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Put up early for Trackback purposes. |
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March 4th, 2004 Today is World Book Day! The BBC has a quiz on opening lines. If you think that quiz too easy, you can find more trial at First Lines. |
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March 15th, 2004 When it rains... Ztuff posted
A perspective on security. The article he links to presents a
technical business view on The Bad Business of Fear
in the digital Security industry. The article presents insightful commentary on and possible solutions to the near death of an
industry. Speaking of security I don't think I posted on Port Knocking, an example of
simple technical inovation in the digital security field. Not quite as interesting as setting up and dissolving a profitable
corporation in a single day, a possibility mentioned in the Fear article, but an exmaple of true hacking. Nothing had really inspired me to blog lately, but this got my dander up. The "winning" robot
in the Darpa Grand Challenge went 7 miles. Huh? 7 miles?
I've built lego robots that could crawl that far missing a limb. So what happened? The people working on these things were bright.
I mean super-nova bright. These were some of the cream of the crop. They had modified sand-rails and Humvees. They had doppler
radar and laser range finding devices. They had millions in backing, or at least a hunger to win.
(See ) So what happened? Well DARPA
happened. The truth is that the military played this off as a race across the desert, like the Baja 500, you hit all the checkpoints
and cross the finish line first and you win. But that was not the case. The Humvee had
its wheels catch fire. Catch fire? A Humvee? Again, Huh? Look, I
know that the Military has been working on Robot Humvees for at least three years, and the
Red Team is from one of the leading research institutes on mobile
robotics. Surely they could have done better? But look again, the tires caught fire. The military rigged the competition. Not
against the Red Team, not in some conspiracy theory way. They rigged the competition against all the teams. The
truth of the matter is that NO robotic technology available today could complete a military obstacle course. So everyone who signed
up, signed up to fail. The teams never had a chance. Their sponsors might as well bought lottery tickets, they would have had a
better chance of winning a million. Any chance greater than zero would have been better. Bet the lame horse at the track and there
is still a chance, but no robot, and therefore no team had ANY chance at completing the course, let alone in 10 hours. My advice
somebody needs to open a REAL contest. One in which an autonomous vehicle MIGHT win. Then we would have the competition necessary
to promote advancement. Without a possible winner, there can be no competition, without competition there is no evolution, and
without evolution there is death. In other news, Grey Tuesday has had some follow ups, and has gotten the industry talking. |
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March 16th 2004 A great article on The Truth About UFOs. |
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March 17th, 2004 As a prospective parent I have given some consideration to allowances and general money issues regarding children. Specifically I am interested in how best to instill in them good economic sense. Primarily living within their means and saving for the future, the unexpected, and large purchases. I had always thought that a weekly allowance was a good tool for teaching children about money. Today, I found another view point, or Why allowances don't work. This article makes an excellent case for the Monthly Lump Sum method of teaching smart money management to children. |
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March 22nd, 2004 This morning MSN had a link to an article that aptly summarizes the data deluge. Although the article title implies a discussion of how to deal with information overload, the only tool it pointed to was Sensemaking, which seems to be only in the research phase at Xerox PARC. Aside from the Sensemaking project the article holds up standard stress relief techniques, not very likely to help anyone make better use of their data. Personally I recomend basic training in search technology, like UC Berkeley's Finding Information on the Internet or the Google Guide, Before moving on to more advanced search techniques like those discussed on Searchlores. Also traditional search techniques still apply to the Internet. A basic book like Finding answers in science and technology (I believe that this is the book I am currently reading.) and once you find your sources you should consider How to Read a Book to help you distill information into knowledge. Those are just some resources to get you started sifting information. The Copernic Summarizer is a currently available software product that can assist you in choosing which documents are most relevant to your search, a liferaft on the ocean of information. I found Tom's Garage today through my refers. His site is "located" about six miles away from me. (See GeoURL for more on this.) He posted a link on Plugging into the power of sewage. This topic has been of interest to me ever since I heard an April first NPR report on the subject. Specifically I am interested in using Methane produced from compost. Most of the information I've seen on-line has been for large municipalities. I only found one good possibility at my library, but the book had gone missing. The Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog pointed me to Water Supply for Rural Areas and Small Communities (which I have not seen yet) and now this link from Tom, maybe my research will make some headway. |
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March 29th, 2004 Soze's Blog pointed me to the following insanity, Congress Moves to Criminalize P2P. This is just ANOTHER example of the Mickey Mouse Laws. |
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March 30th, 2004 Skotos Articles had a great article on Procedural Content Generation. And there is a town in California named Textile Boxes. |