Web Tools to Ruin Your Life (and improve it)

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One of the students put me onto something that is going to keep me amused during lunch hours for a while. It is called StumbleUpon, and it is an add-in for Firefox or IE which suggests funky web sites that you might be interested in. You assign a bunch of categories that you like and then press the Stumble! button. It then takes you somewhere you might find interesting. When you get there, you can rate what you see so that other people can find it later. Great fun and highly unproductive, in that I can see myself spending hours with this thing. Within minutes I had found this link. I'm sure there are thousands of others.

But if you want to use the interweb to improve your life productivity wise you should really take a look at del.ico.us. Stupid name not withstanding it is actually massively useful. Again, it installs buttons on your IE toolbar, but this time it lets you manage and tag web favourites that you find. When you find a site that you don't want to forget (perhaps one you Stumbled across) you press the "post to de.lico.us" button and it then lets you enter tags for the link. It also shows you a "cloud" of existing tags so that you can easily find related sites. Very useful. You can see my tags here.

Appliance of Science

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Usually on a Saturday I go up town and think about buying things that I don't really need. Yesterday was slightly different, in that I actually bought something. Staples were getting rid of some external disk drives and stuff, and tucked away down the side they had a network storage device from Maxtor.

This is like an external disk drive, but rather than connecting it directly to your computer you plug it into your home network and it then presents network shares for you to browse to. The bad news is that it will work a bit more slowly than a directly connected device, the good news is that everybody on the network can see and use it at the same time, without a computer being switched on.

At only seventy quid for a 200GByte device I thought it was a reasonable deal. And so it has turned out. I've loaded all my pictures onto it and I'm going to use it as a media server for the house.  I can even plug in external drives (it has two USB sockets) and give myself around half a terabyte of storage. Wowzer. I can remember when 20MB was a lot...

Of course I've since found people on the web reporting that theirs lost all their work when the drives crashed, but so far it seems OK....

Hull Culture

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If you live in Hull, and haven't been to Ferens Art Gallery, then shame on you. It is free to get in, they have a nice coffee shop and there are some stunning paintings in there. At the moment they have a special exhibition called "Darkness Visible" which is easily the equal of ones that I've seen at Tate Modern (that is to say that I didn't understand some of these exhibits either).

But that doesn't mean that I won't be going back. It really is a nice place. Right in the middle of town it is an oasis of peace and quiet and paintings and sculptures and installations.

I try to make a point of going into art galleries when I go places. Not because I am particularly artistic (obviously) but because it gives you a nice insight into the local area. Hull has some splendid galleries and museums and can really hold its head up with pride in this respect.

Students, a good place to take your parents if they insist on you showing them the neighbourhood. You can leave them with the impression that you are acquiring culture, which is always a good thing.

Prada and Profundity

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Since that horrible Horizon program on Wednesday about artificial intelligence I've been pondering on what is really going to happen in the future, when megabrain computers are loaded with the minds of our greatest scientists.

Now, I don't know much about this stuff, but it seems to me that us ignorant humans have managed to prove that:

  • some things you just can't predict (Quantum Theory)
  • some things you have to take on trust (Godel)

In other words, no matter how clever you are there is a limit to the number of things you can work out using pure brain power.

Which means that our super intelligent machines are going to be in a bit of a fix because they won't be able draw any conclusions at the end of all this wonderful thought they will be doing.

And then it came to me; they will do what us humans do when we have nothing better to do. They will dabble in things like fashion.

Scene : Singularity Sixty Seven - outpost seventy three of hive mind five

Consciousness Alpha Four: "..then I said to him that recurring decimals were so last season and that all the really serious fraction action this year has got to be down with the vulgar's..."
Consciousness Beta One: "You are so right. Do you think my brain looks big in this?"

Devil Wears Prada vs Cars

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Went to see "The Devil Wears Prada" tonight. Even though I am of course the epitome of style, I thought it worth taking a look to see if there was anything I could teach the world of fashion.

Good film. Bit like the last film that I saw, which was Pixar's cars.

  • Both films had models in them with very shiny paintwork - none of which are actually real.
  • Both films are morality tales.
  • Both films have a baddy (of sorts) who actually gets what they want at the end (but at what cost to themselves? we are invited to ask).

Anne Hathaway played the young innocent seduced by the world of glamour rather well I thought. And Meryl Streep was wonderful as the editor in chief with a heart of granite.

In conclusion, I quite liked the movie, even though I was one of around three blokes in the rather full cinema.

The other good thing about the night was the trailer for the new Bond film, which looks like it is going to be a corker.

Horizon: The Rise of the machines eh?

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When I was younger the summers were longer, grass was greener, beer was cheaper etc etc. And the BBC science program 'Horizon' was worth watching. Against my better judgement I watched it again tonight, mainly because the subject was Artificial Intelligence or how modern computer science, brain research and general stuff means that in precisely 22 years we will be downloading our consciousness into hyper intelligent machines to make a Human Vsn. 2.0 which will then wage a war with the remaining klutzes on the planet in which billions will be killed.

