I always think a good icebreaker would be to give away gifts. Like you just need to carry one around with you in your pocket or something.
So… what we need, is a social excuse for ppl to bring around gifts to give to supposedly random people!
Now, the excuse is…
You buy the gifts in contract with some charity cause - the gifts that are sold that way, in the stores that support it - and the trick is that the charity money can only be activated by somebody who didn’t buy the gift.
I don’t know how to verify it - obviously the cashier would have to know something about your information. If you pay with cash or credit, I suppose that part’s easy. If you pay with cash, who knows… a driver’s license number or phone number maybe.
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
i used to keep this idea to myself because I wanted to be the one to start and/or run the organization. Now I care about other things..
The idea is called ProCat, or Project Catalyst Organization. The idea is to establish a non-profit organization, with legal bindings, and they allow it to allow the citizens to establish ideas, submit variations on ideas, and vote on them - ideas for improving the town, like, for example, establishing a new park. But it's not this simple.
The citizens themselves -- maybe, at least sometimes -- pay for the project (because there may be no other way). So, how does it work?
Say 1,000 people vote on a new park. Bob submitted an idea, Marly modified it, more people voted on Marly's modification, all 1,000 of them (or maybe not all) committed to paying a certain amount toward the project, but ONLY IF the project passes successfully. They probably committed varying amounts of money, but if it adds up to being enough then they all win. If it doesn't?? Nobody pays!
Obviously we can't trust somebody with that last $100 it takes to make a park just because they committed to it, so what the idea should probably be is that they *already* pay and THEN if it falls through - for lack of enough funds or for some other reason - then they all get paid back; the organization we *can* trust.
The idea is called ProCat, or Project Catalyst Organization. The idea is to establish a non-profit organization, with legal bindings, and they allow it to allow the citizens to establish ideas, submit variations on ideas, and vote on them - ideas for improving the town, like, for example, establishing a new park. But it's not this simple.
The citizens themselves -- maybe, at least sometimes -- pay for the project (because there may be no other way). So, how does it work?
Say 1,000 people vote on a new park. Bob submitted an idea, Marly modified it, more people voted on Marly's modification, all 1,000 of them (or maybe not all) committed to paying a certain amount toward the project, but ONLY IF the project passes successfully. They probably committed varying amounts of money, but if it adds up to being enough then they all win. If it doesn't?? Nobody pays!
Obviously we can't trust somebody with that last $100 it takes to make a park just because they committed to it, so what the idea should probably be is that they *already* pay and THEN if it falls through - for lack of enough funds or for some other reason - then they all get paid back; the organization we *can* trust.
i always want to see - i don't know if exists - i know something like it did for a while - a forum where people review bills, people translate bills to plain english, to varying levels of detail, and make sure not to forget the zingers, and and people - average citizens - comment on bills, rate them, submit ideas for variations, rate them, rate variations, submit variations of variations, and rate or vote up/vote down others' comments.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
I always think a good icebreaker would be to give away gifts. Like you just need to carry one around with you in your pocket or something.
So… what we need, is a social excuse for ppl to bring around gifts to give to supposedly random people!
Now, the excuse is…
You buy the gifts in contract with some charity cause - the gifts that are sold that way, in the stores that support it - and the trick is that the charity money can only be activated by somebody who didn’t buy the gift.
I don’t know how to verify it - obviously the cashier would have to know something about your information. If you pay with cash or credit, I suppose that part’s easy. If you pay with cash, who knows… a driver’s license number or phone number maybe.
So… what we need, is a social excuse for ppl to bring around gifts to give to supposedly random people!
Now, the excuse is…
You buy the gifts in contract with some charity cause - the gifts that are sold that way, in the stores that support it - and the trick is that the charity money can only be activated by somebody who didn’t buy the gift.
I don’t know how to verify it - obviously the cashier would have to know something about your information. If you pay with cash or credit, I suppose that part’s easy. If you pay with cash, who knows… a driver’s license number or phone number maybe.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Wouldn't it be great if I could, say, for example, listen to music playing Winamp visualizations and stream it to one of my blogs as a dynamically changing background?
As the communication channels get faster, how will IT technology adapt to take advantage of it?
