Where have all my images gone?
Very funny, Google! All of the images have disappeared from this blog.
Thoughts about a funny old world, and what is real, and what is not. Comments are welcome, but please keep them on topic.
Very funny, Google! All of the images have disappeared from this blog.
My veteran laptop PC is a (less than 1 GHz) Pentium 3 powered Compaq Presario 1800, which has a mere 320MB of RAM and a 30GB hard disk, and it even needs an expansion card to enable it to talk to a wireless network. The real reason that I bought it around 5 years ago was the quality and size of its LCD screen; it has a 15 inch LCD screen which comfortably runs at 1400 by 1050 pixels (16 bits per pixel).
Am I the only one, or has anyone else noticed how a lot of the New Scientist brainteasers (in the Enigma section) appear to have been constructed so that they can be solved by brute force? In fact, brute force makes it very easy to construct a "brain" teaser in the first place, because all you need to do is to describe a largish (but not too large) ensemble of potential solutions (e.g. all possible n-by-n grids of digits), then state a set of conditions that a unique member of the ensemble has to satisfy, then ask the reader to find that unique member, and submit it as their solution to the "brain" teaser.
Here is a photo showing the view from my house this afternoon. On a clear day you would see hills/woods/fields in the middle distance of the photo. But yesterday and today the snow monster visited instead.
In last week's New Scientist there was an article entitled The Large Hadron Collider: Bring it on! which discusses how physicists are going to set about interpreting the flood of data that will emerge from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. This grabbed my attention because the method of bottom-up construction of physical theories that is described in the article is closely related to how self-organising networks are designed.
In this week's New Scientist there is an article entitled Bell Labs: Over and out, which is about the decline and fall of Bell Labs. As the article puts it, Bell Labs was "formerly the world's premier industrial research laboratory". So, what went wrong?
From KurzweilAI.net I learn that Marvin Minsky has given an interview to Discover magazine here. Minsky is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, and he is a very articulate and outspoken character. In the interview he comments on the activities of neuroscientists.