Chorover frets that a widening circle of contemporary scientists embrace Sigmund Freud’s approach to these questions, which is to say, “Biology is destiny.” Neuroscientists are promoting an even narrower dogma, says Chorover, where “everything we are trying to understand can be understood in terms of underlying brain mechanisms, neurons and molecules.” How can we cultivate individual ethical acts, and how can society hope to respond to such challenges as violent conflict, or social and economic inequity, if all human behavior reduces to a set of neurological inevitabilities?

Don Norman's suggested readings

From a genius of human factors & design. Annotated recommendations.

Interactive Statistical Calculation Pages

Interactive Statistical Calculation Pages
Interactive statistical stuff. Can be used for learning, and also can be used for powerful work. I hope.

Bull Moose

Bull Moose

Bleeping Computer: Computer Help and Spyware Removal

Computer Help and Spyware Removal

lots of useful stuff to help fix annoying stuff

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.

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.

Musipedia: The Open Music Encyclopedia

Musipedia: The Open Music Encyclopedia
Find a melody by humming it...

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...

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

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.

digg

digg
Stories which users decide are worthwhile... collective intelligence as a story filter.

Ask MetaFilter | Community Weblog

Ask MetaFilter | Community Weblog
as they say, "querying the hive mind".
Questions, and... answers.

Reference, Facts, News ... Free and Family-friendly Resources

Reference, Facts, News ... Free and Family-friendly Resources
The first stop on the Internet for finding things out.

AI Chat bots Developing - The Code Project - Book Chapters

AI Chat bots Developing - The Code Project - Book Chapters
Not comprehensive but a lot of good information and ideas here.

The Chatterbot Collection

The Chatterbot Collection
A lot of effort to keep this blog up to date.

OpenMind Commonsense

OpenMind Commonsense
And some tools for computerized ontologies.

MiniMind

MiniMind
an ontology/semantic network

ZAP: About Zinfandel: The Zinfandel Aroma Wheel

ZAP: About Zinfandel: The Zinfandel Aroma Wheel
In case you need some help identifying the aromas in your zin.

A Century of Controversy Over the Foundations of Mathematics

A Century of Controversy Over the Foundations of Mathematics
Lecture by Chaitin.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.