Saturday, August 23, 2003

Electronic Voting Machine Cracker Challenge An anonymous reader writes "In the ongoing debate on the security of electronic voting, an Atlanta area programmer has confronted Georgia election officials on ... [Slashdot] What makes this very cool is that the voting officials have accepted the challenge and dare the hacker to crack the voting machines. 8:47:40 PM    comment []; EPA Lets Old Coal Plants Fire Up The Environmental Protection Agency prepares to ease pollution rules for power plants....The Antarctic ozone hole may be larger than ever.... and more... [Wired News] Hey, I have an idea! If we pollute even more maybe we get to experience all of the negative effects of it in our lifetime...and we'll spare the future generations.... 8:45:18 PM    comment []; Noise...... This picture literally started with nothing, a blank new Photoshop file to which I added visual noise, which I then shaped with the Wave Distortion command. 12:20:41 PM    comment []; Not a drawing..... This is a Wave Distortion done with Photoshop, not a drawing.... 12:13:33 PM    comment []; Gender Genie I used what I wrote earlier concerning Awareness and pasted it into the Gender Genie....here are the results. I write like a girl. 11:56:42 AM    comment []; Common errors in English. Brilliant .... Common errors in English.Brilliant. What is an error in English? The concept of language errors is a fuzzy one. I'll leave to linguists the technical definitions. Here we're concerned only with deviations from the standard use of English as judged by sophisticated users such as professional writers, editors, teachers, and literate executives and personnel officers. The aim of this site is to help you avoid low grades, lost employment opportunities, lost business, and titters of amusement at the way you write or speak. Via Sean Lloyd. [The Cartoonist] I checked out this word, which I have only heard misused: Hoi Polloi Great site! 11:49:17 AM    comment []; SUPER FLY; ONE THAT GOT AWAY FLY FISHING? Sheer apophenia, that. I said "GONE FISHIN'", as in gone to do nothing in particular. The only fishing I ever do that doesn't involve the excercise of literary imagination is with search-strings, on eBay. BUT THIS IS NOT TECHNICALLY A FISH... Yesterday I took this picture of a member of J Pod, while I was technically, in my sense of the phrase, "gone fishin'". Mammalian and roughly the size of the fusilage of your smallest Cessna... http://members.shaw.ca/wxy123/orca-s.jpg [Gibson Blog] 11:46:24 AM    comment []; Do you write like a girl? Try this test and find out! As you may recall, I wrote a piece last month for the Boston Globe about an artificial-intelligence program that can tell whether a piece of anonymous writing was composed by a woman or a man. The New York Times Magazine ran a short essay on the subject, and within days, a very cool blogger named Rich rendered the program on a web page called The Gender Genie. Go there, input in some text, and it'll tell you whether it was written by a man or a woman! Interestingly, I fed this very entry into the Gender Genie and found out that it was indeed written by ... a man! I'm strangely relieved. (Thanks to Misha for finding this one!)... [collision detection] I don't even want to touch this one. But I am intrigued and will take the test...Do they have subcategories? Like: You write like a macho, without an adjectives. You write terrible and yet masculine. You write well and girlie. That is the most hermaphrodite prose ever. etc. etc.. ad nauseum.....I am sure over a bottle of wine we could come with a million of them!! I am off to take the test..... 11:30:47 AM    comment []; Solution To The Landmine Problem There are well over a million unexploded landmines around the world. Many of these devices outlast the conflicts they were intended for, only to later maim or kill innocent civilians. In many cases the locations of landmines are forgotten or lost, making the task of de-mining extremely difficult, dangerous and time-consuming. What is needed is a solution to this problem that protects innocent civilians and reduces the need for costly de-mining. It is a given that militaries will not likely voluntarily abolish the use of landmines, therefore any solution must take that into account. I propose a simple solution to the problem that meets all of the above criteria: Landmines should be manufactured with a built-in time-limited safety switch. After a certain amount of time, the mine simply will not explode anymore. The safety switch could be designed in a number of ways -- one embodiment would have it rust or dissolve over time by exposure to air and/or water. Another embodiment might base the switch on the decay of an isotope with a short half-life. Organic substances that are designed to degrade over time, perhaps by exposure to natural bacteria, could also be used. The time limit could be set to several years, or perhaps a decade, at most. Deactivated mines could be reactivead by simply replacing the switches. There are probably many other alternatives to accomplish the automatic time-limited self-deactivation of landmines. Getting landmine manufacturers to adopt such a technology is probably more achievable than getting them to stop making landmines altogether. This innovation could save a lot of lives and limbs. [Minding the Planet] An expiration date for landmines. A brilliant idea. Minding the Planet is full of ideas! 