I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords

So: my semester is done. I think it came out well, though we'll wait for the grades to say for sure. Since the end of the semester, I have:

• Gotten all 120 stars in Super Mario Galaxy (plus another 10 as Luigi)
  
• Recorded a full length album with Black Joe Lewis
  
• Taken pictures of our new house, which is now framed
  
• Caught up on all my emails and feeds, and all the other work I'd been shirking during crunch time
  
• Made a couple other changes (???)

Now, the wife and I are preparing for a vacation in sunny old London, starting late next week. Lo and behold, Google Maps has taken it up another couple notches since last I looked, and is now totally usable as a one-stop vacation planner:

• You can create your own maps with placemarks, shapes & notes, and collaborate on them with other people
  
• You can turn on a Wikipedia layer that shows geo-located wikipedia links for anything on the map area
  
• Not to mention all the other layers that you can turn on now in Google Maps, for restaurants, coffee shops, etc.

Here's the neighborhood we're starting in. Any suggestions?

View Larger Map

Food vs. nutrition: Michael Pollan @ Google

This is a fantastic video lecture by Michael Pollan (who wrote the Omnivore's Dilemma).

The Home Stretch

I've got about 10 days of productive work left before the end of the semester, so I'm battening down hard at the moment. In celebration thereof, here are a few procrastinatory web goodies:

TV = 2000 Wikipedias a year: Looking at how much time people spend watching TV in units of "wikipedias" - that is, the estimate of how much human effort has gone into wikipedia (around 100 million hours). How many wikipedias are spent watching TV each year? 2000.

A good quote from an article on SuperMemo:

Given the chance to observe our behaviors, computers can run simulations, modeling different versions of our path through the world. By tuning these models for top performance, computers will give us rules to live by. They will be able to tell us when to wake, sleep, learn, and exercise; they will cue us to remember what we've read, help us track whom we've met, and remind us of our goals. Computers, in Wozniak's scheme, will increase our intellectual capacity and enhance our rational self-control.

I welcome our new robot overlords.

Paul Graham considers whether benevolence might be the wellspring of corporate profit:

"Don't be evil" may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. I'm sure they find it constraining, but think how valuable it will be if it saves them from lapsing into the fatal laziness that afflicted Microsoft and IBM.

Another good quote: "truth = statelessness":

Being good is a particularly useful strategy for making decisions in complex situations because it's stateless. It's like telling the truth. The trouble with lying is that you have to remember everything you've said in the past to make sure you don't contradict yourself. If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything, and that's a really useful property in domains where things happen fast.

Here's a cool artwork / game where you can see the code that's running the game and interact with it while the game is running: The Naked Game (Don't worry, SFW).

Ok, back to trying to get my last 9 stars in Mario Galaxy working on my Data Mining and Software Validation projects.

ps - Here are some pictures of the newly poured foundation of our house: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Goings On

Been quiet on this blog for a couple months, eh? Well, as they say, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. :) Not that I have anything particularly un-nice to say, I've just been busy ...

What's new? Last weekend, Jill and I went to the wedding of our good friends of many years, Emily & Matt. We went to Balcones Springs, which was amazingly beautiful

More photos here. They allow dogs, which Mr. Emmet was very excited about:

I'm now entering the last month of classes (just finished my last mid-term, and now I have two projects left to go), so don't expect to hear much out of me until mid-May. Not that you did anyway. :)

Yes We Can

So, I've been reading Obama's book, and I have to say: I will be pretty excited when he is elected president. He's a smart, inspiring person who tends to bring people together, which is exactly what we need. This video captures the feeling pretty well:

Can you imagine such an honest, heart-felt video starring a speech by Senator Clinton? I can't.

Also, the white house is not a time share. :)

50K: Some Passings

Happy Holidays, all.

So, I got my 50,000th saved email this week. It was from my friend Paul, and the subject was:

Singer Dan Fogelberg Dies of Cancer

That's too bad, I have always liked Dan's music. "Longer", in particular, is one of my favorites. I know, it's sappy. So sue me.

And a couple other notable entertainer passings in the past couple weeks. Closest to my heart is my favorite piano player, Mr. Oscar Peterson. He was, almost without argument, the most technically proficient pianist of our time, maybe even of all time. I loved his music so much growing up - pretty much every year, that's what I wanted for Christmas, one of his albums. It taught me both that jazz could be exciting and highly structured, and that I could never actually be an amazing technical pianist (a valuable lesson to learn BEFORE practicing a zillion hours a day for your entire young adult life). Don't believe me? Watch this.

This dude was way over the top. RIP, Oscar.

And of course, the third notable one is Ike Turner. This happened (or at least, we found out about it) while we were in the studio recording Gunpowder with Black Joe Lewis. Seemed fitting. My favorite part of the whole thing, though, is the headline from some inspired journalist: "Ike Turner beats Tina to death."

50K

OK, I'm about 40 emails away from hitting 50,000 saved emails (I hit 40k last year). Any bets on who'll be # 50,000? (Not counting spam or bacn, or work emails ...)

Man, I know I must have something better to do than this.