Blog Without An Important Name

Early today (give or take) NZ time, eMusic/J was featured in comments on both Slashdot and Digg.

As a result, on the 24th of May, there were 56 downloads of eMusic/J, compared to a typical day of around about 5. Hopefully this will help the userbase grow a good bit. Oh, and before you ask, it wasn’t me talking about it online, it was random people who I don’t know

Found on Digg:
“Once enough votes have been collected, the genetic algorithm gets to work. It picks the good images and breeds them using either mutation or crossing-over. Since the images’ genes are just trees, it is simple to cross-over two of them and produce new ones.”

It’s a nice idea, similar-but-different to what I’m planning on trying to implement one day. I’m skeptical about how well it’ll work when faced with multiple people having disparate ideas of what looks good, along with people trying to game the system a bit. But for something fun, it’s interesting. They’ve also implemented it, which is something I haven’t gotten around to yet
the site (more description) | digg story

Here a point is made that I find is becoming a problem (for me, anyway) in movies and books. The problem comes when the author (or scriptwriter, or whoever) tries to be realistic in a field they don’t really know. If it happens that this field is something that I know about, and the author gets it wrong, all of a sudden any suspension-of-disbelief is immediately lost.

Unsurprisingly, many movies these days include references to computers. That’s all well and good, I can put up with some liberty there. I can handle “Movie OS” scenes where the person opens a file, and a flashy 3D visualisation shows it opening on the screen. I’m desensitised to that by now. However, when they try to get a bit deeper into it, that’s when everything starts to go wrong. The prime example in my mind is the movie “Swordfish”. This has a great scene where the “hacker” has to break into a machine in 30 seconds, from the password prompt. Apparently, it has “256-bit AES encryption” or something. A valid enough statement, but has no relation to a password prompt, nor breaking into the machine from there.

I find that this extrapolates quite cleanly into things that aren’t supposed to be fiction, also. It turns out that a certain amount of suspension-of-disbelief is required to read the newspaper. Usually, if you’re just reading it without thinking, you (well, I) tend to take for granted that the things it says are correct. This house-of-cards comes falling down the moment you read an article on something that you have first-hand knowledge of…and the reporter gets fundamental things wrong. (This was brought home to me today when looking up the date that something was on. One source said it was on the 20th, another said the 19th. Fortunately I erred on the side of caution and got it right). All of a sudden, all confidence is lost in everything else said in the paper. It’s somewhat unfortunate that this state doesn’t seem to last all that long.

I think that this reminder that “things may not be exactly as they’re written” is something that needs to be reinforced. It would be nice to be able to switch it off when watching/reading something fictional that tries to be taken seriously, however.

This week just past was apparently elections for the Otago University Students Association. Typically with these kinds of things, there is campaign advertising stuff stuck around the place. Those of you who have seen the movie Napoleon Dynamite will understand this that I saw today:

Also chalked on the ground were things such as “Pedro is an option”.

I wonder who won…

Dunedin locals may be aware of the Tui ad on Albany St, on the side of Liquorland. It looks like it had been attacked by someone with a bit of wit. Here is what it said tonight:

The previous edit that I remember was turning “My new flatmate keeps giving me the eye” into “My new mate keeps giving me e”.

Update: as of Monday the 8th, it’s been painted over. Pity