More research is leading me to more funny moments while reading papers. In a paper that seeks to explain an optimization technique called the Conjugate Gradient Method, there is a page that is blank except for a brief listing of keywords associated with the paper’s topics:
Keywords: conjugate gradient method, preconditioning, convergence analysis, agonizing pain
Here is the paper, should you desire to torture yourself.
While doing research for the final paper for my Artificial Intelligence course, I came across this citation in a paper I am studying:
In several applications, Tang and Fishwich [22] … and many other researchers have shown that ANNs perform better than
ARIMA models, specifically, for more irregular series and for multiple-period-ahead forecasting.
…
[22] Z. Tang and P. A. Fishwich, “Backpropagation neural nets as models for time series forecasting,” ORSA Journal on
Computing, vol. 5, no. 4, pp 374-385, 1993.
Tang and Fishwich. What an awesome name that would be for a new Adult Swim cartoon.
You’ve heard that Iggy Pop song, “Lust for Life”, right?
Well, the new Yahoo Lyrics service thinks that your poor little impressionable mind is not ready to be exposed to such deviancy:
I think we can all tell Yahoo Lyrics to **** off.
Posted in music
Many thanks to Jeff Hudson for emailing me about some errors that I had in the Zodiac cipher web toy. I’ve made the corrections, and I’ve also posted a few more interesting decodings that I found recently. These decodings are almost certainly gibberish, but they are still kind of fun to find.
Jeff says:
I’ve only just started trying to decode the 340, but the other day i found “crush them into ground up bits” in a single string of characters. I naturally got really excited as this phrase emerged – but unfortunately everything else in the code was complete gibberish 🙁 so i guess it’s back to the drawing board lol.
Today is National DNA Day. In celebration, marvel at the wondrous complexities of molecular biology:
I am boggled with wonder at the endless coils within coils within coils, and the molecular machine in the 2nd half of the clip. Life is amazing!
Get our your decoder rings and try out my Zodiac cipher web toy. Crack the code; become instantly famous!
This cipher is one of the famous unsolved ciphers that the Zodiac serial killer sent to newspapers back in the late 1960s / early 1970s to taunt people about his killings. His first cipher was solved a long time ago. But he sent another cipher, which remains unsolved to this day. Many cryptography experts have tried and failed, which has led to speculation that the cipher is a hoax sent to frustrate and delay detectives working the case. But there are claims that by using statistical analysis, you can tell that the cipher does indeed contain a message (I don’t recall exactly how).
“Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over the fifty-seven years of my political work in England, knowing what I aimed at and the results, meditating on the history of Britain and the world since 1914, I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing. The world today and the history of the human anthill during the last fifty-seven years would be exactly the same as it is if I had played pingpong instead of sitting on committees and writing books and memoranda. I have therefore to make the rather ignominious confession to myself and to anyone who may read this book that I must have in a long life ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work.”
– Leonard Woolf, from The Journey Not the Arrival Matters.
Slide.com has a nifty and free slideshow-creation widget. Check out this slideshow that uses my Flickr photostream –
Here’s a a larger 800×600 version. It looks nicer!
Trying out the Scriptless Flickr Badge, which pulls out random selections from 300 of the most recent posts to my Flickr photostream:
Reload to see new selections.
Posted in crackbaby, meaningless, tech, toys
I had to sign a form tonight that has this legalese about permissions I’m granting to ACM by submitting my abstract to an evolutionary computing conference. Maybe I’m not around legal-speak enough to think that using the term ‘universe’ this seriously is not at all strange:
