Virtual High Five

As my readers must have figured out by now, I am a bachelor (the Lego Star Destroyer is a dead giveaway) So, there are times when I need to celebrate some achievement, such as finally defeating Darth Malak at the end of Knights of the Old Republic, but am all alone. It is at these times that I turn to the Virtual High Five. I just load the web page, and give the hand a high five. It's great.

How to feel impotent and omnipotent at the same time.

Welcome to the Hubble Ultra Deep Field
Take a moment to just stare into the abyss. 10,000 galaxies in this little sliver of sky with perhaps hundereds of billions of stars each. One has to wonder if maybe there is not any cosmic santa claus poking around the universe like they told us in school; no one keeping track of the sex lives of a bunch of primates on the third planet from nowhere? One can't help but feel a little small and lost.

Now open up this image in your favorite paint shop program and start with a black pen. Pick some hapless galaxy and delete it. Say something like "..and you guys are outta here!" Then pick another 100,000 billion-star galaxy. Rub that one out. Probably a bunch of perverts anyway. Keep going; you still have 9,998 left. Pick a galaxy full of beings that probably have not kept the Sabbath. "Gonzo!" Don't feel so small anymore do you?!

The more I write, the more I'm concerned that I might need therapy. I'll stop now.  

I Feel for This Guy

If I were on the jury, I would acquit this guy for punching a self-checkout machine at Walmart. Those things are deliberately engineered to drive me crazy. The worst ones are at Albertson's. They talk to you with a real attitude. "Unexpected item in bagging area!" Yeah, I'll put an unexpected item in your bagging area, asshat.

Why isn't this guy dead?

John Koza. Heard of him? Some sort of PhD from Stanford who has poineered Genetic Programing methods. Check out Genetic Programing here. The May edition of Popular Science (which is not fully on-line yet) has a nice article about this guy's "invention machine" which is essentially a bunch of computers working in parallel to solve problems in a Darwinian sort of way. Breeding mathmatical solutions together, adding occasional mutations, and working toward some prescribed goal. They have a picture of a really cool antenna which the computer came up with. It looks crazy, but apparently work exactly like NASA wanted.

"[It] started with a basic antenna. It then made thousands of small, random mutations, then tested each mutation to see which changes make the antenna perform better. The program combined the characteristics from the best mustations into new antennas, then mutated the offspring again. After thousands of iterations, this process created a design that's far more efficient than a human could devise. "

And now this guy is thinking of ways the software can work on the problem of improving itself. Singularity here we come.

The real story here is why soldiers from the future have not yet sent a cyborg back through time to kill this guy? I'll leave it to you to work on that answer. But I suspect that Mike is right... be nice to your computer because it's never to early to start sucking up to our robot masters.

Operation Biscuit Update #3

After a Darth Tater inspired burst of activity this weekend, the Star Destroyer is finally taking shape.

Sub-orbital opportunities

This is for Mike:

I think this is a bargain compared to operation sea biscuit, with a better timeline too. Payload slots are only $99 for the 350 gram CanSat.



http://masten-space.com/index.html

Spontaneous what now?

Now isn't this interesting? Spontaneous Human Combustion is old news, but this is something else entirely. Spontaneous Human Invisibility. The stories are riveting. One guy was ignored by his girlfriend at a party, another by a police officer checking IDs. Something is definitely going on here. Also the other links on this post make for some fertile web surfing.
By the way, I'm standing right next to you.

New favorite "game"

Well, isn't this fun?
Erika really like to watch me play it. She'll watch for even longer than I can possibly stand doing it. Then she'll push all the function keys on the keyboard along with every known combination of the windows key, alt, and who knows what.
This is why I haven't been able to post very much recently. Typing on the keyboard draws her like a magnet. A magnet with busy fingers.
Anyway, turn up the sound and enjoy!
PS: Apparently you can't "win". I've tried.

Operation Biscuit Update #2

As you can see, Operation Biscuit is clearly behind schedule. Darth Tater has recently arrived to provide additional "motivation" to the construction crew. I tried to explain that I had wildly underestimated how long it would take me to find each particular LEGO block in a sea of 3100 such blocks. The Dark Lord was unmoved. All he said was, "The Emperor will not be pleased."