Mon, 11 Aug 2003
Sensory overload: You step out of an elevator on the third floor of a university building. You're in a beige carpeted corridor, with whitewashed walls on one side. On the other side, a glass wall separates you from the Disruptive Technology Laboratory. Open the door and look inside. The lab is about thirty feet square, with small offices off to either side. It's cluttered with open plan desks; at one corner a cluster of black sofas sit in a circle around a big television set with a stack of video equipment and an Xbox. At the opposite corner, there's a bench with oscilloscopes, soldering irons, and the other detritus of electronic prototyping. In one corner, a bunch of students are trying to reinvent the wheel -- specifically, the car steering wheel, which they're trying to add intelligence to. (Imagine you're driving a car, spproaching a busy roundabout. Your hands tense and your pulse rate soars -- it's a bad time for your cellphone to ring, isn't it? That's why the intelligent wheel knows enough about your emotional state to switch the incoming call to voice mail until you're calm enough to talk, and turn down the radio volume while it's about the job) ... [ Read more ] [ Discuss Media Lab ] posted at: 22:25 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry Those fun guys at the MIT Media Lab bring us a new streaming radio station -- Eigenradio. Eigenradio makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it. Since we listen to so much music all the time, Eigenradio is always on and always live. What you hear on Eigenradio is the best of the New Music, distilled and de-correlated. One song on Eigenradio is worth at least twenty songs on old radio. And when you've had enough of Eigenradio there's always Spam Radio. [ Link that is KILLING the RIAA ] [ Much more questionable Link ] [ Really Weird Link ] [ Discuss mp3 ] posted at: 22:01 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry
This is all Feorag's fault. [ Link ] [ Discuss The horror! The horror! ] posted at: 16:36 | path: /weird | permanent link to this entry Read this (or be terminally uncool) Warren Ellis seems to be getting into the writing-fiction-online-via-a-blog thing with "LISTENER: A book for the Internet in sixty entries". You can find it on Livejournal and the first parts are 1, 2, 3, and 4. Follow it via the blog. According to Warren, this is all Cory's fault. [ Link ] [ Discuss writing ] posted at: 14:29 | path: /writing | permanent link to this entry The policeman's beard is half constructed The annual chatterbox contest throws up some rather cool quotes from the Turing-test candidates: Judge: Have you ever watch American football? Of course, it's going to be rather harder to pass the original Turing test than that little exchange might indicate. Alan Turing, a product of the English public school system writing in 1950, established his test as an imitation game with the pragmatic goal of building a conversational computer system that could fool a judge within a wide domain of human interactions. Consciously or otherwise, the domain Turing picked was one in which the judge is a male human being and the goal of the computer is to fool the judge into believing that he is communicating with a a human female. These days we have highly-sophisticated constructs that are dedicated to carrying out this very task over the internet -- we call them "police officers". Meanwhile, I humbly submit that a piece of software that could successfully emulate a circa-2003 British female would clearly fail the circa-1953 Turing test by not conforming to the expected stereotypes. Which leaves us flailing around trying to write bots who deal with more general problem domains -- like this: User: DO YOU ACCEPT JESUS CHRIST AS YOUR PERSONAL LORD AND SAVIOR? [ Link ] [ Discuss singularity ] posted at: 11:07 | path: /weird | permanent link to this entry Well, I don't know about global but there's definitely something weird happening locally -- with temperatures in the high twenties in Edinburgh, and an all-time record temperature set yesterday -- 38.1 degrees in Gravesend (100.6 Fahrenheit), this is shaping up to be one of the hottest summers ever for the UK. Heat: I hates it, yes my precious, I hates it. [ Discuss warming ] posted at: 10:51 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry |
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