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Mmmvelopes. Tasty Tasty Mmmvelopes.

Too often in life I am sending out a check to some charitable organization, or to resubscribe to Bacon magazine, and I think “damn this would be a lot better with Bacon.” And now via the honest one, I find out that there is a solution to this vexing problem: Bacon flavored envelopes! From the “learn more” section of the webstie:

Technology has given us a lot lately. The car. TV. X-rays. The refrigerator. The Internet. Heck, we even cured polio. But what have our envelopes tasted like for the last 4,000 years? Armpit, that’s what.
Really, people? If we can’t overcome this kind of minor technical challenge, it’s only a matter of time until some super-advanced race of aliens with lasers, spaceships and a delicious federal mail system comes down and colonizes the world. And nobody wants that (except for the aliens, of course).
So, after thousands of years and kajillions of horrible tasting envelopes licked, we’re happy to report that J&D’s Bacon-Flavored Mmmvelopes‚Ñ¢ are here to save the day. No longer will envelopes taste like the underside of your car. You can enjoy the taste of delicious bacon instead.
That’s right, bacon. It’s not real bacon, mind you, so you won’t have to start storing your envelopes in the refrigerator. But it really does taste like bacon. Which is what you really wanted in the first place, isn’t it? And it only took us 4,000 years to get there. Eat that, alien invaders.

Cool, but I beg to differ. My armpit smells like….Bacon!

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Science Fiction Prototyping

Last Friday I went to at talk by Brian David Johnson from Intel. That sentence sounds like any other that an academic could write–always with the going to seminars we acahacks are. That is until you hear that Brian David Johnson is a “consumer experience architect” in the Digital Home – User Experience Group at Intel. Okay that is a bit odd for a typical seminar speaker, but still lies in the “reasonable” range. And then you find out the title of his talks is “Brain Machines: Robots, Free Will and Fictional Prototyping as a Tool for AI Design” and you say, whah? Which is exactly what a group of about forty of us said upon hearing about this seminar, and is exactly why we showed up to hear the talk!
Continue reading “Science Fiction Prototyping”

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Igon Value Problems Over Dilettante Matrices

Friday the 13th is, apparently, a day of must read articles. This time it’s Steven Pinker’s review of Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures. Readers who have taken linear algebra will be amused:

He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aper√ßus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

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Cormac Interview in the WSJ

This interview with Cormac McCarthy by the Wall Street Journal is well worth reading (Coincidentally(?) I just started rereading the Border Trilogy.)
This amused me

[CM:] Instead, I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window.

simply because I can attest that yes, indeed, this is what he does! And, well, because my time at the Santa Fe Institute followed a similar pattern 🙂
On the other hand here is a more ominous reason why I enjoyed (my too brief) time at SFI:

WSJ: What kind of things make you worry?
CM: If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won’t even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It’s more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it’s just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there’s a problem you can take to bed with you at night.

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Guess the Dow, Win Chow!

Last month a local restaurant group, Chow foods—among whose restaurants is one of our favorite Sunday breakfast spots, The Five Spot—ran a contest/charity event: “Chow Dow.” The game: guess the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the close of the market on October 29th, 2009. The closest bet under the closing value which did not go over the value would be the winner. The prize was the value of Dow in gift certificates to the Chow restaurants: i.e. approximately $10K in food (or as we would say in Ruddock House at Caltech: “Eerf Doof!” We said that because it fit nicely with another favorite expression, “Eerf Lohocla!”, this later phrase originating in certain now obscure rules enforced by administrative teetotalers.) I love games like this, and I especially love games where the rules are set up in an odd way. Indeed what I found amusing about this game was that, as a quick check of the rules on the Chow website showed, you could enter your guesses at anytime up until October 28th. Relevant also: maximum of 21 bets per person with a suggested donation of $1 per guess. So what would your strategy be optimizing your probability of winning, assuming that you are going to enter 21 times?
Below the fold: my strategy, the amazing power of the X-22 computer, and….chaos!
Continue reading “Guess the Dow, Win Chow!”

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The Seven Deadly Sins – a Theorist Versus Experimentalists Deathmatch

Over in the twitterworld, @orzelc and @EricRWeinstein have been having a nice little chat about experiment and theory, when he of uncertain principles opinioned

I’m not sure what you have in mind as examples of experimental sins, though. Nothing really comes to mind.

At which point besides my head nearly exploding, made me think, well okay so what are the sins of theorists and experimentalists (so it’s a good thing that my head did not explode, since that would make thinking that thought rather…difficult)?
For your amusement: the seven deadly sins a theorist v. experimentalist deathmatch below the fold.
Continue reading “The Seven Deadly Sins – a Theorist Versus Experimentalists Deathmatch”

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Geek Synth

It’s like, nearly, a genre (via Martin Schwarz):
I once saw a talk where Bill Nye said “systematic directed genocide.”

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Glorious Dawn Record

I get a lot of press releases forward to me which usually get forwarded directly into my gmail archive. But this one I’m happy to pass along: Third Man Records is releasing A Glorious Dawn. You know the Carl Sagan remix (w/ guest appearance of the Hawkmeister) that I’ve been looping over and over again while I work:

Third Man Records is over the moon to announce the 7-inch release of “A Glorious Dawn” on November 9th.
…
The release is timed to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Sagan’s birth. Also happening that day is a reception in United States’ Congress with speeches by senators, NASA officials and assorted scientists, all hosted by the Planetary Society, which was co-founded by Sagan.
Third Man Records, in conjunction with United Record Pressing, fabricated a special “Cosmos Colored Vinyl” of which 150 copies will be available…50 randomly inserted into mail orders for “A Glorious Dawn” and the remainder to be made available at the Third Man Records Nashville store front at noon on November 9th.
The one-sided single features a very special etching on the flipside. Reproduced from the original artwork, the etching copies the etching included with the Voyager Golden Record, set off into space in 1977 as the most elaborate message-in-a-bottle idea ever imagined. With its inclusion of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night” it goes without saying that the Voyager Golden Record is one of Third Man’s favorite releases of all-time..

I fell asleep last night listening to an episode of Cosmos. Maybe that explains da alienz in my dreamz?

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A Tactic Named Sue

A puppet commenter informs me that El Naschie is suing Nature. El Naschie, you may remember, was the journal editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals who was accused of not reviewing his own papers in the journal. To be expected, I suppose. But the commenter that pointed this out is entertaining:

Sarah Limbrick [Pontiff: writer of the above linked article about the suit] would surely be interested to know what the leading libel expert in England had to say about the Nature article complained of. He said he is in a state of disbelief that the worlds most respectable scientific journal Nature should publish an article which bears all the hallmarks of the tabloid press. Another interesting point is the conspiracy theory linking the plagiarism of El Naschies work published in Scientific American with the Nature article as well as a far worse article published in Die Zeit. Interestingly all of these three publications are owned by Macmillan. I understand from confidential sources that a mega surprise will be released at the trial engulfing highly reputed names some of whom are Nobel laureates.

OOooh, Nobel laureates in a libel case and conspiracy theories to boot! That’s bigger than the Scopes monkey trial!

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Seattle Signs

Not helpful:
In Seattle if a road bends ever so slightly you are on a new street, but the above is…confusing.