The V of Doom!

Why did this Viacom logo creep me - and others - out so much when it appeared at the end of TV shows when I was a kid? At least I wasn't the only one.

...

The air in the room was thick with the scent of power and vestigial conviction. Secretary of Defense Longinus McClung was literally twiddling his thumbs in his chair when President Elston D'Aquino entered the room, and Gen. Erasmus Flynn was standing at full attention, gazing intently beyond D'Aquinos head.

"It's the transmission from the Kappa quadrant, sir", McClung said, hesitantly.

D'Aquino sat down, and his men in black dutifully fell into place behind him. He gazed intently at McClung. Longinus was, for lack of a better word, a sweaty man. Everything about the man perspired, from his faintly shining brow down to the wet, sticky, odorous mess that was his very soul. Friends would helpfully suggest medication, but McClung was a closet Scientologist and refused all medication that did not come in the brightly colored shape of a cartoon character.

"It was ... there was a most unsettling, shall I say, for lack of a better word or means of conveying the unsettlingness of the matter, sir, it was, uh ...Perhaps Gen. Flynn may fill us in on the details."

Flynn nodded. As he would speak, he was haunted by the image of his wife, Bienvenida Goddard Flynn, making passionate love to Eric Rombokas, whispering the sweet nothings that stood the hairs upon her neck on end more firmly than Flynn's own surgically enhanced spine stood as he spoke.

There is a robot, sir," Flynn said. "A killer robot. From outer space."

D'Aquino sighed. He knew that his legacy, like every one before it, would come down to moments like this - moments when Fate hurled an arrow our way, unmercifully, perhaps with some kind of sling, and the futures of millions, including a small pool of misfit teenagers who needed something to give them hope in the future, would stand inalterably altered by his will. It made him, for lack of a better word, horny.

"Is there any hope?"

"Our calculations, sir, indicate that our army will face casualties in the quadrillions were to take down this enemy via conventional means."

D'Aquino pounded his fist on the table. "Well, you eggheads are just gonna have to start THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX, THEN!" He shot out of his seat and stormed out in a counterfeit of conviction, stealing a couple of mints out of the bowl on the table first.

Grab bag

A new record has been set for the highest Scrabble score ever: 830. Sweet Jesus. I can only dream of such achievements in my as-yet comparatively unimpressive career Scrabbling record.

In other news, our current President likes some really disgusting recipes, a new book by his former chef reveals. (Props to Slog.)

826 Seattle is the Seattle chapter of 826 Valencia, a cool organization founded by Dave Eggers which helps kids develop their writing skills. Right now, they are having a Mustache-A-Thon to raise cash, and blogging the affair.

The Enron Explorer!

When Enron collapsed in an avalanche of lawsuits and criminal charges, the text classification and data mining community were unexpectedly gifted with the mighty Enron email corpus, released to the public as a byproduct of court investigations. This has presented researchers with a huge dataset on which to test social networking and document classification related algorithms.

Anyways, the Enron Explorer is now here, letting you search online through a massive collection of Enron emails. You can find strange flirtation, executive flames, fratboy chest-thumping, and other such mildly amusing ephemera.

Creepy cartoons and CS researchers

I have fallen for the charms of The Comics Curmudgeon, a blog by a man with a keen eye for the underlying pathos and deeply disturbing dark innards of your newspaper's comics section.

Whoa ... creepy. I was just watching UWTV, and saw myself in the audience of a seminar on quantum computation - our department's seminars are routinely featured there. A couple weeks ago my advisor said to me "Hey, I saw you asking a question on TV last night!" (he was watching a talk by Luis von Ahn, who has earned my envy by winning a MacArthur grant).

Speaking of Luis von Ahn, his research is interesting stuff. What he's done is take a lot of tedious, repetitive tasks of collecting information - for example, labeling all the images on the Web - and solve them by designing online games which are fun to play, but, as a side effect, actually have the users indirectly solving these problems. The game Peekaboom is an example of this - it seems like a straightfoward two-player game, but the resulting gameplay is used to collect keywords relevant to a particular digital image.

Two things that people have taken with them all over the world

1) A can of S&W black beans.

2) A Nintendo Game Boy.

Why Women Can't Do Math:

Because they're convinced they can't, apparently.

A report published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science showed that women exposed to theories saying females are genetically bad at math performed far worse on math tests than women who had not been exposed to such beliefs ... The research, [researcher Steven Heine] said, shows that people believe they can overcome stereotyping and continue to try. But if they blame their genetic makeup and believe they have an innate lack of ability, they give up, he said.

This is, more generally, one of the hazards of the excessive trendiness of research in genetics and evolutionary psychology, I think. It's been abused and twisted by partisans and charlatans to justify pretty much every reactionary, nonsensical notion about sex, race, intelligence, etc. that society had so far failed to completely quash and render laughable. And when these bad idea thrive, they can sometimes be self-fulfilling.

