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Posts Tagged ‘Found Online’

Justification of Ockham’s Razor as a principle of reasoning

06 May

Scientists use the principle of Ockham’s Razor as their guide. Ockham’s Razor states that when there are multiple consistent theories are being considered, the choice should be the simplest one. Simple theories have an intuitive appeal, but that is not a justification of Ockham’s Razor as a principle of reasoning. A justification should demonstrate that preferring the simplest compatible theory is better at finding the truth than any other competing strategy.

This article does a good job with great cartoons of explaining why this principle is valid. Very insightful. Here’s the link.

Update: here is an animated older version. The link above goes to the version 2 story board which has not been animated.

 
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Information Visualiation, Philosophy, Science

 

The Ron Paul Tea Party – Liberty is Brewing

12 Dec

On Dec 16, on the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party – Ron Paul organizers (if you don’t know who he is watch this) want you to donate to the Ron Paul Presidential Campaign. They are to create what they call a money bomb – the largest single day fund raiser in history in order to get the national media to take him seriously. It is amazing to see how dedicated his supporters are. With little coordination they have created an internet phenomenon. Good luck guys.

http://www.teaparty07.com/

 
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Philosophy, Politics, Thoughts

 

Download a backup of wikipedia to your laptop or local lan

09 Dec

Yesterday I downloaded Wikipedia – All of 2,120,684 English articles of it are now on my hard drive.
A few stats for the curious (for the English version only):

  • Date of last edit: April 2007 (A September backup is still in progress)
  • Compressed size: 7.19 GB
  • Number of files compressed: 9
  • Number of files decompressed: millions
  • Decompressed size: ~100 GB
  • Time to download: 8 hours
  • Time to decompress: 10 hours

Why on earth would you do this?

  • The more versions of Wikipedia exist in the world, the less the chance it will get lost if something really depressing happens
  • Having a local version means you can look things up offline
  • Local versions can be used in corporate firewalls to give users access without granting full access to the web
  • Local files can be parced by scripts to create reports and study the structure, trends, and patterns
  • umm..its cool…do I really need a reason to want all the world’s collective knowledge on my laptop

Most people interested in this won’t have any problem downloading the compressed files. But few people have 100 GB free on their laptop. If you decompress the files to an external usb hard drive, it can take 30 hours per file (multiply times 9 files). Still, that is not too bad. You can buy 2.5″ laptop drives now that have 300gb and 3.5″ drives that are 1000 GB. The only problem is that decompressing the time it takes (10+ hours!)

Wikipedia is growing…fast.
Last year (Dec 2006) total compressed size of the English version was version only 5.8 GB. By April 2007 (just 4 months later) it was 7.2 GB (this is the version I downloaded). I am waiting to see what the September version will be. How fast is Wikipedia growing? It is hard to say. The last stats I found are for July 2006 but it was definitely on an exponential curve.


http://download.wikimedia.org/
http://static.wikipedia.org/downloads/December_2006/en/

 
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Hacks, Web Design, Web Software

 

Google Trends API coming soon

08 Dec

Google is planning to release an application programming interface for its Google Trends program, according to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google. She also said the company would make it possible to download data from Google Trends into spreadsheets. Mayer said she couldn’t provide a time frame for either action.

Google trends has become an valuable tool for me in comparing the popularity of everything from HDTV sets, websites, software, and presidential candidates to vacation spots. I can’t wait to see what kind of mash-ups the web community creates.

 
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Google, Hacks, Web Software

 

Eat fruit, lose weight

08 Dec


Here is a list of foods that burn more calories than they contain. Called negative calorie foods, the following 15 treats actual require more calories to digest than they provide your body in energy. You still get vitamins and plenty of fiber. Up until I saw this list, the only one I knew about was celery. However this is also highly dependent on the speed of your metabolism. Putting these foods together is called a Negative Calorie Diet. Take for example – an orange, which may contain 50 calories, but requires 75 calories to digest. So for every orange you eat, you should burn off 25 calories. This is why advocates of the Negative Calorie Diet encourage you to eat frequent healthy meals, in doing so you are actually increasing the speed of your metabolism.

The Negative Calorie diet – Against:

  • No scientific proof to confirm its effectiveness
  • Very little information surrounding diet
  • More theoretical than practical

The Negative Calorie diet – For:

  • Little effort involved
  • Promotes consumption of foods rich in vitamins and minerals
  • Increases the body’s metabolism

Foods on the list – it seems like practically every fruit and vegetable can be found on one of the many lists.

