08.24.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:24 am by Administrator
I have to say, I’ve been getting a little annoyed at all the people who want to get out of Iraq right now. We, as a nation, apparently decided to go to war. We messed up Iraq, messed it up bad. There are still areas of Iraq that don’t consistently have running water and electricity for air conditioning, all things many had before we invaded. We have ruined lives, economies, etc. We have a responsibility, an obligation, not to leave. Regardless of the legitimacy of the war, there is a war, and we as a nation must finish the job that was started. Is it going to hurt us? Yes, of course it is. Is it a bad idea? Of course it is, just as bad as it was when we started, but now we have to finish. I have no patience for those who began this war gungho and full of enthusiasm, but now that they know the cost, have wet their pants and want it all to stop. Of course, I know many protestors now are the same that protested the first time. But no, if we leave now we leave Iraq worse off than before we invaded. That is unacceptable. If it is possible that Iraq can be left in a better state than we found it, we must try to make it happen. I, honestly have little hope of that happening, though. We’re talking about religion over there, blood feuds. You can’t make it go away just by sitting down and having a little chat. But, if there’s any way some sort of stability can be reached, we’ve got to try. Besides, you all voted for the damn fool again. You voted to let the damn fool have his war, so war it’ll be.
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08.23.05
Posted in Uncategorized, Interests, Computers, Cog Sci at 4:51 pm by Administrator
Okay, so I know I’m a geek, but NLP fascinates me. I consider natural language processing to be one of the major hurdles to overcome before computers can behave in a reasonably intelligent manor. For example, if computers, can understand language, they can understand any printed text. Once that happens, it becomes trivial to create a huge online repository of all any information you can imagine, just feed it an encyclopedia or dictionary. Don’t even worry about complicated tasks like problem solving and data mining, just think about all that knowledge, interconnected, fast, easily accessible. Related facts linked to each other for easily moving from general to specific, similar to opposite, and more complex relationships. Anyway, I don’t need to go on, really. If you could speak, ask any question you want, or even state a fact, and have an answer replied to you, complete, fast, in your language, or have that fact stored forever. That’s cool. Anyway, I’ve kind of been surveying current research projects, and I’ve been a little disappointed. NLP and computational linguistics research is so spread out and disconnected. I tried for a while to get Stanford’s LKB/HPSG/PET and all that other crap working on my computer. I gave up. There’s just no place to get enough info on the various things. It’s more than a little disappointing. I’d really like to know what’s up with those projects. Part of me is even thinking Stanford would be cool for graduate school, even though I really don’t want to go to California. There are some cool resources out there, but most of them are just so disjointed and uncoordinated. I know it’s hard to get people to work together, but still. On the really really cool side, though, Microsoft has basically done what I was describing earlier with MindNet. It’s a pretty cool system. They basically fed their parser a dictionary and an encyclopedia and stored the results in a knowledge representation system. It’s cool, you can read their paper. They made MindNet over 10 years ago. That’s pretty cool. For the first time in a while, I actually think Microsoft is cool. They really do some neat research. It’s just too bad they won’t let other people use it.
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Posted in Uncategorized, Political at 4:35 pm by Administrator
The bbc has a great article about the state of science in the USA. It’s really quite unsettling. Of course there’ll always be people upset that they aren’t getting money, and well, that’s too bad, but the larger issue is even more disturbing. The frank disregard for facts and science, and in some cases even anti-intellectualism in the US and in particular in the Bush administration is downright frightening. It scares to realize the drastic change from science and facts and research and experts dictating and informing policy to policy controlling and suppressing information and research. Research on everything from forrest fires, environmental issues, pollutants in our drinking water, global warming, AIDS, birth control, weapons of mass destruction, has been twisted and bastardized by the Bush administration. We treasure our freedoms, but how free are we really when our government controls what can be researched, even what results and conclusions are acceptable?
