PigeonRank™

Reciprocality: some interesting stuff about the psychology of creativity.

Steve Baker tells the tale of the Utah Teapot. (Found through another Steve’s links.)
Links in turn to the Stanford Bunny.

And what collection of digital models would be complete without Lena Sjööblom?
I first saw her in Foley & van Dam, where her face (cropped rather tight) was used to illustrate halftoning; my copy vanished in ~1982, and I now have a later edition without her (*snif*).

New Scientist: Neural network ‘in-jokes’ could pass secrets

This reminds me of a discussion, years ago on Extropians, of “Schelling points”: for under-constrained problems there may be a cultural preference for particular solutions. For example, if I ask you to meet me in Paris on a given day (but have no time to say more), and you’ve never been there before, you’ll go to the Eiffel Tower — but if we have previously met in Paris, you’ll go to wherever we met before. At least, that’s how I’ll bet.
These are examples of Schelling points, as I (mis)understand the notion.

But.
I know two people who have various things in common.
Suppose I tell each to meet the other in Chicago on a given day.
If they know nothing about each other, they’ll go to some generic Chicago landmark.
If I tell each that the other studied physics at UChi, they’ll go to the site of Fermi’s reactor, I guess.
But if I tell Bruce only that David is a science fiction fan, and tell David only that Bruce teaches physics, they’ll probably go to two different places.

I’m not sure what this thought-experiment tells us, if anything. 😉

Here is a paragraph from HTML: The Definitive Guide, by Musciano & Kennedy, second edition published by O’Reilly in 1997:

Yield to the browser. Let it format your document in whatever way it deems best. Recognize that the browser’s job is to present your documents to the user in a consistent, usable way. Your job, in turn, is to use HTML effectively to mark up your documents so that the browser can do its job effectively. Spend less time trying to achieve format-oriented goals. Instead, focus your efforts on creating the actual document content and adding the HTML tags to structure that content effectively.

Who now remembers such quaint old notions?

Not the folks at Extropy, that’s for sure – whom I expected to show more concern for content over form. As for me, Extropy will have to wait until either I get Mozilla (or NS6) configured properly or Max sees fit to allow me to read it in a typeface bigger than 7 pixels.

Machine translation is not quite here yet. I started to read “BLOG ALWAYS, YOU INTEREST Me” (linked from this article on Googlebombing) but quickly decided to try my luck with the French instead. I’ve written my own translation.

Vernor Vinge’s mind-expanding novel A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) contains numerous postings on “the Net of a Million Lies.” But unlike the Usenet of our time, most of the senders have institutional names, like Khurvark University or Sandor Arbitration. I have assumed that these represent consensus cooked up by AIs from internal discussions.

Now Sean Kirby says that Columbia Newsblaster (a project of the Natural Language Processing Group at Columbia University) automatically “trolls hundreds of news sites, collects all the information from the articles, and summarizes them with links . . . . its computer-generated summaries are virtually free from any possible taint of bias.”

Oh? Newsblaster itself lists seventeen sources (Yahoo, ABCNews, CNN, Reuters, LA Times, CBS News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Virtual New York, Washington Post, Wired, FOX News, NY Post, USA Today, Science Magazine, BBC News, Nature Magazine, Lycos) some of which repeat each other; Yahoo and Lycos get most of their stuff from Reuters. The summary will be as unbiased as the median of mainstream news; that beats reading just one paper, but is it revolutionary?

Unfortunately there’s no obvious link to information on how Newsblaster works.