  • Celery
  • Oranges, Tangerines, Grapefruit, Lemons
  • Mangos
  • Onions
  • Lettuce
  • Strawberries
  • Carrots
  • Apricots
  • Lettuce
  • Tomatoes
  • Cucumbers
  • Watermelon
  • Cauliflower
  • Apples
  • Hot Chili Peppers
  • Zucchini
 
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Hacks

 

Decode Your Genome For $1,000

07 Dec
from Consumerist by Chris Walters
For $1,000, a small California-based company called 23andMe (financed in part by Google) will decode your DNA and tell you whatever it can about your predispositions, health risks, and family traits—for example, whether or not you’re in line for the same heart disease that affected your father and grandfather, which is what the author of the Wired article wondered. (Turns out he’s not, but he’s at a higher risk of developing glaucoma. When one door opens…)

con_dnaexplosion.jpg

For now, companies are offering genotyping—”the strategic scanning
of your DNA for several hundred thousand of the telltale variations
that make one human different from the next.” It will take a few more
years before anyone can offer (or afford) to sequence all 6 billion
points of a person’s genetic code, but in the meantime, genotyping can
provide a lot of the kind of health-related information many people
would love to know.

 
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Imagination, Science, The Future

 

Tired of waiting on hold – outsource your waiting to India

07 Dec

It’s not just for Fortune 500 companies, you can use a company like Brickwork and pay someone $4/hr to sit on hold for you. From the website:

Remote Executive Assistant

  • Do you spend more time on routine administrative tasks instead of important business issues?
  • Are you suffering from information overload?
  • Are you finding less time to devote to your personal interests?
  • Are you up against a deadline and need help with research on your project?
  • Do you have an interesting idea but need help in creating a business plan?
  • Do you need assistance for extensive internet research and database creation?
  • Do you want to create/improve your website which gets you more customers?

Tasks they do:

  • Formatting/beautifying any MS office files like word, excel, PowerPoint
  • Quick mail mergers and sending mass mails in your name; Email & fax blast
  • Internet search or any other sources that you provide them access to
  • Designing customized greetings cards and sending them on your behalf
  • Fine tuning your logo, business cards and other stationary including converting image to vector
  • Data processing like data entry, OCR conversion; creating the PowerPoint presentation from the handwritten data;
  • Updation, normalization & standardization of database;
  • photo edits; b/w to color
  • Shopping
    assistance like comparison of models & prices, listing of shops
    within a specific area with address, phone number & route map

Has anyone tried this?

 
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Guides, Hacks, The Future

 

How corporate policy works (joke)

25 Oct

Here is an oldie but a goodie. This story made it’s rounds years ago as an email forward. I’m sure everyone has seen it before but maybe you forgot it – enjoy:

——-

THE PLAN

In the beginning was The Plan.
And then came the assumptions.
And the assumptions were without merit.
And The Plan was without substance.

And darkness was upon the face of the workers.
And they spoke among themselves, saying, “It is
a crock of shit, and it stinketh.”

And the workers went unto their supervisors and said,
“It is a pail of dung, and none may abide the odor thereof.”

And the supervisors went unto their managers, saying, “It is
a container of excrement and it is very strong, such that
none may abide by it.”

And the managers went unto their directors, saying,
“It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong.”

And the directors went unto the VPs, saying unto them,
“It promotes growth and it is very powerful.”

And the VPs went unto the Prez, saying unto him, “This plan
will actively promote the growth and vigor of the company,
with powerful effects.”

And the Prez looked upon the plan, and saw that it was good.
And The Plan became Policy.
This is how shit happens!

——-

Let me share my personal take on this… Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Email, Humor, Imagination, Observations, Poetry, Thoughts

 

Google more popular than sex (at least according to google)

16 Oct

I was playing with Google Trends yesterday. With a few keystrokes you can satisfy your need for both useless trivia interesting facts and the data to back it up. Where else can you discover that basset hounds are more popular in Hungary, that Hillary Clinton is finally more popular than her husband, or that in spring of 2007, google became more popular than sex:
Here are some more fasinating trends (at least to me). Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Google, Information Visualiation, Observations, The Future, Web Design, Web Software

 

A new site, again

03 Sep

I have had my first real stretch of free time in almost 4 years these past 2 weeks. With it, I thought I would clean a little house and update my website. I have 2 goals with this new site: consolidate and simplify.

Consolidate because I have 34 domains hosted with half a dozen ISPs. This is great for playing the feild and comparing level of service (except they all pretty much suck the same with 1 notable exception), but it is very poor for having any kind of focus. The fact is,  I do a little bit of work online each week outside of my client paid activities.  But since it is  spread out across so many different projects, it is lost.

Simply because my old site, while cool, was based on a cold fusion platform I build my self with several different web services integrated into it. Half of these were down half the time. Well see how well this new approach works. Fingers crossed. (by the way, if its 2010 and this is the only thing up here, you will know it failed.)

 
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Humor, The Future

 

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