NativeClient (one of Gooogle's pet projects) takes native code and rigorously proves using proof theory that it can't commit any kind of violation or infraction under any circumstances, so it's safe. That allows websites to send native code to the client for execution, which is probably dozens of times faster than JavaScript with JIT. The drawback is, of course, that any CPU architecture that isn't supported - well - won't be supported. But x86 isn't the only architecture they're pursuing, and as of now, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac computers all use x86 anyway. Mobile devices don't, but some of them don't even show Flash..(>:)).. and ARM is probably one of the architectures they're pursuing anyway.
With NativeClient I could program my *own* visualizations to be running as a page background, all the time.
But let's say I wanted to stream it? HTML 5 might be able to handle that, with sufficient speed. But of course if it's a public blog site, the blog site must allow that kind of connectivity for me to stream it. How generalized would this ability be? Quickest solution: JavaScript can send requests to domains other than the document's origin. XmlRpcRequests aren't that good at streaming, though; you'd normally have to use a hidden frame for that.
And let's say 5 people read my blog simultaneously? Would I want to have to waste bandwidth streaming the same visual to all 5 of them? Why couldn't I just use multicast? But now we have to allow the consumer to use multicast, and we have to allow JavaScript to tap in..
I imagine new APIs usable by blogger sites or any other site that would make such communications (and much more) possible, but what exactly will the APIs contain?
Basically we're talking about shifting into a more dynamic and freely flowing information age. I have mixed feelings about that in general, but it's -going- to happen, so the sooner we get to thinking about how we're going to do it *right*, the better.
As the communication channels get faster, how will IT technology adapt to take advantage of it?
NativeClient (one of Gooogle's pet projects) takes native code and rigorously proves using proof theory that it can't commit any kind of violation or infraction under any circumstances, so it's safe. That allows websites to send native code to the client for execution, which is probably dozens of times faster than JavaScript with JIT. The drawback is, of course, that any CPU architecture that isn't supported - well - won't be supported. But x86 isn't the only architecture they're pursuing, and as of now, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac computers all use x86 anyway. Mobile devices don't, but some of them don't even show Flash..(>:)).. and ARM is probably one of the architectures they're pursuing anyway.
With NativeClient I could program my *own* visualizations to be running as a page background, all the time.
But let's say I wanted to stream it? HTML 5 might be able to handle that, with sufficient speed. But of course if it's a public blog site, the blog site must allow that kind of connectivity for me to stream it. How generalized would this ability be? Quickest solution: JavaScript can send requests to domains other than the document's origin. XmlRpcRequests aren't that good at streaming, though; you'd normally have to use a hidden frame for that.
And let's say 5 people read my blog simultaneously? Would I want to have to waste bandwidth streaming the same visual to all 5 of them? Why couldn't I just use multicast? But now we have to allow the consumer to use multicast, and we have to allow JavaScript to tap in..
I imagine new APIs usable by blogger sites or any other site that would make such communications (and much more) possible, but what exactly will the APIs contain?
Basically we're talking about shifting into a more dynamic and freely flowing information age. I have mixed feelings about that in general, but it's -going- to happen, so the sooner we get to thinking about how we're going to do it *right*, the better.
Monday, August 16, 2010
inhahe: i just thought of a good prank to pull on telemarketers
inhahe: first time one calls, answer, don't speak, record their reaction
theteofscuba: they don't even use the do not call registry any more
inhahe: second time one calls, play back the recording of the first one
inhahe: and record their response
theteofscuba: we get telemarketers calling daily
inhahe: third time one calls, play back the second telemarkter's response and record their response
inhahe: etc.
theteofscuba: hmm
inhahe: first time one calls, answer, don't speak, record their reaction
theteofscuba: they don't even use the do not call registry any more
inhahe: second time one calls, play back the recording of the first one
inhahe: and record their response
theteofscuba: we get telemarketers calling daily
inhahe: third time one calls, play back the second telemarkter's response and record their response
inhahe: etc.
theteofscuba: hmm
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Ngodot1800: we were talking about my former or her present boss Barbara
inhahe: oh, my mom was talking about bosses today.
inhahe: she had a great idea
inhahe: it was
Ngodot1800: which was?
