A silly project ...

OK, so my goal here is to collect completely silly cleaned-up quotes from the edited-for-TV versions of profanity-laden movies. Examples:

From Fargo: "Jerry you're a liar, a ... a FRUISING liar!!!" (formerly "fucking liar")

From The Big Lebowski: "Do you SEE WHAT HAPPENS LARRY when you FIX A STRANGER SCRAMBLED EGGS!!!" (formerly "when you FUCK A STRANGER IN THE ASS") (I've also heard "Meet a Stranger in the Alps".)

I intend to collect more. Suggestions welcome.

Audio inspired by classic arcade games

Fun link 1: The theme music to Atari games.

Fun link 2: An old LP featuring a guy talking about how to win arcade games.

Fun link 3: C64 remixes.

Fun link 4: Impossible Mission!

First two links taken from BoingBoing and Waxy.

Scientists and engineers discover activism

About time that scientists realize their careers and values are under attack:

"Today a group of scientists and concerned citizens launch a new organization, Scientists and Engineers for America, dedicated to electing public officials who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy. "

(Lifted from BoingBoing.)

You got a date Wednesday, baby!

With my own Big Lebowski party coming up soon, I was quite happy yesterday to make (with Jenni's help) serious inroads on my Jesus costume, having found a purple shirt, jacket, and pants tight enough to get me arrested in municipalities with higher community standards. All I need now is some rings and a bowling glove, and I will be ready for the semis.

Teaching matters

This is good to hear: universities are starting to take teaching seriously. It's always a severe disappointment when a talented scholar turns out to be a terrible teacher, and it's more common that it ought to be. The chair of our department has stated in the past that a research university's job is not only to crank out great research, but to train the next generation of great researchers; the second part is too often ignored.

For those who have been wondering "How do I make an ugly, ugly, ugly Myspace page?"

Wonder no more. In no time, you'll be creating pages like this crime against aesthetics.

I Like To Watch

I Like To Watch

"I like to watch / CopVision is a program that watches television. Specifically, it watches COPS on Fox ... CopVision learns its language from closed captioning subtitles transmitted in the television signal. Everything that is said on COPS is tucked away in its memory to help it understand what it's seeing. It analyzes every frame, searching the field for outlines that remind it of something it has seen before. When it recognizes a contour it tags it with a guess as to what might be going on, gathered from its experience of words and pictures that go together."

With respect to research in commonsense reasoning, I found this interesting, because one difficulty in such reasoning is collecting lots of commonsense knowledge about the world - e.g. information such as "When you are hungry, you eat." We use a tremendous amount of simple information like this in our everyday lives, and it's not obvious how to collect all of it in one place. There have been attempts to collect this information through hand-entering by experts, through passive analysis of Web text (and other text as well), through collaborative effort by Internet users, and indirectly through online games. Another possible source of low-effort commonsense collection could be through parsing the text from closed-captioned TV programs.

Today's sounds and words

The Magnetic Fields' "69 Love Songs" may be the most perfect album in years. I have just listened to the song "I Don't Want To Get Over You" enough times to make my ears bleed, and I'm not quite sick of it yet. Also just read John Hodgman's Areas of My Expertise, which is quite a larf. You can hear him read the names of 700 hoboes online.