11:21:04 AM    comment []; City Living!! 11:22 AM. Underpants Man sighted again. Underpants Man is a guy who lives a few buildings away from me. He looks to be about 70 years old, 300 to 400 pounds. His name is derived from the fact that each day at around noon, weather permitting, he steps out onto the roof of his building wearing nothing but white boxer shorts and a necktie. He then proceeds to walk around his roof doing mild calisthenics -- basically he moves his arms laterally to simulate some form of "exercise." After walking around the roof of his building like this for approximately five minutes he furtively glances around to make sure nobody has seen him, and then he goes back inside. It's like this every day. Why does he do it? Why the necktie? It's an unsolved mystery. I am fortunate enough to live higher up than his roof, so I have an unobstructed view of this unique phenomenon. Underpants Man is one of those characters that make living in New York City so rewarding. [Minding the Planet] Hilarious story...now it would not be nice to make a QuickTime file of that man. Don't do it.............. 11:13:31 AM    comment []; Ok, that's it. I'm switching Radio's... Ok, that's it. I'm switching Radio's new trackback function off. It either doesn't work, or I did something wrong or nobody is linking to my entries. Pffrrr...! Who cares. [The Cartoonist] It's not working for me either. It's more of a cute idea than a really useful one anyway....I wonder whether a lot of people use NetNewsWire or an equivalent and thus don't ping the quoted source? Or is that an automatic function of NNW I am not aware of? 11:05:16 AM    comment []; Sea Sponge uses better Fiber-Optics Technology A variety of sea sponge grows natural fibers that transmit light as well as, or even better than, existing fiber optic technologies. Nature scores a point. [Minding the Planet] 11:00:22 AM    comment []; Awareness Is Not What You Think I think the title of this post pretty much sums up my entire philosophy of mind in one neat sentence. It also sums up my argument for why awareness cannot be sythesized on a computer. Without some equivalent to "thought" (in other words, without representing or creating any information) how could a computer ever know that it was knowing? How could that computer express and experience its own awareness without some sort of symbolic representation taking place? My argument goes as follows: 1. A human being can be aware of their own awareness without any thoughts occuring (ie. without creating or using any information) 2. Computers cannot do anything (thus they certainly cannot "sense" or "know" anything) without using information. 3. Therefore computers will never be able to synthesize self-awareness using any information process. 4. Thus computers will never be as conscious or intelligent as humans. [Minding the Planet] I read this not as an argument against Computers becoming aware, but rather an argument for people to meditate. Most people are only aware w/o any thoughts for moments during meditation (or sex). I would suggest that our minds' chatter is far too loud and persistent to claim that human beings in general can be aware of their awareness for any length of time. But if, as the writer points out, that awareness sets us apart and is a unique ability, shouldn't we all practice it more? I find that another unique ability of our minds is that we can be daydreaming and yet some neurons are firing and maybe colliding and we suddenly have a great idea. An idea that does not appear to be based on any sort of computing or even related to what we were doing or thinking at the time....It's not really accidental of course because I feel that an artist for example prepares himself for these beautiful accidents by practicing his instrument and thinking and meditating about music...Beautiful accidents are what makes great art, great engineering, great discoveries. It's that ability to create random collisions in our brain that creates some of the greatest works of mankind. For A.I. to work I believe the computer would have to be able to experience itself moving and would have to be able to generate some kind of meaningful random accidents. Those amazing Aha! moments that make life so splendid and exciting!! 10:59:36 AM    comment [];

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