 What complete and utter rubbish.

Apparently, one of the reasons that this all makes perfect sense is that around 20 years ago a nutcase sent a bunch of bombs to people in America to stop it happening. Yeah, right.

I kind of lost it when the narrator mis-quoted Moore's Law. Then we had a bloke who had managed, by plugging wires into the brain of monkey, to capture and replicate the moment of the monkey arm. Apparently this was a big advance. Along the lines of "Hey, we've made a tape recorder. Now we understand music". Do we heck.

Then we were whisked to another laboratory, where another man with bad hair and a big vat of liquid helium told us how he could make computers which can do this and that at the same time. I used to have one of those but I scrapped it for a machine which actually worked.

Before they could explain what this meant we were sent off to see a bloke who is taking lots of pills and walking on a treadmill so that he can survive the next 22 years, whereupon he can download his consciousness into the machines we will be making by then. He was doing this with such smug assurance that I ended up hoping that he would get knocked down by a bus in 2028 on the way to get his brain recorded.

Then there was the chap who was taking rat's brains to bits so that he could put them into a pile of Sun computers. And the scientist using the Basic Stamp (in the shops for fifty quid folks) to remote control a rat.

 By now my own consciousness was making a valiant attempt to crawl out of my ears and reach the TV remote.

There was nothing here that made me more scared of the future, and quite a lot which made me scared of the present. If these are the kind of people we are giving money and resources to I can see trouble ahead.

I'm sure that I've missed the point (definitely Human Vsn. 1.0 me), and that all these professors and well funded genius types are going to succeed in making something with a higher level of consciousness. I for one will welcome the day. I'll give it a camera and put it in charge of making better science programs. Then again, I reckon the monkey could have probably done that.

Madness I tell you

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If you go to the MSN home page at the moment you can see an advert for satnav for a Buick car. The tagline for Buick would seem to be "Beyond Precision".

What rubbish. How can you be more precise than precise? This sort of advertising really annoys me.  I really dislike it when people mess up with English. How on earth did they get to this?

Scene : Advertising Agency

Drone 1: "They say that this satnav is precise."
Drone 2: "And precise is good, right?"
Drone 1: "..and so more than precise would be even better?"
Drone 2:"I've always liked 'beyond'....."
Drone 1:"So, 'Beyond Precision' it is then. Send them a bill for fifty thousand as usual."

shudder

Torchwood

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The BBC launched its new "Dr. Who for grown ups" today. Called Torchwood, it follows a team of alien artifact experts working to understand strange technology which has fallen through a gap in space/time and landed in Wales.

Or something.

It is high grade, imaginative hocum with a big budget look and I'm signing up. It is certainly not for kiddies, but this grown up likes it.

The first episode is very nicely plotted with a lovely twist at the end. The second overcooks things a little bit, but is still worth watching.

And it looks like there are some lovely plot arcs being slotted into place.

BBC 2 is repeating the program on Wednesdy night. Worth a watch.

Useful Hull Web Sites

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My mate Geoff has made a couple of very useful web sites for people who live in Hull. One gives you a list of what is on at the local Cineworld and the other the weather forecast. They both go onto web sites to scrape the data and then present a page just right for viewing on a mobile device:

http://www.geoff.org.uk/cinema.php

http://www.geoff.org.uk/weather.php

Worth adding to your mobile favourites.

When someone rings me a penguin dances

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One of my students very kindly sent me a Firebox.com voucher after I helped her debug her program (not sure how this figures in the scheme of things bribery + corruption wise, but since the voucher has a cash redemption value of 0.001 pence I don't think I necessarily have to inform the authorities).

Anyhoo, it was off down to the Firebox web site to see what goodies they had in store. I got the latest version of 20Q - which is even more impressive than the original - and a bunch of mopods for me and the ladies in my family (they won't work for number one son 'cos he is on 3G - but you can't have everything). Actually, the voucher only covered a small part of the total price - but since I was saving money I was quite happy about this....

Mopods are fun. They are a little figure in a tiny glass jar and when your phone rings they dance. I got the penguin one which is quite neat. In the unlikely event of someone ringing me up (although it did happen in a lecture today....) he spins on the spot and lights flash. For a fiver they are quite good value.  Actually, I get quite a bit of dance action because he also detects when my phone connects to ActiveSync email and does a little dance then too.

The Big Cheese is Coming

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For some time my newspaper of choice (The Guardian)has been giving out wallcharts depicting different varieties of things. It started with things like fossils and animals, but they seem to have been running out of steam recently, having to resort to footling things like apples and salad vegatables to keep going.

Until now.

Tomorrow they are giving away a cheese wallchart. Oh yes. One for the office wall methinks.

Note: I know that cheese is essentially a lump of fat with good PR, but I still like it.