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Aaron deMello › Comments
Roger Waters is a much more impressive artist than Gene Simmons. Kiss is mostly garish junk.
Maybe, but Gene Simmons is a brilliant businessman.
- Aaron deMello
True that: Simmons is a more impressive businessman than a musical artist. An indefatigable hustler and self-promoter.
- Sean McBride
Bill Maher is emotional and irrational about Israel, Islam and 9/11. Anything but an independent and clear thinker.
John E. Bredehoft liked this
He's a comedian. Who cares?
- Cristo
He's as much a political pundit as Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. He's obsessed with politics.
- Sean McBride
Phil Weiss nicely carves up Maher here: http://mondoweiss.net/2011...
- Sean McBride
Well, he's funny sometimes. Glenn Back and Rush Limbaugh, not so much.
- Cristo
I like Bill Maher. He is a comedian. He's clever enough to make a point through his jokes. Not sure what else he is supposed to do besides make me laugh.
- Monique
I agree that Bill Maher is sometimes funny, but what's funny about the fact that he is relentlessly pushing the same hate-filled agenda and propaganda as Pamela Geller, David Horowitz, Glenn Beck and Richard Perle, all because of his passionate attachment to Israel? Why should he get a pass on that? The poison is exceptionally insidious because he is slipping it in with...
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- Sean McBride
He's as much a comedian as Al Franken was.
- Aaron deMello
Douglas Hopkins queried me about the sources of my "intelligence" -- following are a few folks I pay attention to in trying to figure out what is going on in the world:
Anthony Citrano, Dimitar Vesselinov, timedalkat and bill giltner liked this
1. Aaron David Miller 2. Andrew Bacevich 3. Andrew Sullivan 4. Anthony Sampson 5. Anthony Zinni 6. Arnaud de Borchgrave 7. Avraham Burg 8. Brent Scowcroft 9. Chris Hedges 10. Craig Unger 11. Daniel Yergin 12. David Bromwich 13. Eric Margolis 14. Fred Kaplan 15. Gershom Gorenberg 16. Glenn Greenwald 17. Greg Mitchell 18. Jacob Heilbrunn 19. James Bamford 20. James Fallows 21. James Galbraith 22. Jane Mayer 23. Jeff Huber 24. Jeremy Scahill 25. Jim Kunstler 26. Jim Lobe 27. John Mearsheimer 28. Joseph Stiglitz 29. Kevin Phillips 30. Lawrence Wilkerson 31. M.J. Rosenberg 32. Michael Lind 33. Michelle Goldberg 34. Naomi Klein 35. Patrick Lang 36. Philip Weiss 37. Ray Kurzweil 38. Ray McGovern 39. Robert Dreyfuss 40. Robert Malley 41. Roger Morris 42. Samantha Power 43. Stephen Walt 44. Steve Clemons 45. Thom Hartmann 46. Tim Berners-Lee 47. Tim O'Reilly 48. Zbigniew Brzezinski
- Sean McBride
Thanks for that impressive list; are they all bloggers or systematically available on the web? I only recognize about 10 of them. Kurzweill, by the way, is brilliant but too deeply in love with himself to be useful any longer on anything but hardware. I'll sift through the rest, however, I do enjoy your fascinating flow of their ideas.
- Douglas Hopkins
Douglas -- most of their best stuff is captured in books via Amazon. Some of them are bloggers. Obviously I don't agree with all of them on everything, but they all have a gift for provoking interesting conversations on important issues.
- Sean McBride
When I started reading #1 and saw the name Aaron my heart leaped for a moment.
- Aaron deMello
Aaron -- I wish you would post more.
- Sean McBride
Aaron, such a compliment you receive from Sean McBride. If I may: "leapt" not leaped.
- Douglas Hopkins
You know what's funny Doug - I wrote "leapt" first but it looked wrong, so I "corrected" it. My strict British education and grammar is failing me! Sean - I need to post more too. Just a bit concerned given what I do for a living to post my actual thoughts on these subjects. Such is the paradox of being social on the web.
- Aaron deMello
Interesting class of words: English irregular past tenses ending in ''t'': burnt, dreamt, knelt , leapt, learnt, spelt, spilt and spoilt.
- Sean McBride
Many of the people who know most about some of the subjects being discussed on the net are forbidden by the laws of their respective countries from sharing what they know.
- Sean McBride
Absolutely. Not only by the law, but also by confidentiality agreements, and of course security classifications. I'd love for chief architect of China's Golden Shield to blog about it, but that's not going to happen.
- Aaron deMello
I once had a big argument with my children. I used learnt and they thought I was wrong and it was learned. Both are right. Sean, I saw your tweet and came here. I am glad I did.
- Dorai
Dorai -- also be apprised that split infinitives are legit. :) It took me quite a while to overcome my pseudo-pedantic conditioning on that hoary rule.
- Sean McBride
Just read again "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"!
- Dimitar Vesselinov
Pizza Hut's new name and logo
2Picture, Abhishek, Thierry R. Andriamirado and 52 other people liked this
wow
- Paul Buchheit
Jabba?
- Sam Harrelson
Really?
- Ashish
Butt?
- Jeff P. Henderson
from iPhone
Honestly I think it sucks!
- Jeff P. Henderson
from iPhone
I'm confused. It looks like the Hut is wearing a web-2.0 style fedora.
- Ginger Makela Riker
@ginger, the hut's hat is more or less the same as the one from the previous logo: http://walkba.alsa.org/images...
- Dan Hsiao
Is this for their entire brand now? I heard it was just for an upscale version of Pizza Hut they were testing.
- Mark Trapp
They're promoting their pastas more, and probably want to extend the food offerings further. They've offered pastas and desserts and such in Asia for a few years now. Seemed to work out well there. (Not to say that I like the change... I think I'll continue calling it Pizza Hut)
- Dan Hsiao
I shall continue calling it "Pizza the Hut" :)
- Paul Buchheit
This was from a pizza box from a plain 'ole Pizza Hut (er, "The Hut") that I wouldn't consider upscale, except for the fact that it's across the street from a ginormous Whole Foods.
- Dan Hsiao
Ah, okay. I found a story from last month (URL: http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/topstoc...) that says they're rebranding the boxes and "some" signage, but not everything. Yum has never been good at rebranding (they also own Kentucky Fried Chicken/KFC/Kentucky Grilled Chicken or whatever they call it this week).
- Mark Trapp
Too bad they dropped "Pizza" from it; Pizza the Hut would've been awesome. Maybe they didn't want to get sued by Mel Brooks.
- Brian Chang
I like Papa Johns better.
- Dallas Cao
I LOVE Zachary's, but it's a bit too far. Patxi's is a reasonable drive, but still not all that convenient.
- Dan Hsiao
Agreed. It's not quite as good, but it's a helluva lot closer for me. Are there any good non-chain thin crust pizza places around the bay area? The only place I've been that is remotely comparable to good NY pizza is Pizza Antica in Santana Row.
- Dan Hsiao
+
- Will Higgins™
that's all kinds of crazy - still can't get over syfy
- BEX
Same disgusting taste. Papa John's FTW
- LANjackal
It's not a name change but "additional branding" for some markets. Pizza Hut is still Pizza Hut http://www.facebook.com/PizzaHu...
- Rajiv Doshi
Hopefully slave girls in gold bikinis cannot be far behind, along with Rancor battles for evening entertainment.
- Kevin Fox
When I went to KFC a few weeks ago they insisted on calling themselves 'Kentucky Grilled Chicken' but they still use the KFC initials. Perhaps it's now Kentucky Fgrilled Chicken, with a silent F?
- Kevin Fox
I am waiting on the first person to fall off the roof trying to paint Jabba on the Logo..
- Tony C (Unrated)
from fftogo
This isn't nearly as bad as, say, Tropicana's failed re-branding, but I still don't like it.
- George S.
Grotesque.
- Aaron deMello
+1 Sam for Jabba comment.
- Mike Reynolds
+1 Mark. Yum! sucks at rebranding. I saw this logo over the weekend and thought it was a mistake. What. The. FRUIT! were they thinking?!?
- Bill Sodeman
hmm, that's interesting. Not against it, since they have been diversifying for the past couple years at least. EDIT: read comments. Oh, it's just a nickname/partial change. I'm a fan of it for that. Pizza the Hut would have been pretty humorous, though, lol.
- Chieze Okoye
looks more like a hat...
- John Wang
I shall continue not eating there
- andy brudtkuhl
The first thing I thought of was Jabba, Jabba the hut, so much for new branding.
- Dan owns Comicsforge.com
eat with us twice a week and become our name? kind of stupid move by them, assuming this story is true....i, like many of you, first thought of Jabba....not good.
- Morgan
Well Dan, have you seen most of the folks eating there? jabba is not to far from the truth :D
- Tony C (Unrated)
from fftogo
I've always called it 'Pizza Slut' which sounds better than 'The Hut'
- Morgan
"Hut" means "hat" in German. Good luck in Germany if that's really the new name... with "pizza" at least you can guess it's not a clothing store.
- Philipp Lenssen
Haha, I always said that if they stopped serving pizza, they'd be called "Hut", and now it's finally happened. I don't know if I should laugh or cry.
- Tyson Key
@Morgan: That's what my niece's friends called her when she worked there.
- April
Ah, stupidity abounds. Yeah, still not buying their pizza.
- Jennifer Dittrich
I don't understand this random rebranding thing...
- Vince DeGeorge
+1 Vince
- Tyson Key
The placement of "the" is just aweful
- Shawn Hickman
@Shawn - it is actually one of the few things I like. In my head, I add "Pizza" to "the Hut," and it reminds me of Spaceballs.
- Jennifer Dittrich
hey! our family has been calling Pizza Hut "the hut" for years! i think i need to see a royalty check here!
- MikeAmundsen
I vote that they change it to "Piazsta Hut" just to satisfy both those that wanted it to be called "Pizza Hut", and those that wanted it to be called "Pasta Hut" in their poll. ;)
- Tyson Key
They should think about serving Italian food there. It's all the rage.
- John Hardy
Jennifer: If it reminds you of SpaceBalls then it can't be wrong:)
- Shawn Hickman
It has a very "fat" sort of feeling. I feel like I'm putting on pounds just looking at it.
- Jen (SquirrelGirl)
Tyson, one could argue that they never *started* serving pizza. That said, the image above the logo-type looks like a fedora. Pizza Hat?
- Kevin (barely visible)
Heh, I see what you mean now about it looking like a hat.
- Tyson Key
And it's a sassy red hat, too.
- Bill Sodeman
First thing I thought was - "The Hut stole Carmen Sandiego's hat!"
- Paul OFlaherty
Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego.... 's hat!
- Bill Sodeman
RT @Wolfram_Alpha Get detailed comparisons of countries quickly with Wolfram|Alpha: http://www08.wolframalpha.com/input... #wolframalpha
Looks like the comparison is getting better, now covering more aspects than when Alpha was released.
- François Dongier
FD -- Wolfram has established a strong beachhead for computational semantics, and it will be all onward and upward from here. The possibilities are endless -- an exciting prospect.
- Sean McBride
Funny how almost nobody is talking about WA any more. Nice to see you are still following it.
- Aaron deMello
Wolfram Alpha is still a product that is well ahead of its time -- the world at large will eventually catch up. (And WA still needs to fill in many knowledge blocks to make its value apparent to the masses.)
- Sean McBride
I'm impressed by his Bauer speech, http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009..., which is clearly ahead of mass discussions.
- François Dongier
Great Stephen Wolfram speech and historical survey of the quest over thousands of years to build knowledge systems (and the ultimate knowledge system). Everyone with an interest in this field should take the trouble to read and digest it carefully.
- Sean McBride
Michael Scheuer on Fox: America's only hope is for another terrorist attack | Crooks and Liars - http://crooksandliars.com/david-n...
If it happens it's clear who will be financing it.
- Todd Hoff
File under false flag ops, and consider the implications for 9/11. If 9/11 Part II does occur, we'll have some leading suspects.
- Sean McBride
What a moron.
- Aaron deMello
I wondering how this isn't treason?
- Todd Hoff
From comment: "The only way to protect ourselves effectively is to be attacked. But if we're not attacked, we're not protected?!?!"
- tehKenny
Oh my god: Beck sounds saner than this guy. I repeat: BECK sounds SANER THAN THIS GUY. Holy fuck.
- tehKenny
Is everyone here fully aware that we still haven't a clue about who were the paymasters behind 9/11? In fact, the 9/11 Commission absurdly attempted to dismiss that question as a matter of no consequence.
- Sean McBride
Friendfeed themes rock, Helvetica rocks. Great new Friendfeed feature.
Myrna liked this
Where is it?
- Aaron deMello
Aaron: Friendfeed > settings > Theme: > Helvetica
- Sean McBride
Now: if Friendfeed would only massively upgrade its search functionality, with an emphasis on data mining search results in a variety of ways. And provide list view: the ability to hide all comments and to present posts one post per line, in multiple columns.
- Sean McBride
Holy jeebus that is cool! NICE. Search is hard Sean, the real-timers aren't going to figure it out on their own.
- Aaron deMello
Iran: We foiled Israeli-linked election day bomb plot | Iran news | Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/servlet...
Rob H. and MikeAmundsen liked this
"The Iranian Intelligence Ministry on Thursday claimed to have foiled an Israeli-linked terror plot to plant bombs in mosques and other crowded places in Teheran during last week's presidential election."
- Sean McBride
from Bookmarklet
Who knows what to make of this - so many angles, so many agendas.
- Aaron deMello
Let's see what evidence is produced to support the charges. We do know that neoconservatives are officially on the record in endorsing efforts to destabilize Iran through covert ops.
- Sean McBride
ha. classic stuff. if your leadership is on the ropes, invoke a hated "other." sow fear in the populace. create a "state of siege" that convinces folks that changing leaders ow would be a terrible idea. blah, blah.
- MikeAmundsen
Mike -- if no evidence is forthcoming to support the charges, then your explanation fits the situation. But the Jerusalem Post felt the story important enough to report without editorial comment.
- Sean McBride
Not comparing, but in Israel people like Libermann and even Bibi talks all the time about the Iranian danger (which I do not under estimate) but try to use it to justify everything they do or do not do. Cannot go out of the territories because of the Iranian danger, cannot focus on real problems we have because of....... and so on. Its less theatrical here but similar tactic. Agree with Mike.
- Roni Segoly
It's interesting how little cross-communication goes on among Friendfeed users on many topics: more than a dozen Friendfeeders have independently posted links to this story on Friendfeed.
- Sean McBride
But FF isn't Digg. I post things for my feed. Now setting up an automatic room that could merge all comments in as well as being a separate channel would have some value.
- Todd Hoff
Todd -- it would be nice in FF to be able to click on a button for any post and to generate a page which nicely organizes all the FF posts and discussion about links mentioned in the post.
- Sean McBride
That would be nice.
- Todd Hoff
@Sean: sorry i wandered off. i see it like this: if you have a threat and successfully stop it, what is the value of exposing the threat? esp. at this time in Iran? note i am not saying this is not a credible claim, what i am asserting is that - at this time - the story meets a domestic need.
- MikeAmundsen
Mike: the charges meet a domestic need, indeed -- but they may also be believable to the Iranian public, because Israel has made so many public and strident threats to attack Iran over the last year or two. Lebanon has also made several charges about Israeli spy rings operating on Lebanese soil during recent weeks -- the story is still unfolding. So far there has not been much in the...
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- Sean McBride
@Sean: yep, i hear ya. i'm not making any judgement about the veracity of the charge, just timing and presentation. looking forward to the details. btw - i've not heard much about how the CIA is working the crisis, either. betcha lots of folks working overtime on that one.
- MikeAmundsen
Phoenix crop circle may predict end of the world - Telegraph - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news...
Kol Tregaskes, David Young, Jeff P. Henderson and 13 other people liked this
"Crop circle experts believe the latest pattern to be discovered, a phoenix rising from the flames in Wiltshire, may give a warning about the end of the world."
- Sean McBride
from Bookmarklet
Three questions: who is constructing these things, how are they constructing them, and why are they constructing them. Who, how and why.
- Sean McBride
Except, y'know, for that whole "2012 = end of the world" thing being debunked... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
- Ordinarybug Heather
I don't know but they are really cool. Also interesting that the Phoenix is referred to as that "Arab bird" by Shakespeare.
- Todd Hoff
Ladybug -- yes: the end of the world interpretations are bunkum. But I am still curious about the who, how and why behind these amazing structures.
- Sean McBride
Yeah, I'm very curious as to the artist behind them. Some of them are very beautiful!
- Zulema ❧ spicy cocoa tart
someone has WAY too much time on their hands.
- Joe Silence
Science fiction scenario: an MIT geek sitting at a computer at a classified government agency is scrawling these computer-generated designs on the ground by means of a classified directed-energy technology via satellite on behalf of a fanciful or mischievous Masonic project.
- Sean McBride
What I can't envision: the creation of these structures by people on the ground. It doesn't seem possible.
- Sean McBride
It seems to me that it would be possible for current spy satellite technology to easily identify the source of these crop circles. Surely the American intel community knows the truth.
- Sean McBride
Not if they do it from under the ground :-)
- Todd Hoff
When I look at some of these crop circles, I feel a tingle up my spine -- *something* special is there in the geometric patterns -- but I am not sure what. They feel like the manifestion of a higher intelligence, of an advanced symbol system or language. If human beings are behind them, "clever" doesn't begin to cover it.
- Sean McBride
RefD -- if I had infinite time on my hands, I couldn't build these things, and I don't know anyone who could.
- Sean McBride
@sean I can't remember the exact source, but I have watched a video where some people (think amateur mythbusters) demonstrated on record that they could create arbitrary crop designs in under a half an hour, and faster if working not alone.
- Michael Bravo
this stuff was debunked back in the 90s.
- Joe Silence
Spy satellites don't work in real time, Sean.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Any pointers to the debunkings? I recently saw a solid documentary on the subject on The Discovery Channel (?) in which efforts to replicate these structures within the time frames they usually appear failed. The documentary concluded that there is no good explanation for this phenomenon.
- Sean McBride
Alex -- for how long can our current spy satellite technology survey a given area?
- Sean McBride
One could easily debunk crop circles with a single video: record a group of human beings replicating one of the more complex patterns within a set period of time. Is the video out there?
- Sean McBride
I don't have any solid opinion about crop circles (they are intriguing to me, too), but if someone is sending messages, why not just write something like "u r all going to die lol" instead of mysterious symbols.
- Jemm
Perhaps they simply enjoy playing games.
- Sean McBride
and UFO experts and psychic surgery experts and flat Earth experts...
- Joe Silence
RefD -- any pointers to the debunkings? A simple video would do the trick.
- Sean McBride
i haven't bothered with this twaddle in about 15 years, so my best guess is try Google.
- Joe Silence
Amazingly complex crop circles can be made with a board a piece of rope and a ball of twine. The guys that do it have their own website: http://www.circlemakers.org/
- Robert Hafer
I already checked Google: I couldn't turn up any definitive debunkings, like the video I mentioned.
- Sean McBride
sorry, CBFed to work at this. i do like some of these as works of art, however.
- Joe Silence
Sean, for long enough to take one shot. Physics prevents the satellites from fixing on one spot on the earth for more than a split second. The energy that it would require to rotate the satellite to keep it pointed at one spot on the earth would make the satellite and thus the camera vibrate enough that it would degrade the resolution to the point of uselessness.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Alex -- a digression: do you have any pointers to documents on the latest spy satellite technology that a layman could understand? I imagine there must be considerable R&D dedicated towards monitoring regions from above for extended periods of time. Drones could probably perform a similar function on a smaller scale.
- Sean McBride
As art, some of them are stunning.
- Sean McBride
Solid debunking pointer, Robert. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... (It's usually best to go to Wikipedia first, and Google second.)
- Sean McBride
No, I don't, but you can read up on the technology used for the Hubble and extrapolate from there, since from what I understand it's quite similar.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Physics is physics, JC...
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Alex: this info is ten years old: "Private analysts believe that a new generation of spy satellites planned by the U.S. government's secretive National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) will consist of smaller, more numerous satellites than the current generation of "spies in the sky." ... According to John E. Pike, space policy director at the private Federation of American Scientists, the...
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- Sean McBride
Haha, crop circle expert. That's rich!
- Jon Anderson
Notice how "real time" is in quotes.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Ok -- Googling "real-time battle surveillance" will get one directly into the latest developments on overhead video spy technology -- a hot topic. According to John Pike (a respectable authority), some of it is satellite-based. UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are the most mentioned technology.
- Sean McBride
Alex -- I'm fairly certain that "real-time" means real-time literally. Browse around. ("Real-time battle surveillance" is in quotes, not "real-time" -- just looked back.)
- Sean McBride
UAVs in the form of blimps are being tested right now for real-time surveillance.
- Aaron deMello
Aaron -- wouldn't a high priority be placed on making these craft as inconspicuous and invisible as possible? When I think blimp, I think of a large visible slow or stationary object that is easy to sight and shoot down. Perhaps these are special blimps.
- Sean McBride
Blimps are being considered because they are slow and can linger over a target. Being UAV, it's OK if they are shot down.
- Robert Hafer
Good luck in finding a farmer to let you crush his crops out of the goodness of his heart. There must have been compensation paid to him at some point if your looking for clues, or else the culprits would be facing some vandalism charges. Farmers don't react favorably to damaging their hard work.
- Robert Kenney
Well, if all the crop circles are human-made, it's a tribute to the wonderfully eccentric imagination of the Brits. Who else would expend so much effort in creating sometimes spectacular environmental art without needing personal recogniton.
- Sean McBride
US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation : 40 National Orgs. Tell Congress, "Freeze Military Aid to Israel Until Israel Freezes Settlements" - http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article...
Cole Jolley liked this
Wow.
- Aaron deMello
Long overdue.
- Cole Jolley
Like unto others as you would like to be liked unto you.
Private Sanjeev, Scoble, Alex Scoble, Alex Scrivener and Hutch Carpenter liked this
Awkward!
- Aaron deMello
You are right Aaron. Is there a better way of saying it?
- Todd Hoff
"Like unto others as you yourself would like to be liked" ?
- Todd Hoff
@aarondemello What is the best wine you've ever tasted?
Maryam, Shevonne and Scoble, Alex Scoble liked this
Probably the 2003 Romanée St. Vivant, from Domaine de la Romanée Conti. Close followups were the 2001 and 2003 Clos de Bèze from Armand Rousseau. I like my wines younger, I could list some older stuff that I've enjoyed but the above three are my faves.
- Aaron deMello
Ouch -- a mere $800 or so for a bottle of your fave?
- Sean McBride
The crime is that the wine is grossly underpriced today. Not saying that I'm a buyer in this economic climate, but the 2003 DRCs, to me, are among the greatest wines ever made and represent tremendous drinking and long-term (15-20 year) investment value. Having said that, my very most favorite wines in terms of drinking pleasure with no guilt, are the magical zinfandels made my Mike Officer at Carlisle Winery in the Russian River. He's a real-deal modern-day American wine genius, an ex-programmer.
- Aaron deMello
At under $50 a bottle, Mike's zinfandel creation may be doable.
- Sean McBride
Truly astonishing wines, all that is great about America and its one truly unique varietal in a bottle of wine. Massive, powerful, audacious yet balanced, and eminently enjoyable. People forget the agricultural richness of California, I love the place! Especially with Conan running shit over there. LOL.
- Aaron deMello
Aaron -- you should be doing Orson Welles-style commercials for Mike's product. :)
- Sean McBride
LOL, he makes too little wine to warrant me drunkenly slurring on YouTube to shill his wares.
- Aaron deMello
M Coz Meritage from Cosentino Wineries.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Baron Philippe de Rothschild Cabernet Sauvignon
- Shevonne
Official Google Research Blog: Large-scale graph computing at Google (Pregel) - http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009...
Отборнейший бред liked this
"If you squint the right way, you will notice that graphs are everywhere. For example, social networks, popularized by Web 2.0, are graphs that describe relationships among people. Transportation routes create a graph of physical connections among geographical locations. Paths of disease outbreaks form a graph, as do games among soccer teams, computer network topologies, and citations among scientific papers. Perhaps the most pervasive graph is the web itself, where documents are vertices and links are edges. Mining the web has become an important branch of information technology, and at least one major Internet company has been founded upon this graph."
- Sean McBride
from Bookmarklet
Time to build the graph of all graphs -- the graph which integrates all other graphs.
- Sean McBride
That's practically the web you're describing. Too bad the IP zealots don't believe in linking everything together, which was TBL's original vision of the web. Now what we actually have is a million stand alone webs.
- Aaron deMello
Aaron: 1. I grabbed the link from your Twitter feed. 2. I've been squinting at the world this way for quite some time. 3. Now it's time to reknit together in a GGG (Giant Global Graph) what has been splintered. 4. Semantic science, the science of sciences, is the way to go.
- Sean McBride
Agree on all counts. The GoogleGods are way ahead in this race. Its all so obvious when you look back. TBL "invents" the web. The web is a graph. The graph needs to be indexed. There is no index in TBL's vision. Enter Google.
- Aaron deMello
Semantic science: the science of how everything in the universe is connected.
I like it, but I would say the meaning of why everything is connected. Or "how" everything is connected explains "why" they are connected i.e. the links themselves are the reasoning.
- Aaron deMello
When I think "why," I tend to think of ultimate why, which we will probably never know -- there are always levels of reality just beyond our grasp that are influencing (or totally controlling) our current understanding of reality. But I see what you mean. "Why" within our current best understanding of the symbol systems which describe reality as we know it so far.
- Sean McBride
Yes, why as in what the decision was behind the connection. For the semantic interpretation to be effective, the decision to link two distinct entities needs to be self-evident by the link itself.
- Aaron deMello
@Akoha team saved a cat hit by a car today at our offsite. Team project is going to be finding owner, home or humane way to help
Aaron deMello liked this
This is really amazing!
- Aaron deMello
The latest bin Laden tape sounds like yet another fake -- he has almost certainly been dead for years. So: who would be motivated to create these fake tapes and to promote a "long war" between the United States and Islam?
Chris Heath and Ahsan Ali liked this
The phrase "long war" is straight from the neoconservative propaganda handbook.
- Sean McBride
I was watching a movie the other day in which the protagonist says: If it makes sense, it's fabricated. The timing of these 'tapes', 'announcements' - and they're so pathetic, transparent and self-defeating - has always been suspicious.
- Ahsan Ali
If the bin Laden tapes are fake, as they strongly appear to be, then one must inevitably ask what other events associated with this entire propaganda campaign and psychological op are also fake.
- Sean McBride
In all probability, no one will find out. What I'm interested in is - what is the underlying agenda ?
- Ahsan Ali
Well, neoconservatives shout their agenda to the heavens -- that is hardly a well-kept secret. :) They march in lockstep with Likud Greater Israelists. I do think that many of the true facts concerning 9/11 will begin to leak and tumble out at the some point -- there is tremendous pressure just beneath the surface of public discourse to push the truth out. The event was much too large and consequential to consign to a memory hole.
- Sean McBride
Well, the military-industrial complex has profited to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. There is one non-ideological and non-religious motive in play -- war profiteering. One should look for links between the MIC and neocon outfits like AEI and JINSA.
- Sean McBride
Or maybe we're wrong, and there's no _one_ person or organization behind this whole thing. Maybe it was just an opportunity many parties exploited for their own ends, causing more chaos in turn.
- Ahsan Ali
In the old days, mysteries remained unsolved for lack of information. Today, we have too much information; I doubt if anyone can sift through what is real and what is not.
- Ahsan Ali
If you're trying to identify the culprits behind this entire op, the first best place to look: those who were the ringleaders in exploiting it.
- Sean McBride
Who makes the tapes? The Talibani version of the Jerky Boys.
- Aaron deMello
I still don't see any proof here of how you can call anything a fake except for your assumption that it is. Maybe sometimes a horse is a horse or, more appropriate, an ass is an ass. Bin Ladin wants/wanted attention, so if he is alive, and I see no proof he is not, he is attention mongering ass.
- Eric - 100% Choice Cuts
Aaron -- ha! Probably too close to the truth. I don't know any serious person who takes these tapes seriously.
- Sean McBride
Ahsan -- quite a few very bright people have tried to sift through all the data on 9/11 in a strictly logical way. For instance, take a look at the work of David Ray Griffin (search Amazon.com). We don't have all or most of the answers, but many false assertions have been thoroughly debunked. A leading member of 9/11 Commission, John Farmer, recently dismissed the proceedings of the Commission as mostly a pile of malarkey -- which was obvious to many of us from the get-go.
- Sean McBride
Judge Tosses Telecom Spy Suits http://www.wired.com/threatl... for participation in once-secret electronic eavesdropping program.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker upheld summer legislation protecting the companies from the lawsuits. The legislation, which then-Sen. Barack Obama voted for, also granted the government the authority to monitor American’s telecommunications without warrants if the subject was communicating with somebody overseas suspected of terrorism.
- Aaron deMello
The Coming Superbrain (The Future of Artificial Intelligence) - NYTimes.com (John Markoff) - http://www.nytimes.com/2009...
Aaron deMello, Barbara and Meryn Stol liked this
"In Dr. Kurzweil’s telling, rapidly increasing computing power in concert with cyborg humans would then reach a point when machine intelligence not only surpassed human intelligence but took over the process of technological invention, with unpredictable consequences. Profiled in the documentary “Transcendent Man,” which had its premier last month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and with his own Singularity movie due later this year, Dr. Kurzweil has become a one-man marketing machine for the concept of post-humanism. He is the co-founder of Singularity University, a school supported by Google that will open in June with a grand goal — to “assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.”"
- Sean McBride
from Bookmarklet
Funny, I just posted this on FB. Largely a fluff piece but its good for the general population to read this stuff.
- Aaron deMello
AI for the masses.
- Sean McBride
Wolfram Alpha Approaches 100 Million Queries - http://mashable.com/2009...
98% of which returned no result. "Does not compute, Dave!"
- Aaron deMello
True that. But my enthusiasm remains undiminished -- I see the potential; I see where this is going.
- Sean McBride
LOL. I just like to make jokes. It needs a lot of work, but its an amazing start for a specific type of computational reasoning. Its going to be wrong 100x more than right, but we (they) will learn a lot along the way.
- Aaron deMello
No doubt, this is gonna be interesting
Hisham Sadek هشام, Ashish, Kol Tregaskes and 16 other people liked this
I keep hearing that, but why? Isn't it just another search engine? I'll admit that I haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to it, but that's what it looks like.
- Derek Coward
Derek - It launches in abt a week and is expected to be very different than Google ... and not an out-of-the-box fail (ugh ... Cuil :). Numerous reviews around the web by people that saw the preview. Most thought it was pretty interesting. With all due respect to the founder, they could have picked a better name ??
- Charlie Anzman
Like HAL.
- DGentry
The live countdown is on! http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009...
- Charlie Anzman
Derek -- it's much more than just another search engine -- it's a computational knowledge engine, for real. It has a long way to go to fulfill it's full potential, but Stephen Wolfram has established an important beachhead.
- Sean McBride
watching and commenting: http://ff.im/2W4Zp
- Capn' One Eye - adrift
Since nobody's seen it yet, I wouldn't get too excited. What they are trying to do is difficult not only technically, but from a social sciences standpoint. I'm not so sure people search to find computationally-generatable results.
- Aaron deMello
Actually Aaron - People are seeing it and commenting here and on Twitter #Wolfram
- Charlie Anzman
Just trying to save humanity from Skynet, Charlie.
- Aaron deMello
So far, seeing some not-so-good comments around the 'sphere'. We'll see. BTW .. The URL to test is http://www.wolfram-alpha.com/input...
- Charlie Anzman
Wolfram is an industry & academic tool, so all those Googlers will be pretty at a loss. But that's fine. I can see myself using this every day for work.
- CannonGod
For scientists it's going to be immensely useful; I can see myself using it daily instead of getting frustrated with Google. For the average Googler, less so.
- Sally Church
With all due respect to Wolfram and his team ... I keep saying Wolfman .
- Charlie Anzman
I haven't heard too many details about it, but I know people are excited. What makes it so fantastic?
- Adriana
Best thing to do is go there. It's different. Not apparently meant to be a Google killer and has a way to go but interesting. Not an out-of-the-box FAIL like Cuil was (and still is) http://www.wolframalpha.com/
- Charlie Anzman
Google is aimed at finding websites - this is aimed at finding information. Very different. People judge all search engines in comparison to not only google but their habits built around google. New search engines tend to be disliked because people are familiar with the behavior of google, even when the behavior is inadequate. Inadequacies in the system become things we expect, because...
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- Iphigenie
We all have been googlized.
- Ashish
I wanted to like it but I haven't found much use to it on a daily basis.
- Manuel Mas
Facebook’s Valuation Heading North Again. Up To $10 Billion Now. - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
Daniel Rowley, Manuel Arroyo, Susan Beebe and 5 other people liked this
$10 Billion??
- Jeff (Team マクダジ )
Kevin - no, but I heard they saved a ton of money on car insurance by switching to Geico
- Jeff (Team マクダジ )
Stuff like this makes me sure that bubble 2.0 is closer than we think.
- AJ Kohn
Kevin, Facecbook is running at $500M+ per year with a 100% annual growth rate with very meager attempts at monetization. Not something to sniff at.
- Aaron deMello
Considering that the market for the humble hot dog just jumped to reports of +$2B in the wake of the SaraLee/Kraft lawsuit -- ask yourself how many hot dogs you throw down your pie hole in a year. Now consider what you paid for them. Now ask youself how many times a week you interact with Facebook in some way. Sure, some people don't eat meat and some people don't do the Facebook thing. But speaking generally, that $5 for a wiener gets pried from your pockets at least a few times a year.
- Jay Cuthrell
Creative financing for sure - totally bloated numbers ...
- Susan Beebe
Mmmm bloated on hot dogs...
- Jay Cuthrell
I.B.M. Unveils Software to Find Trends in Vast Data Sets - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2009...
Susan Beebe, phil baumann, Meryn Stol and 5 other people liked this
"New software from I.B.M. can suck up huge volumes of data from many sources and quickly identify correlations within it. The company says it expects the software to be useful in analyzing finance, health care and even space weather."
- Sean McBride
from Bookmarklet
"“For us, there is no chance in the world that you can think about storing data and analyzing it tomorrow,” Mr. Thidé said. “There is no tomorrow. We need a smart system that can give you hints about what is happening out there right now.”"
- Sean McBride
Gonna be super huge -- no end of the possibilities and uses.
- Sean McBride
"Instead of creating separate large databases to track things like currency movements, stock trading patterns and housing data, the System S software can meld all of that information together. In addition, it could theoretically then layer on databases that tracked current events, like news headlines on the Internet or weather fluctuations, to try to gauge how such factors interplay with the financial data."
- Sean McBride
Guessing the NSA will be looking them up in the morning.
- Dave Hodson
Big Blue is expecting their stream computing initiative to be their next multi-billion dollar segment. Viz is a great way to sell it.
- Aaron deMello
Every major corporation and government agency on the planet might be interested in tapping into this service. Potentially a stupendous business opportunity.
- Sean McBride
This is awesome, too bad it's already out there and called Microsoft Analysis Services.
- xero
xero -- how do System S and MAS match up featurewise?
- Sean McBride
Microsoft Analysis Services is just an OLAP service. Systems S is hardcore stream processing / complex event processing for massive quantities of data in real time... it collapses the mining paradigm and overlays it on stream processing. For similar platforms check out StreamBase. The hard core nerds should join the Complex Event Processing group on LInkedIn.
- Aaron deMello
Great info, Aaron.
- Sean McBride
Didn't realize it was doing it on the stream as it came across, that's pretty awesome.
- xero
It seems I'm not supposed to buy a new fridge from MAYTAG/AMANA/WHIRLPOOL or JENN-AIR because they have little bitty compressors and sucky service. So what refrigerator should I buy?
Scoble, Alex Scoble and Amir liked this
We have an older Amana which has worked fine, but apparently the new ones have smaller compressors which seem to break and then it's over. I was wondering if there's some other awesome fridge I just don't know about.
- Todd Hoff
Refrigerators have followed the same path as cars. A "high tech" fridge is one with lots of junk added like TVs, remote control, writing pads etc. Cars became high tech if they had an ipod dock. When I think high tech I think innovation in basic technology, not silly appendages.
- Todd Hoff
I like my GE Profile
- Aaron deMello
sub zero even if its from craigslist or ebay. They still serviced mine free after 10 years
- Mrsth
Kitchenaid/Friggidaire?
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
I've got my eye on Costco's kitchenaid side by side stainless with water/ ice dispenser for about $1k
- Mrsth
Washington Watch: Ex-AIPACer: There is no military option in Iran | Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/servlet...
"There is no viable military option for dealing the Iranian nuclear threat, and efforts by the Israeli government and its supporters to link that threat to progress in peace with the Palestinians and Syria are "nonsense" and an obstacle to the Arab-Israeli and international cooperation essential to changing Iranian behavior. That's the conclusion of Keith Weissman, the Iran expert formerly at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), speaking publicly for the first time since the government dropped espionage charges against him and his colleague, Steve Rosen, earlier this month."
- Sean McBride
from Bookmarklet
The mind boggles at the possibilities: trading a US-Israel "solution" to the Iran nuclear threat for a two-state permanent solution for Palestine backed by Saudi, Jordan, Egypt, Syria. Basically everyone except Iran.
- Aaron deMello
Yahoo Placemaker: Extract Location Data from Any Text - ReadWriteWeb - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...
Aaron deMello liked this
ReadWriteWeb rocks, I say, it rocks. It has its finger on the pulse of the most strategic tech trends.
- Sean McBride
I'm ashamed I don't have them in my feed. WIll fix that today.
- Aaron deMello
Searching for answers, Microsoft set to intro "Kumo" search engine : Scientific American Blog - http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog...
Philip Lei and James Ostheimer liked this
"In the market for yet another way to navigate cyberspace? Just days after physicist Stephan Wolfram took his Wolfram|Alpha "computational knowledge engine" live, word is that Microsoft next week will debut a revamped version of its flagging Live.com search engine, the No. 3 Web navigator behind Google and Yahoo. Microsoft will take the wraps off of "Kumo"—the codename of its new, improved search engine—at the D: All Things Digital technology conference next week in Carlsbad, Calif., the Wall Street Journal reports. (Here's a low-res image of the new search engine, that CNET ran and reports was captured by someone who stumbled across it online while using Microsoft Live Search in the Internet Explorer 8 browser. It looks very different than the Live.com search results page pictured to the left.)"
- Sean McBride
from Bookmarklet
Is this based on PowerSet?
- Aaron deMello
Yes.
- Sean McBride
Impressive turnaround time for MSFT with that acquisition. Good for them!
- Aaron deMello
Clinton calls on Israel to halt 'any kind' of settlement activity - http://www.haaretz.com/hasen...
"U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took a hard line against settlement construction in the territories Wednesday, including a call to freeze building for natural growth. Her statement came in contrast to the general terms U.S. President Barack Obama expressed about the issue to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier in the week. ..."
- Sean McBride
I'd like to see mommy reinforce that by cutting off their allowance.
- Aaron deMello
Governments "contracting out" cyber-attacks to criminal networks - http://www.itbusiness.ca/it...
Aaron deMello liked this
Mercenary botnets are the future of cyberwar... inherently unattributable, I see lots of Agency dollars flowing into China, Russia, and Eastern Europe for stuff like this.
- Aaron deMello
#nml[The Bourne Ultimatum /2007 /IMDB-rating 8.2/10 /200905]
Scoble, Alex Scoble and Todd Hoff liked this
Or: #nml:rating[The Bourne Ultimatum /movie; 2007; IMDB; 8.3/10; 200905]
- Sean McBride
#nml:rating[*rateditem /**category; *rateditemdate; *rater; *rating; *ratingdate] NML default format for ratings. Tags with double asterisks are optional.
- Sean McBride
#nml[The Bourne Ultimatum /2007 /Netflix-rating 4.3/5 /200905]
- Sean McBride
What are you doing here?
- Aaron deMello
Feeling out the best simple markup conventions for describing movies (or anything).
- Sean McBride
Aaah... got it. Semantically describing movies is about as hard as getting a robot to reason with a naughty child. That kind of heavy lifting I'll save for after the Singularity.
- Aaron deMello
Aaron -- I keep sensing that semantic markup is on the verge of crystallizing in a natural, organic, universal and ubiquitous way, but I may be delusional. :) It's in the air....
- Sean McBride
Spring does crazy things to people! Its going to take the world a generation to mark up content, but I do think that if they start with the tough ones - music and movies - the rest will be a lot easier (textbooks, non-fiction, fiction, etc.)
- Aaron deMello
Travel guides would be a nice easy one to start with.
- Aaron deMello
Todd -- is that #hreview format machine-readable and machine-parsable from within a Friendfeed comment?
- Sean McBride
I think I could parse it Sean. The #hreview: would index into a required and optional keyword list. The keyword syntax is keyword: The value is whatever is between keywords. That's easy to splat into an associative array. I would try not terminating it explicitly and just read ahead a little to see if there where any keywords found. I selected this approach because it's natural for the user, but harder to parse. Embeddable widgets would be better: http://ff.im/2NHhP
- Todd Hoff
Todd -- this is how I would mark up your review: #nml:review[/restaurant Parish Publick House /rating 4 /review haz good beer and good food /reviewer self /visit-date March 28, 2009 /address Santa Cruz /food-eaten beer, onion ring, bacon burger /description *description] Slot name/value pairs can be placed in any order. I find this a bit easier for human beings to read/parse -- the...
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- Sean McBride
To me Sean it looks like it's markup and that's what I'm trying to avoid. The least structure possible while still being parsable.
- Todd Hoff
I like to be able to easily and clearly identify formal semantic objects embedded in plain and natural text, without the markup being too noisy or verbose. There is room for many semantic approaches that can intermingle -- it is a trivial matter to translate or convert most formal semantic markup schemes to most others, once one unambiguously articulates the conventions and rules.
- Sean McBride
Todd -- I really like the direction you are going here: http://friendfeed.com/toddh... I think there is going to be a huge future in developing tools for supporting the on-the-fly creation of formal semantic statements on social media platforms like Friendfeed. Twitter hashtags are the first primitive stirrings along that front -- there is a long way to go.
- Sean McBride
"The least structure possible while still being parsable" -- a worthy goal.
- Sean McBride
From what I can tell Sean there's nothing that allows this yet. I took a look at greasemonkey but I became more confused the more I looked :-) Hopefully there's someone smarter out there. Microformats as a layer above the client would be useful.
- Todd Hoff
You're psychically channeling something which doesn't exit yet but which is on the verge of physically manifesting. :)
- Sean McBride
Sean, I asked this before I believe, but why not just count on natural language parsing? There are many ambiguous sentence out, but the aggregate will probably be able to make sense of. There must be countless of occurrences of a pattern like "[actor name], who also stars in [movie name]" inside reviews. All these kind of little phrases (and the mass occurrence of certain ones) can be used to help estimate the fact that this is an important semantic relationship.
- Meryn Stol
I also mentioned this before, but have you have studied "Controlled English" or "Controlled Natural Language" in general? I really don't care for "computer-speak". I'd rather use a subset of English.
- Meryn Stol
Meryn -- have you studied natural language processing issues in depth? It is an enormously difficult problem, one which we have barely scratched the surface of solving after decades of intensive research and the expenditure of many millions of dollars. Someday the nut will be cracked. In the meantime, simple semantic markup provides quick and easy shortcuts for pushing along the development of the Semantic Web.
- Sean McBride
Meryn: how many accurate semantic statements can you extract from this article using state-of-the-art NLP sofware vs. your human mind? "The Echo Nest Teams Up With Spotify" http://sev.prnewswire.com/music...
- Sean McBride
Meryn we could all switch to Loglan, but I agree with Sean, it's very difficult to extract deep data from text. Even when I write something as simple as a movie review and try to envision how I would parse the semantics and we are a long ways a way. So we need signs and portents.
- Todd Hoff
Sean, controlled english does too. That's my point. And applying heuristics (for example: regular expressions) to normal text databases does too. I'd rather crowdsource the heuristics than crowdsource all the facts.
- Meryn Stol
Signs and portents; clues and cues.Standardized markup.
- Sean McBride
" Spotify, the music streaming service, " suppose this phrase occurs many times over the web, this probably indicates some sort of relationships.... Amazon has some kind of algorithm running on books discovering "statistically unlikely phrases"... These kind of algorithms I'm talking about.
- Meryn Stol
Point is, I'm having the idea of crowdsourcing heuristics in mind... And I think that will beat crowdsourcing facts. I'm not talking about strong AI.
- Meryn Stol
Could you give an example Meryn?
- Todd Hoff
Well, there's no running example I know of, but it's mainly answering Sean's question: "ow many accurate semantic statements can you extract from this article" or "this group of articles". At this moment, I'm not even sure what kind of relationships I'm looking for, but suppose the challenge is to "mine" employment information. We see "Jim Lucchese, CEO of The Echo Nest" and "Andreas...
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- Meryn Stol
Those rules I thought up just now could be crowdsourced. Anyone with a bit of regex knowledge can participate and test their queries on live data. People could rate queries, compare queries which purport to do the same things (which is more accurate, or faster?), etc.
- Meryn Stol
The problem is regexes can only handle context free grammars. For a human to write only in a regular language would be difficult.
- Todd Hoff
I didn't say it's possible to extract any knowledge using regexes, but I think that for most triples a human can come up with (it's kind of artificial to think this way anyway) there is a way to think up a regular expression (or other kind of parsing code, regexes are quite limited with what you could do compared to a full parser) that can get this data from a *percentage* of relevant...
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- Meryn Stol
Meryn: I was able to quickly extract 15 semantic statements from the article (among many, many more). "/c" is an abbreviation for "/category": {1. Argos Management /c The Echo Nest investor 2. Commonwealth Capital Ventures /c The Echo Nest investor 3. San Francisco Music Tech Summit /2009 /attendee Spotify 4. San Francisco Music Tech Summit /2009 /attendee The Echo Nest 5. Spotify /c...
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- Sean McBride
#nml:movie[The Bourne Ultimatum; 2007 /IMDB-rating 8.2/10 /200905]
- Sean McBride
8.2/10? What does that even mean? :)
- Nathan Chase
Sean, I don't know. But if you try to describe the "heuristic" you have applied to extract this data, software might be able to do it. One thing I think you should understand is that it's not necessary to be able to extract knowledge from any page: There's so much written on the web that you can mine data where it's easy. Something ambiguously "encoded" in one article, can be written down very explicitly in another.
- Meryn Stol
Meryn -- if there existed a piece of software that could extract in a consistent and reliable way substantial semantic facts from this natural language text, or any other natural language text, don't you think we would have all heard of it? It would be an enormously valuable product. The truth is, doing this kind of thing involves incredible complexity -- some of the best minds on the...
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- Sean McBride
Sean, I asked *you* to provide the heuristics, the algorithms you used, or better said, you would *say* you used, because you probably didn't. But people tend to rationalize their choices afterwards. If you can explain for each item you extracted why you did so, some of these explanations might be translatable (by a human!) to a small computer program. You can put that as a module into...
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- Meryn Stol
For an example of a (half-baked) algorithm, check my comment directly after Todd asked me for an example.
- Meryn Stol
Again, I want to be clear that it does not have to be a goal to extract all possible facts from one piece of content. It's better to extract the facts where it's the easiest. For some of the facts listed, there might be tens, hundreds or even thousands of sources to derive it from.
- Meryn Stol
Meryn -- run this text through whatever semantic analyzer you have at hand, and please post the output. Thanks.
- Sean McBride
Nathan -- 8.2 of 10 points means that many IMDb users think that The Bourne Ultimatum is an exceptionally strong movie.
- Sean McBride
I don't have any semantic analyzer at hand. Just read what I say, carefully. You're a pretty smart guy, I think you'll understand.
- Meryn Stol
Also, if you don't know what crowdsourcing is, please look it up. Otherwise you really don't know what I'm suggesting.
- Meryn Stol
Meryn -- when you ask me (or anyone) to explain the heuristics and cognitive processes by which they extract semantic meaning from natural language texts, you are addressing perhaps the most difficult problem in linguistics, artificial intelligence and natural language understanding. So far no one has been able to figure these processes out in a definitive way. Many of these mental operations appear to be unconscious -- not accessible to the conscious mind.
- Sean McBride
Just tell me *why* you chose what you chose. Think about it. