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Chuggnutt!

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  • 20 questions

    Okay, so I must be easily impressed. From this post on Boing Boing I found the 20Q.net site and began trying to stump the system. I can’t do it. No wonder; the guy that created the neural net (a type of artificial intelligence software) started it back in 1988, and it’s been “learning” ever since, entirely by people playing 20 questions with it. Crazy.

    I remember having a 20 questions “A.I.” game that came with the Logo programming language for the Commodore 64 (way back in the day). Same deal, it was preprogrammed with maybe three items, but as you played it, it remembered every new item you fed it and got “smarter” each time it played. The only drawback was that on a Commodore, you couldn’t really save the state of the program, so it would “forget” everything each time you started it up.

    Funny part is, I remember the first time I played it, I figured I’d stump it with “ostrich.” I just about fell out of the chair when, after about five questions, it says, “Are you thinking of an ostrich?” I was hooked, but ultimately didn’t fully capitalize on that for another few years… at the time, I simply considered it to be an exotic toy. Now I write software for a living. Go figure.

  • INTJ

    My friend Kerry at work had a bunch of people take the Jung Typology Test to determine personality types and see how well they applied to the real world. I’m not really sure why, perhaps as a group-building exercise. Whatever the reason, they’ve been good for a laugh, but the best part is the analysis of each profile, with lists of famous people—real and fictional, amusingly enough—that match that personality.

    My own score came up INTJ, which is “Introverted Intuitive Thinking Judging.” It’s more or less accurate, in broad strokes. You can read the full profile here, but here’s some of the fictional INTJ’s—characters I share personality types with:

    • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, from Hamlet.
    • Gandalf the Grey (every geek’s dream come true, I’m sure)
    • Professor Moriarty… Sherlock Holmes’ arch-nemesis. I can see that, I guess.
    • Hannibal Lecter… what the—?

    The best (worst?) part was that someone else, after finding out I shared a personality profile with Hannibal Lecter, looked at me with an appraising eye and said, “Yeah. I can see that.”

  • Followup to the Time Traveler Convention

    Wired News has a followup article about the time traveler convention that I blogged about the other day. Apparently no one from the future showed up.

    But when attendees gathered outside for a raucous countdown at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, nothing appeared on the makeshift landing pad at the coordinates Dorai set for the time travelers….

    It’s actually a blessing that no one from the future showed up on Saturday night, said David Batchelor, the NASA physicist who wrote “The Science of Star Trek.”

    Speaking on his own behalf and not for NASA in a phone interview, Batchelor noted the same potential risks mentioned by speakers at the convention, such as the displacement of matter in a finite universe caused by the introduction of someone from another time. He also touched on the paradoxes arising from such acts as going back in time and killing one’s own ancestors.

    “We should breathe a sigh of relief,” said Batchelor, who considered his decision not to go to the convention a safe bet. “It means we were protected from the chaos that would result if someone came back and changed something.”

    The thought that struck me as I read this was, if time travelers came from the future to attend the convention “after the fact”—wouldn’t our memories change to match the altered timeline? In other words, we wouldn’t know that no one from the future appeared, because they in fact did and time was changed.

    Alternatively, travelers from the future did attend the convention, only that spun off into an alternate timeline and our own timeline is undisturbed.

  • Waxing

    Holy cow… you must go read Jack Bogdanski’s blog entry titled The short hairs!

  • Morse code wins!

    I thought this was funny: Morse code trumps SMS in head-to-head speed texting combat.

    93-year-old telegraph operator Gordon Hill delivered a resounding ass-whoopin’ to his rival, 13-year-old Brittany Devlin, using Morse Code.

    Man, there’s retro, and there’s retro.

  • 15-pound burger

    This is crazy; a 15 pound hamburger is being offered free to any two people who can eat the entire thing in one three-hour sitting.

    the “Beer Barrel Belly Buster” weighs in with 10 pounds of meat molded into a 20-inch patty on a specially baked, 17-inch bun.

    The balance of the weight comes from 25 slices of cheese, a head of lettuce, three tomatoes, two onions, plus copious quantities of mayo, ketchup, relish, mustard, and peppers….

    The 15-pound burger can feed a family of 10, according to Liegey. He has sold two so far to teams of two people, and neither team did much more than put a dent in it.

    Wow. Just wow.

  • 05-05-05

    Not only is today Cinco de Mayo, but it’s also the fifth day of the fifth month of the fifth year of the millenium. 05-05-05. I’m sure people are imagining correlations. I touched on this two years ago in 03/03/03.

    Isn’t numerology grand?

  • Cougar! Forever

    Just when you thought you’d heard the last of it, Mellencamp the cougar is back in the news. There’s an article in today’s Bulletin, more or less reiterating the cougar report on Z21 News last night. It was spotted near Newport Avenue and Fourth, but officials had no luck tracking it.

    Last week the Bulletin also ran an interesting article on Jack Spencer, the wildlife specialist for Deschutes County heading up the cougar search. It’s a good read, and shows just how crazy that kind of job is: he’s been bitten by a rattlesnake, caught bubonic plague (!), even tranked himself while trying to get a bear out of a cougar trap. You gotta love that kind of stuff.

  • The Time Traveler Convention

    I don’t know whether to file this under “weird” or “science” or “brilliant”: MIT is hosting a time traveler convention on May 7.

    What is it?

    Technically, you would only need one time traveler convention. Time travelers from all eras could meet at a specific place at a specific time, and they could make as many repeat visits as they wanted. We are hosting the first and only Time Traveler Convention at MIT in one week, and WE NEED YOUR HELP!

    Why do you need my help?

    We need you to help PUBLICIZE the event so that future time travelers will know about the convention and attend. This web page is insufficient; in less than a year it will be taken down when I graduate, and futhermore, the World Wide Web is unlikely to remain in its present form permanently. We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in MAJOR outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them.

    Great idea, I’d love to help! What should I do?

    Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.

    You can also make an absolute commitment to publicize the convention afterwards. In that case, bring a time capsule or whatever it may be to the party, and then bury it afterwards.

    I wish I’d thought of that. :)

  • Things about Bend that I like

    That is, these are things that are new in Bend, or are a result of progress, that I like. It’s a balance to my Things about Bend that I miss post the other day.

    I like…

    • …the Bend Public Library building. I have fond memories of the old building they used to be in, but their newer building is far better.
    • …McMenamins’ Old St. Francis School. Can’t ever have enough microbreweries, and they’ve really done excellent work on the site. Plus, they brought back a movie theater to downtown Bend—a theater pub no less (which is what I always thought the Tower Theater should have been turned into)!
    • …The Old Mill District. For the most part. They’ve developed the area much better than I would have thought.
    • …newer restaurants like Zydeco, Mercury Diner, Merenda’s.
    • …Barnes & Noble.
    • …the Les Schwab Amphitheater.

    More as I think of these, too.