January 2006 – Screenshot

Homemade, Semi-Fabulous

I was IMing with a friend last night and we decided that I am the anti-Sandra Lee. Sandra Lee is the frightening person behind the Semi-Homemade trademark, and host of the self-titled Food Network show in which she illustrates how to live the Semi-Homemade life. Every meal in Semi-Homemade world is garnished just so, served at a color-coordinated “tablescape” that usually seems to involve using one’s extensive collection of cake plates as pedestals for the dinner plates, and is accompanied by an also color-coordinated cocktail (but don’t worry – Sandra always shows how to serve out virgin portions for the … Continue reading Homemade, Semi-Fabulous

Think like Google

By AMH

Here’s an internet game that you can really only play online: What Did I Search For?. You’re shown the Google results page for a one-word search, with all occurences of the search term omitted, and have to guess the search term. Yeah, you could cheat, type in the URL of a returned page, and find the elided term from the blurb, but that really misses the point. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but now I’m well hooked. And, as a bonus, as you keep playing you are “rewarded” with links to pretty pictures or, … Continue reading Think like Google

Elegant Science

By AMH

Besides being a good selection, this list of science’s ten most beautiful experiments is also a really good presentation of the methodology and implications of the experiments, in brief form. The presentation as a whole also gives some insight, though not in explicit statements, of what it is that make an experiment “beautiful”. I suspect this is as hard a concept to communicate to students as the notion of an elegant proof or algorithm.

Media Errors

By AMH

I’ve added the new-to-me weblog Regret The Error to my daily websurf. It’s a collection of links to errata corrections in a number of major US newspapers, but it’s the accompanying commentary that is particularly good. Reading through the recent entries, there’s a fair bit of discussion of how much news sources rely on each other to be accurate, so that an error in one publication can spread throughout them all without much background checking being done. Obviously, the misreporting about the recent mining accident is a tragic example of this. What I particularly like about the site is the … Continue reading Media Errors

Happy Anniversary

By AMH

Happy Second Anniversary, Spirit, and close to second anniversary to Opportunity as well. Take a minute to sit back and appreciate how mind-boggling it is that we have had two rovers driving around on Mars for the past two years. It is a routine part of life that we’ve got these exploratory vehicles up there. At the least, go check out the “One Martian Year” slide show they have up.

Happy Birthday AI

By AMH

What did you do with your holiday break? Did you invent a new field of computer science? If not, you weren’t as productive as Newell and Simon were during their break fifty years ago. This is a nice story about their early work towards a program that could be considered “artificial intelligence”.