inhahe: there should be a radio show called 'be careful, your boss may be listening'
inhahe: people can call in to complain about their bosses
inhahe: and now and then play a song like 'shove this job'
inhahe: and once a year have a thing where you praise bosses who are nice
Ngodot1800: I will spend one nanosecond per decade doing that
inhahe: oh, my mom was talking about bosses today.
inhahe: she had a great idea
inhahe: it was
Ngodot1800: which was?
inhahe: there should be a radio show called 'be careful, your boss may be listening'
inhahe: people can call in to complain about their bosses
inhahe: and now and then play a song like 'shove this job'
inhahe: and once a year have a thing where you praise bosses who are nice
Ngodot1800: I will spend one nanosecond per decade doing that
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Idea for images.google.com
A link under each image for "similar images." This isn't some AI comparison feature. This is simply finding more-or-less identical images, that may just be in other resolutions or image formats.
The way to do this would be to scale each picture down into a smaller grid, i hear 4x4 is a good number. Then just take a hash of the 16 color values. (the color gamut should also be scaled down, but not sure by how much.) Everything with the same hash is an identical picture.
It would be nice if relative comparisons could be made, i.e. ordering pictures by similarity, too. How many pixels (and the color gamut) you scale the image down to determines how precise a match has to be to fit; so google could choose a level that they think will satisfy the average user. Or, they could even create multiple hashes for each image based on different scales, then order image results by which hashes match...
Even more convenient would be if there were some kind of hash where the linear difference between any two hashes is also the level of difference between two pictures. I'm not quite sure if that's logically possible, but then, the above idea can actually be thought of that way..
To actually compare image distances, a good way could be to take color distance between every corresponding pixel between the two grids, square each distance, sum them, then take the square root of that.. but that's way too intensive a comparison for a google search. (Also it ignores the dimension of object borders changing location, but that could be solved by a 2-dimensional levenshtein distance.. which is even more insanely computation-intensive. and i wonder how you can integrate that with a color distance formula.. i wonder if it would work to take an n-dimensional levenshtein distance ( http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/publications/storage_paper/lrec06_v0_7.pdf ) where L*a*b are three dimensions and x, y location are two more..)
A link under each image for "similar images." This isn't some AI comparison feature. This is simply finding more-or-less identical images, that may just be in other resolutions or image formats.
The way to do this would be to scale each picture down into a smaller grid, i hear 4x4 is a good number. Then just take a hash of the 16 color values. (the color gamut should also be scaled down, but not sure by how much.) Everything with the same hash is an identical picture.
It would be nice if relative comparisons could be made, i.e. ordering pictures by similarity, too. How many pixels (and the color gamut) you scale the image down to determines how precise a match has to be to fit; so google could choose a level that they think will satisfy the average user. Or, they could even create multiple hashes for each image based on different scales, then order image results by which hashes match...
Even more convenient would be if there were some kind of hash where the linear difference between any two hashes is also the level of difference between two pictures. I'm not quite sure if that's logically possible, but then, the above idea can actually be thought of that way..
To actually compare image distances, a good way could be to take color distance between every corresponding pixel between the two grids, square each distance, sum them, then take the square root of that.. but that's way too intensive a comparison for a google search. (Also it ignores the dimension of object borders changing location, but that could be solved by a 2-dimensional levenshtein distance.. which is even more insanely computation-intensive. and i wonder how you can integrate that with a color distance formula.. i wonder if it would work to take an n-dimensional levenshtein distance ( http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/publications/storage_paper/lrec06_v0_7.pdf ) where L*a*b are three dimensions and x, y location are two more..)
Thursday, March 11, 2010
This needs to be done.
Wouldn't you like to be able to take a day - or a week - off, whenever you wanted?
Is it me, or is one of the main stresses in life due to having to be at work *every* work day for years on end, *on time*, or risk being fired, which poses the further risk of living on the street?
Aside from the needlessly totalitarian exactly-on-time aspect, I can see why a company wouldn't let you just take a day, or a week, off whenever you wanted. If there's only 10 other people working there who can fulfill your position, then they can't necessarily afford to lose a spot unplanned. Even if there's 1,000 people working for the company who can fulfill your position, most of them are probably in other cities.
