Posts from — August 2005

I made my first contribution to wikipedia tonight. I wrote a paragraph on the origins of CAPTCHAs (see it here). There are a couple of other entries that could use some work that I’ve picked out, not sure when I’ll get to them.

Wikipedia might be my favorite site on the web, it’s certainly near the top. It has incredible breadth and the quality is amazingly high. It makes sense, though… I’m able to write about the origins of CAPTCHAs because it was discussed at the workshop I was at earlier this summer. How long before a term like that makes it into a “regular” encyclopedia at all? How many writers for Encarta have had dinner with the guy who invented them?

Thanks to for this link…

I ran over to the north side after dinner today. It was somewhere between 4.5 to 5 miles when I was done, but I had to keep adjusting my route due to musikfest. It was dark out, so dodging people became a bit difficult, but it kept things interesting. It reminded me of racing, and made me want to do that again.

There’s a 5K (3.1 mile) race in Fountain Hill on Saturday, if anyone is interested, let me know. If you don’t want to run and are just curious, you’re welcome to come. I’m not 100% sure that I’ll do it, but I should. There are some in the Fall as well, hopefully I’ll get to do those. Hopefully I’ll find someone to run with me on a semiregular basis as well. I’m not in all that great running shape, but getting out there today felt good. It had been at least a week (because I was sick last week), so I wasn’t sure how I’d do. Hopefully I’ll be able to run more this week.

There was a pretty strong thunderstorm this evening after I got back from the run. It was too bad that it was cloudy out, it could have been quite a show. Hopefully there will be more of these in the near future… that’s my favorite thing about summer.

You know… for kids!

Anyway, things are going well (besides being sick last week). About a week and a half of work are left, and there’s a lot to do. A couple of professors from other schools will be visiting us in the coming week, so we’ll be showing them what we’ve been up to and getting advice from them (they’re pretty influential in the field).

I’m relatively apathetic about the coming year. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just bland, I guess. I tend to think more about what I’ll do after leaving here than what I’ll do while I’m here. Granted, that’s important, but it’s a bit early for me to be checked out from grad school.

For better or worse, this semester will be very different, not just a change in structure, but a priority revision is in order. Maybe it’ll stick, maybe not. I most likely won’t have a formal job this semester, which is a big change… I can’t remember the last time I didn’t work for a long period of time. I’m not worried about not having anything to do, nor am I worried about having enough money to live on, it’s just a change. That’ll give me more time to work on my own projects though, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe I’ll get some reading done, too.. it has ground to a halt since I started working on runstoppable, and probably won’t resume until that’s subsided a bit.

I amuse myself.

I already posted this a while ago, but the Open Letter to the Kansas School Board is still hilarious and relevant. Nightline had a good segment (Full episode, quicktime, worth watching) about the “debate” that has gained prominence since the president’s remark that both theories should be taught. George Will appears on the program, and makes some very sensible points. One thing he brought up was the concept of falsifiability, meaning that when a theory is proposed, there should be some empirical way of disproving it. For example, if I proposed that acceleration due to gravity on the earth’s surface is always 100 m/s^2, you could run some tests to show that my theory is wrong. On the other hand, if I claim that we’re surrounded by invisible alien beings, oh let’s call them Thetans, for example, there would be no way for someone to disprove this. Since the hypothesis doesn’t have a clear way to be proven false (isn’t falsifiable), it is not relevant to science.

Occam’s Razor (summarized as “The simplest explanation is the best.”), is also mentioned by Will in the show. For example, if I had two theories to explain why I had a fever this week: 1. My body raised its temperature in order to rid itself of pathogens 2. Aliens from Saturn used their heat ray on me in order to test how my body would respond. Either of these could be true… but Occam’s Razor states that the simpler explanation (#1) is preferred. Falsifiability also comes into play with that example. Occam’s Razor isn’t a law; it doesn’t state that #2 is always false, it’s just a heuristic.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster (read the first link if that seems out of context), with intentional absurdity, violates both of these in the same way that Intelligent Design does. I can’t prove to you that the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn’t exist, nor can you prove that it does. This leaves the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the realm of Ideology, not science itself.

The wikipedia entry on pseudoscience is good, too, if you’re interested in the subject.

I guess that was a pretty thick entry, but it’s been brewing for a day, hopefully it gets some people thinking…

45% of Americans believe that human beings were created in their current form about 10,000 years ago

Hey, that’s enough to elect a president! This isn’t breaking news or anything, I was just doing some related reading and listening.

I haven’t done one of these posts in a while….

If you’re reading this with Internet Explorer, please stop. Click here and download Firefox instead. I don’t care if you “don’t know much about computers” or if “computers hate you” or if you’re worried you’ll break the computer. Just give it a try. I’ll set it up for you if you want, seriously. It’s free, better, and it doesn’t remove IE from your computer.

I wouldn’t be writing this post if I hadn’t spent the last 45 minutes trying to fix a really simple bug (I still can’t get it, and the code is valid).

“Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.” – Robert Heinlein

“Nice guys finish last, but we get to sleep in.” – Evan Davis

Next semester I’m taking:

• Fundamentals of Internetworking w/ Davison
• Database Theory w/ Korth
• Pattern Recognition & Document Analysis w/ Baird

For those who are interested…