The Home Stretch

I've got about 10 days of productive work left before the end of the semester, so I'm battening down hard at the moment. In celebration thereof, here are a few procrastinatory web goodies:

TV = 2000 Wikipedias a year: Looking at how much time people spend watching TV in units of "wikipedias" - that is, the estimate of how much human effort has gone into wikipedia (around 100 million hours). How many wikipedias are spent watching TV each year? 2000.

A good quote from an article on SuperMemo:

Given the chance to observe our behaviors, computers can run simulations, modeling different versions of our path through the world. By tuning these models for top performance, computers will give us rules to live by. They will be able to tell us when to wake, sleep, learn, and exercise; they will cue us to remember what we've read, help us track whom we've met, and remind us of our goals. Computers, in Wozniak's scheme, will increase our intellectual capacity and enhance our rational self-control.

I welcome our new robot overlords.

Paul Graham considers whether benevolence might be the wellspring of corporate profit:

"Don't be evil" may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. I'm sure they find it constraining, but think how valuable it will be if it saves them from lapsing into the fatal laziness that afflicted Microsoft and IBM.

Another good quote: "truth = statelessness":

Being good is a particularly useful strategy for making decisions in complex situations because it's stateless. It's like telling the truth. The trouble with lying is that you have to remember everything you've said in the past to make sure you don't contradict yourself. If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything, and that's a really useful property in domains where things happen fast.

Here's a cool artwork / game where you can see the code that's running the game and interact with it while the game is running: The Naked Game (Don't worry, SFW).

Ok, back to trying to get my last 9 stars in Mario Galaxy working on my Data Mining and Software Validation projects.

ps - Here are some pictures of the newly poured foundation of our house: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Goings On

Been quiet on this blog for a couple months, eh? Well, as they say, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. :) Not that I have anything particularly un-nice to say, I've just been busy ...

What's new? Last weekend, Jill and I went to the wedding of our good friends of many years, Emily & Matt. We went to Balcones Springs, which was amazingly beautiful

More photos here. They allow dogs, which Mr. Emmet was very excited about:

I'm now entering the last month of classes (just finished my last mid-term, and now I have two projects left to go), so don't expect to hear much out of me until mid-May. Not that you did anyway. :)