Inbox - Pyrotechnic ideas
I get many pyrotechnic ideas what to do with Alf's bedsheets
Do you know what happened ... I dropped my pink mobile phone in the lift shaft
Those skirts, they destroy the shape of the body
..., but I know my sister, her boyfriends are never normal
but yesterday i brought some monster carrots - enormous!
women are like wolves, if you want a wolf you have to trap it; you have to sneer it, and then you have to love it.
CAPTCHA's used to digitise books
CAPTCHA's are those annoying pictures with characters on them that you have to type to prove to a website that you're human. They're meant to prevent automatic programs to mimic humans and spam. While they undoubtedly are a great good for the internet, they're also a bloody waste of time. The inventor of the CAPTCHA's Luis von Ahn, realised this and decided to put this human effort to good use - to convert old books into electronic form.
Listen to this interview with Luis von Ahn at the IT Conversations Network
Inbox - i didn't fall from her nose hole
i didn't fall from her nose hole
O: he looks too italian ... without any offence
P: yeah but what does it really mean?
O: well I shouldn't like him .. or it's should not make a difference, it's you who should like him
P: u r my friend
O: but i never slept with you
Today in the morning my office is half empty as:
...
Who should work then? :-) no no, don't look at me :-)
Find hot singles in ...
After two weeks, today I made friends with the internet again.
I had a ton of bookmarks to sort, and while I was going through them I clicked on Scary Personals site. This image came up on the left menu bar. I'd say the probability of meeting any one of those chicks in that village is just about 1/27,500,021. What a whole load of bullocks!!
For any Simpson's fans out there. On this site you can watch all the 19 seasons of the simpsons for free.
For any alcohol fans:-
Internet Box - my g/f is pregnant
I haven't posted inbox quotes in a while but today I found this on yahoo answers.
ok im kinda worried an all. my g/f hasn't had her period she she got pregnant. do you think the baby is drinkin the blood??? shes 6 months pregnant. Link
... on risk and disclosure
This is one of the best articles I read on the web this year. Via
Some snippets:
Psychologists call this behavior "learned helplessness"--convincing ourselves that we have no control over a situation even when we do. ...
MY FAVORITE LEARNED HELPLESSNESS experiment is this one: People were asked to perform a task in the presence of a loud radio. For some, the radio included a volume knob, while for others no volume knob was available. Researchers discovered that the group that could control the volume performed the task measurably better, even if they didn’t turn the volume down. That is, just the idea that they controlled the volume made them less distracted, less helpless and, in turn, more productive.
Control is the thing, both Fischoff and Slovic say. It’s the countervailing force to all of this risk disclosure and the learned helplessness it fosters.
...
DREAD IS A POWERFUL force. The problem with dread is that it leads to terrible decision-making.
Slovic says all of this results from how our brains process risk, which is in two ways. The first is intuitive, emotional and experience based. Not only do we fear more what we can’t control, but we also fear more what we can imagine or what we experience. This seems to be an evolutionary survival mechanism. In the presence of uncertainty, fear is a valuable defense. Our brains react emotionally, generate anxiety and tell us, “Remember the news report that showed what happened when those other kids took the bus? Don’t put your kids on the bus.”
...
But even that “one in 50 million” characterization is problematic. It still causes people to exaggerate the risk in their minds, a phenomenon called "imaging the numerator." In one experiment that showed the dramatic effect of imaging the numerator, Slovic notes, psychiatrists were given the responsibility of choosing whether or not to release a hypothetical patient with a violent history. Half the doctors were told the patient had a "20 percent chance" of being violent again. The other half were told the patient had a "one in five" chance of being violent again.
Startlingly, the doctors in the "one in five" group were far more likely not to release the patient. "They lined up five people in their minds and looked at one of them and saw a violent person." They imaged the numerator. On the other hand, 20 percent is an abstract statistic that hardly seems capable of violence.
It sounds illogical, but our minds think that "one in five" is riskier than "20 percent."
Major Events of the Year
(I'm writing this here as a reminder of the events that happened this year.) Last weekend was election weekend in the dot. The government provides very cheap flights to encourage dottians living abroad, to travel to the dot to vote (there was a 93% turnover this year, the lowest turnover since 1971). I went to vote and thank God now it's all over. That's all my election blogging.
On a very sad note my miss’s dad died unexpectedly on Thursday night. He was having dinner with his friends and had a severe heart attack. I took the first flight to her house to attend the funeral.
24 ways to improve your vision
Reader's digest have an article outlining several ways to improve your vision. Most of the tips mention foods you can eat. Here is a summary of the tips:-
Food- fresh blueberries + yogurt or bilberry (blueberry) jam
- spinach
- red onions instead of yellow ones
- multivitamin
- sweet potatoes
- beets
- southern greens
- aim car vents at your feet not eyes
- move computer screen to just below eye level
- turn down the heat in the house
- sniff jasmine, peppermint or vanilla
- use eye makeup remover every night
- replace mascara every three months
How to watch better quality videos on YouTube
Youtube is now making some high resolution videos available. If you find a video you'd like to watch, you can add the following text to the webpage address, "&fmt=6" (without the quotes) to get a better picture. For the higher quality version you might need to wait a bit longer than for the normal version, because the size of the file is bigger, so it takes more time to download.
For example you can take a look at these two videos and compare the difference:-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAE2-FQHkok
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAE2-FQHkok&fmt=6
For the more technically oriented, there's a greasemonkey script available to automatically show the high-res video if available.
Also if you add "&fmt=18" instead of &fmt=6 you'll get the video in mp4 format instead of the usual .flv format usually used by youtube.
Via Hackzine
Data Mining and Info Vis for this week
Nat Torkington from O'Reilly Radar published an interesting weekly roundup post of the Data Mining and Visualization posts. The most interesting posts mentioned are: Catching a poker cheat with data mining, SNA toolkit for R and a link to a machine learning blog called Machine Learning (Theory)
Inbox - Dragon fruit or peach?
maybe i would rather compare you to a dragon fruit or something more masculine than a peach
I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.
You can put visual effect layers on top of Windows or Linux, but it’s just painting a turd.
Last 2 quotes were found on the web
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