Given this tip, you can guess what search engine optimizers will do. If you want to increase your chances of being indexed right by Powerset, you’d better work out what grammar it likes best and conform to it. At last, prescriptive linguistics will find its true purpose. Imagine the written comment of a future English teacher, amid the red marks, “Incorrect grammar. Will not be well indexed”.

In Fernando Pereira’s latest take on Powerset, he eludes to a similar nonmonotonic function for natural language search. Conversing efficiently in natural language requires that you can predict, to some degree of accuracy, what will be understood by your conversation partner. Systems that get uncannily close to human understanding yet fail in cases that are only predictable to the system designers may be frustrating to use. How will the tradeoff between increasing utility and increasing inscrutability pan out? Where is Powerset going to be on this hypothetical graph?

As Fernando says, only testing on the final system will tell.

It doesn’t quite show you how PARC is right on the edge of “civilization” with horses grazing in fields out the back. Here is the view out my window right now:

Come mid-summer, all this will be brown.

Photo by ybboey

If you don’t have a good idea, no problem, he’ll give you one - as long as you’re awesome. Oh to be Paul Graham. To have teams of shit hot coders fighting to be accepted by you so that they can work on your idea all summer, for minimum wage. He has created the world’s first ultra-high-level compiler. I’m being disingenuous of course. This compiler has (at least two) minds of it’s own, and Paul doesn’t really mind if it doesn’t do what he asks just as long as there’s a fair chance it will make him some money.

Here’s his full pres:

Before watching that the phrase “global warming propaganda” would have smacked of blinkered Republican rhetoric. As is pointed out in the film, there is a great global warming juggernaut brimming with funding for scientists that is very hard to slow down now. Even Bush conceded! (Wouldn’t it be funny if his stance on man-made global warming redeemed him in the end.) I think this is a very important film to legitimize the other side of the debate. I wonder is it having much effect?

I don’t know about you, but having a previously certain belief shattered by what looks like good science gives me a really good feeling. This science stuff is pretty awesome.

After more reading around, it seems the documentary was a bit misleading, including theories which have been discussed in the literature and found to have problems, and not including some theories that have been put forward to explain the data presented. Check out this detailed response. Nevertheless it’s good to have some counterpoint to Al Gore. Now maybe we can meet in the middle?

Adobe’s first big Apollo app is an Internet video application codenamed Philo. The pervasiveness of Flash Player created multi-billion dollar Internet video startups powered by the Flash video format. The Philo team hopes to expand the display size and quality of distributed videos and get publishers encoding using the latest Flash video encoders. Publishers can brand the entire video player, delivering MTV content in what looks like a MTV video player, or a Rocketboom-themed player…

Great!! thats just what I want - an MTV branded video player to play MTV videos and a Rocketboom branded video player to play Rocketboom videos. Awesome!

This is not the future of the web people, and it certainly isn’t the future of the desktop. Please try to resist.

I’ve always heard considerations of scale used in favor of there being other intelligent life in our galaxy - There are so-and-so many suns with so-and-so many planets, many of which have the same conditions as our planet when life arose here. Surely there must be lots of other life and surely there must be intelligent life since it would be a coincidence for them to have had less evolution time than us relative to the age of the galaxy (assuming evolution has a tendency to beget intelligence).

It was interesting to hear Creon Levit mention a scale argument for the opposite conclusion on a Neo Files podcast. It goes like this: If there are many such intelligent civilizations, more advanced than us, then they probably have the ability to create self-replicating machines that can be sent out to colonize a suitable planet and prepare it for their more fragile creators. These machines could be programmed to launch identical probes to other planets. And the replicated machines in those probes could do the same. And so on. You get an exponential processs that could spread through the whole galaxy in a relatively short amount of time.

So where are they?

I had never shopped at CD Baby before. I had a fun time. Now they get a blog mention and a link out of it. Site designers take note.