Cobert

Best Colbert since the writers came back.

"Here in My Car..."

Cars;
Another passion of mine for which I haven't yet done a post.
A passion that I was certain that I was willing to give up.

I was planning on selling my RX7 in the next year, since I won't have the time for it anymore. Plus I can't take it to CA, if my career takes me there.

So that's that.
Or at least it was until I was shown the following video.







That car is called Furai.
It has the 3-rotor, ethanol, Renesis version of the engine in my car.
It idles like a wicked laugh. It responds like it's electric!
It reminds me that the most fun I've had in recent history was at an open track day.
Now I'm not so sure I want to let my baby go...
Maybe I can find a way to hang on to it.

Oh, life's dilemmas. :-)
Thanks, Wolff.

Adios

True Knowledge

True Knowledge is apparently a new service that enables you to ask questions in plain language and get direct answers. It's an obvious idealization of how Internet search should work.

So why isn't everyone doing it?
This topic is commonly discussed in early AI courses and is considered intractable (theres no efficient way to do it).
For starters, a service like this is heavily language dependent. Natural language processing is a huge problem because of all the meanings/connotations implied by context, structure, sarcasm, and other dimensions of a language. Right now, translation engines interpret language statistically, but they are far from extracting the true meaning from any given sentence. To get around this, True Knowledge engineers likely code keywords/phrases into the search and use those to invoke different subsystems to answer the question. Good luck rolling it out to other languages.

Also, the type of inference they are doing requires a huge (possibly hierarchical) knowledgebase of propositional (or higher order) logic symbols. Again this has a large dependence on language, but more importantly, it only does well with logical questions. It probably wouldn't do well in answering "What is peanut butter jelly time?"

You know, I realized I'm wasting WAY too much time on this post.

Cliff notes:
Big problem.
Limited use.
Currently requires a lot of human intervention.
Difficult to port to new languages.

blah blah, here's their video... (still pretty cool)

Working at Google

So I just read a pretty good blog post on life at Google.
If you're a techie and you want to see how much better things could be, read this.
It's long, but it will get your gears turning.

Blind Post

By request, I'm posting this link.
I know, by the server, that its from the Daily Show, but I haven't viewed it (hence the title).

Two other pieces of news:
1. Most recent updates to this blog have been in the side bar, so look over here ===>
2. I hte Mac kybords!!!! (I need a freaking hammer to make these stupid keys drop)

Cheers,