I await the long-overdue backlash against nature, and in favor of nurture.

Japanese Nose Abuse

Yeah, yeah, yeah ... it's the Japanese being weird again (probably NSFW). Big surprise.

Followup: Yes indeed, no one uses Friendster.

In case we didn't know that already.

“The counter to that is, ‘Tell me why you aren’t going to be the next Friendster,’ ” Mr. Sze said. “It’s become the iconic case of failure." ... so badly did Friendster fumble its early lead that, as of last month, it ranked 14th among all social networking sites tracked by comScore Media Metrix, trailing even myYearbook.com, a site started last year by a 16-year-old high school student.

Still, who knows? If Myspace suffers some horrible setback - like a few unfortunate outages, or mass discovery by liberal-leaning Myspacers that the place is owned by the Fox News crew - maybe people will actually log into Friendster again, realize the same features are there on Friendster now, and voila! a second chance. Assuming they even last long enough for that.

A collection of names from actual spam headers that would make for good protagonists of a novel

Chastity Baez
Jesus Hancock
Erasmus Flynn
Hiawatha Greek
Elston D'Aquino
New MySpace Message
Eric Rombokas*
Bienvenida Goddard
Henrietta Huffman
Luciano Herrington
Fenella Durand
Longinus McClung
Ebony Hartley


* actually, this one wasn't spam, but I accidentally deleted it. Sorry, Eric.

It is official.

I need to do more songwriting again, like I did many moons ago. Grad school has a way of knocking all other hobbies one once had off the table ... but no more! No longer will I be silenced by, oh, say, the threat of never getting my goddamn PhD. My new skills as a researcher will come to good use in this, however. After careful scientific study, I have concluded that the song that will produce the most pleasure in the listener, and thus make me somewhat rich, perhaps even in this era of BitTorrent, is a song about a killer robot who comes to take over our species to make way for an alien race but, along the way, encounters a poor little orphan girl who in some odd way makes him reminisce about a lost love he had many moons ago, and is thus inspired to help a group of misfit teenagers start an amazingly successful dance troupe. In this series of events and the good-natured hilarity that ensues, much about life and love will be learned by all concerned, needless to say.

I'll get right to work on that.

Free machine learning research idea

So this was a machine learning paper I've been meaning to write but probably will not get around to ...

In co-training, one uses multiple feature sets to describe the same data items, and trains classifiers for both, using the labels provided by one classifier on unlabeled to provide labeled data for retraining the other, with ostensibly improved results. If both classifiers are weakly predictive, this will produce good results even with a very small amount of labeled data.

A similar idea could extend to clustering, where one could break down a set of features into two or more mutually independent (or reasonably close to that) subsets, and perform clustering along each iteratively, using the clustering of one to improve the clustering of the other - e.g. weighting the features in such a way as to reflect the clustering provided by the other feature set. Would this perform better than clustering along the full feature set alone? Under what circumstances?

Lazy Saturday linking

Was up until late last night on a paper deadline crunch, currently watching DVDs of BBC's Life of Mammals series.

This project makes me happy. Because once I have access to Wikipedia in my pocket, I'll wonder how I lived without it, no doubt.

Today's sounds: The Mountain Goats.

A one-of-a-kind collectible from the Bradford Exchange

Don't miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, you consumer you.

Lebowski Party

A splendid time was had by all at the Lebowski party, with photos to prove it. In attendance was many a Dude, a Donny or two, some nihilists, the many faces of Maude, Jesus, and an elusive Stranger. No carpetry was stolen, although a disturbing yellow stain persists on the rug that currently ties our room together. One thing is clear: any future Lebowski parties must take place in late-night bowling alleys. Anyone up to roll a few sometime?

The horrible truth

It's funny because it's true.

Tracking Devices for Alzheimer's Patients

" Caroline County began training deputies today for Project Lifesaver. It provides electronic tracking devices for people with Alzheimer's and dementia." Someday, the technology I'm working on will be integrated into these devices for smarter tracking and analysis. w00t.

Sunday Hungover Blogging

Bwahaha. I'd like to know exactly who felt that this was absolutely begging to be written up, published, and given a line on someone's CV.

I highly recommend holding pillowfighting tournaments at your next party. By the way, this is the most unnecessary usage of 360-degree photography ever. Thank you, Google.

Out of curiosity, does anyone on this blighted planet still actually use Friendster? Just logged in for the first time in a year or so. Anyone? Bueller? I'd get a Myspace page, but I'm waiting for Myspace to go out of style and ride whatever the next social-networking train is instead. As for Orkut, well, apparently that's only useful if you're Brazilian.