Monthly Archives: July 2008

links for 2008-07-17

Iris was on the Today Show!

Last month, we heard about a KIVA outing here in Roanoke to get families and their kids to come out for a short hike and bug hunt. Turns out the Today Show was filming a story about “nature deficit disorder”, the idea that kids just aren’t getting out and connecting with nature as much as they used to. Iris brought a little glass jar to collect bugs and other creatures she found on the hike, and she scored a small interview with the Today Show folks:



(youtube link)

We were pretty excited to see her on national TV!

Here is the entire news story:



(msnbc video link)

She has a small appearance at about 1:23 into the second video (she’s on the right, bending down to look and then moving away). Her little interview starts at 2:14. I’m very proud of her!

Remember this quote next time your are “trembling in your anatomies.”

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and
blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails.
You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at
night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only
love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or
know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only
one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what
wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust,
never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never
dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a
lot of things there are to learn.”
— T.H. White, “The Once and Future King”

links for 2008-07-15

links for 2008-07-14

links for 2008-07-13

Geek celebrity moment

My friend Chris recently got to meet Jeff Hawkins (neuroscientist, founder of Palm Computing and Handspring, inventor of the Palm Pilot and the Treo, author of On Intelligence, founder of Numenta, developer of the idea of “Hierarchical Temporary Memory”):



“Can you sign my Palm Pilot?”

Pretty nifty! Chris gets to play with Numenta’s HTM software at his job at APL (lucky bastard). But everyone else can play, too, because the software is available to everyone here: Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC). Get your A.I. on!

Start your weekend with some crazy




(youtube link)

iMovie + clips of Mel Gibson from “Who Killed the Electric Car” + a little bit a free time = Mel Gibsanity.

links for 2008-07-11

GECCO @ Hotlanta

I’ve finally finished my crazy Zodiac cipher poster for GECCO 2008 in Atlanta next week:



Click image for biggie size, or get the PDF version. And here’s the 2-page paper if you want it.

Last year, I used PowerPoint (gasp) to create the poster. What a huge pain that was. This year, I used OmniGraffle, by far the best damned diagramming software I have ever used.

It should be a fun conference; I’m excited to hear about the results of all the competitions. Chris and I entered the “2D Packing Problem” contest; alas, our entry did not win. Still, we had a lot of fun trying out different ideas – it was a very fun problem to work on. The other contests should be fun to hear about, especially the Rubik’s Cube Solver contest. Entrants in this contest get to use a commercial grid computing platform to breed Rubik’s Cube solving algorithms.