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08.17.05
Posted in Political at 10:10 am by Administrator
So, some friends of my parents went to the airport to pick up some a family from sweden. They got to the airport waited for a while, couldn’t find their friends. Got a little worried, asked around, found out the father hadn’t been allowed to go through customs. They couldn’t even be told why he couldn’t go through. He was the only one in the family who’d been to the US before, so the mom and kids decided to just go back with him. My parent’s friends were a little confused, so they went home, called up one of our senators and asked some questions. Turns out, 30 years ago, the dad had been arrested for MIS-freaking-demeanor drug charge, in SWEDEN!! That’s why he couldn’t enter the country. He’s so damn dangerous because 30 years ago he got caught with a little pot in SWEDEN. What the heck is up with this country? Hell, while they were in the airport, they even met a korean family waiting for friends from south korea. After three hours they were finally told their friends had all been sent back. This is just STUPID! Just makes me want to get out of this dang country. After grad school though, because we still have the world’s best.
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08.14.05
Posted in Uncategorized, Political, Interests at 10:00 pm by Administrator
This weekend was AMAZING!!! I went up to my cabin with liz, ethan, jeff and lacy. It was pretty great. We went canoeing/kayaking a bunch. On friday we saw two bald eagles and a bunch of loons. We got really close to one of the eagles, almost directly under it. We also drank about a bunch of beer this weekend, as well as eating steak for three meals and bratwurst for one, a cake, and KEMPSWICHES!!!! I do really miss laura though. I haven’t really talked about her much, but I should, because she’s awesome, and my girlfriend, and I love’er. But yeah, this weekend was awesome. I also smoked a little on saturday. That was fun. It’d been quite a while.
ALSO though, things suck, like tax cuts for hummer and microsoft’s patents. Microsoft has gone beyond patenting “:-)” to “visually emphasizing … numerical data.” Basically, they’re patenting highlighting numbers. The idea of highlighting numbers is so new and novell that nobody other microsoft should be able to…. riiight. Also, you can get up to $100,000 tax credits for buying a Hummer or other obscenely large and wasteful vehicle, but even the piddly $1500 for buying a hybrid is expiring.
Good ole US of A.
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08.07.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:56 pm by Administrator
Today was yet another near miss for grilling with President Oden. He’s gone this week but we’ll try him again next week. Hopefully we’ll all get some points (full points for consentual).
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08.05.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:10 am by Administrator
Summer is Awesome! Summer is just Great! There’s the kiddie pool, water guns, weekly-biweekly grillings, games, ronnie, tennis, friends, just everything good in the world. I’m getting really excited about Budapest, though. As much as I love carleton, it’ll be good to get away for a term. It’d be hard for me to start getting excited about classes right now. I’m kind of in the mood for some philosophical waxing and wandering around in a foreign city.
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Posted in Computers at 9:06 am by Administrator
I have to say, nobody probably cares, but I think linux is pretty awesome. I only started using it a few monthes ago, but I’m pretty happy about it. Packages are so easy to use. It’s just awesome. I’m amazed at how easy it is to install from scratch. I had to do the same thing with windows when I reformatted a drive a while ago and I never could get it back to the way it was. I just couldn’t find all the software. But with linux, everything came with the distro, there was no searching around at different vendors sites like I had to with windows. I used mandrake, which I know is an easy distro, but I really like it. I even have a laptop and everythings working just fine. I don’t just mean I like it as an alternative to windows, I really think there are a lot of things that are really just better. Installing for one. I also just really like the transparency of the filesystem for different users. Application data is really easy to find and copy and store a backup. I just really like the way things are layed out. Also, multiple desktops are awesome! I know command lines are scary, but once you know a few basic things it can be a really powerful tool. I just like it.
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08.03.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:15 pm by Administrator
Well, this is my first blog….. ever. Crazy stuff. I don’t even know what to talk about really. I don’t think I’m pissed off enough to go onto a big long political rant. Although still pissed about Bush appointing Bolton without congressional approval. EVERYONE!!! If you’re reading this, you’re probably cool so you should read Democracy Now. It’s great news, stuff you’d never find anywhere else. It’s pretty liberal sometimes, but it’s usually pretty credible news.
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