If there were 1,000 people who could fill in for the same position working within one facility, they should be able to afford to let people take some time off whenever they want (barring holidays, etc.), because statistically it will even out and you'll always have roughly the same amount of people who *want* to work that day because they need to make enough money to live. Of course, whether companies actually *would* provide that grace to their employees just because they can is probably a different matter, but that's not the point here.
What if people, in general, had say...5 different jobs? Instead of working the same job every day, you'd work a different one every day of the week. Except it would be more efficient if you didn't always work the same job the same day of the week - if it switched around according to need. Now, instead of hiring one person for a position, they'd hire 5, and each person would work 1/5th of the time, more or less. If a company otherwise had 10 people interchangeable for a certain position, now they have 50. Arrangements would have to be made, somehow, inter-company and between companies and employees, on a day-by-day basis. This could all be automated online, by simply letting the employee bid for a day or string of days off, and letting the computer do the rest of the work and tell people where to go.
This also makes life more fulfilling for the employee, by breaking the monotony of having to do the same thing, and work with the same people, every single work day, and by expanding his/her working skillset.
Wouldn't you like to be able to take a day - or a week - off, whenever you wanted?
Is it me, or is one of the main stresses in life due to having to be at work *every* work day for years on end, *on time*, or risk being fired, which poses the further risk of living on the street?
Aside from the needlessly totalitarian exactly-on-time aspect, I can see why a company wouldn't let you just take a day, or a week, off whenever you wanted. If there's only 10 other people working there who can fulfill your position, then they can't necessarily afford to lose a spot unplanned. Even if there's 1,000 people working for the company who can fulfill your position, most of them are probably in other cities.
If there were 1,000 people who could fill in for the same position working within one facility, they should be able to afford to let people take some time off whenever they want (barring holidays, etc.), because statistically it will even out and you'll always have roughly the same amount of people who *want* to work that day because they need to make enough money to live. Of course, whether companies actually *would* provide that grace to their employees just because they can is probably a different matter, but that's not the point here.
What if people, in general, had say...5 different jobs? Instead of working the same job every day, you'd work a different one every day of the week. Except it would be more efficient if you didn't always work the same job the same day of the week - if it switched around according to need. Now, instead of hiring one person for a position, they'd hire 5, and each person would work 1/5th of the time, more or less. If a company otherwise had 10 people interchangeable for a certain position, now they have 50. Arrangements would have to be made, somehow, inter-company and between companies and employees, on a day-by-day basis. This could all be automated online, by simply letting the employee bid for a day or string of days off, and letting the computer do the rest of the work and tell people where to go.
This also makes life more fulfilling for the employee, by breaking the monotony of having to do the same thing, and work with the same people, every single work day, and by expanding his/her working skillset.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Friday, March 05, 2010
Uniform / easier PC's
PCs would be a lot easier for a lot of people if there were only one type of connection - for everything.
ps/2 ports for keyboard and mouse are all but obsolete, pretty much any new k/b or mouse uses usb. but we still have, for example, cat-5e ports. why not make network cables use USB ends?
that still leaves a few more things that could be converted - at least once we get the new usb 3.0 spec.
SATA? Why? Just replace it with USB. Put USB ports inside the computer.
PCIe? Replace it with USB. Provide sufficient means for cards to dock inside the computer. In fact, strategically place the USB port inside the dock so we don't have to use wires. This could be done with internal drives, too.
That pretty much leaves just HDMI, VGA, and DVI output. VGA is analog but totally obsolete. There's no reason to use VGA anymore. In fact it's a travesty unless you have a CRT. HDMI is a bit outside our domain of consideration because it's an interface to a non-computer device; you can't control that, there are too many non-computer devices out there. DVI, on the other hand, could be usurped by USB. Let's see.. usb 3.0 will be 3.2 gbit/s after protocol overhead, one pixel is 24 bits, that's a possible 64 frames per second at 1920x1080 resolution. Well, I guess it just barely cuts it in that department. We can always sell new monitors with USB connectors that require up to 3.2 gbit/s, and after that use dvi... until we get USB 4.0
Wouldn't it be awesome if there all computers had exactly one type of port and came with about 12 of them?
PCs would be a lot easier for a lot of people if there were only one type of connection - for everything.
ps/2 ports for keyboard and mouse are all but obsolete, pretty much any new k/b or mouse uses usb. but we still have, for example, cat-5e ports. why not make network cables use USB ends?
that still leaves a few more things that could be converted - at least once we get the new usb 3.0 spec.
SATA? Why? Just replace it with USB. Put USB ports inside the computer.
PCIe? Replace it with USB. Provide sufficient means for cards to dock inside the computer. In fact, strategically place the USB port inside the dock so we don't have to use wires. This could be done with internal drives, too.
That pretty much leaves just HDMI, VGA, and DVI output. VGA is analog but totally obsolete. There's no reason to use VGA anymore. In fact it's a travesty unless you have a CRT. HDMI is a bit outside our domain of consideration because it's an interface to a non-computer device; you can't control that, there are too many non-computer devices out there. DVI, on the other hand, could be usurped by USB. Let's see.. usb 3.0 will be 3.2 gbit/s after protocol overhead, one pixel is 24 bits, that's a possible 64 frames per second at 1920x1080 resolution. Well, I guess it just barely cuts it in that department. We can always sell new monitors with USB connectors that require up to 3.2 gbit/s, and after that use dvi... until we get USB 4.0
Wouldn't it be awesome if there all computers had exactly one type of port and came with about 12 of them?
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Better Translating Service
the problem of making an intelligible automated translation -- much more one that's actually reasonable-sounding -- is not easy, and it's not exactly solved anywhere.
the proposal is to make translations more direct and decipherable by not "sugar-coating" them trying to put them into regular English (or any other recipient language obviously) grammar. For example, Mandarin grammar is *completely* different from English grammar. When translating from Mandarin, notation (brackets, etc.) could be used instead of normal English grammatical structures to relay the grammatical structure of the Mandarin phrase. Most people aren't too stupid to get the hang of such a system after a couple of translations; the bigger problem is simply not knowing the words of another language.
Another example of this feature is how to handle agglutination. To translate a complicated German agglutinated word into English, we could simply say present something like zeitgeist, for example, as "time-spirit." People are intelligent enough to infer the real meaning behind such things based on context in a lot of cases; again, the translator only needs to come half-way. The reader simply can't be bothered to spend years learning a language just to translate one text.
Another great feature would be the ability to click on any word in the translation and get a pop-up list of various other words it could have been translated as. Obviously translations aren't strictly word-by-word, but most of the time a word should be able to be tagged (in html id attribute for example) as having been a translation of another word in the foreign text, for use during lookup.
Also, in some cases where there are only 2 or 3 different possible translations of a word but they're significantly different from each other, the word could be presented in a way that shows all of them; for example, "geist" could be show up as "[ghost|spirit]"
the problem of making an intelligible automated translation -- much more one that's actually reasonable-sounding -- is not easy, and it's not exactly solved anywhere.
the proposal is to make translations more direct and decipherable by not "sugar-coating" them trying to put them into regular English (or any other recipient language obviously) grammar. For example, Mandarin grammar is *completely* different from English grammar. When translating from Mandarin, notation (brackets, etc.) could be used instead of normal English grammatical structures to relay the grammatical structure of the Mandarin phrase. Most people aren't too stupid to get the hang of such a system after a couple of translations; the bigger problem is simply not knowing the words of another language.
Another example of this feature is how to handle agglutination. To translate a complicated German agglutinated word into English, we could simply say present something like zeitgeist, for example, as "time-spirit." People are intelligent enough to infer the real meaning behind such things based on context in a lot of cases; again, the translator only needs to come half-way. The reader simply can't be bothered to spend years learning a language just to translate one text.
Another great feature would be the ability to click on any word in the translation and get a pop-up list of various other words it could have been translated as. Obviously translations aren't strictly word-by-word, but most of the time a word should be able to be tagged (in html id attribute for example) as having been a translation of another word in the foreign text, for use during lookup.
Also, in some cases where there are only 2 or 3 different possible translations of a word but they're significantly different from each other, the word could be presented in a way that shows all of them; for example, "geist" could be show up as "[ghost|spirit]"
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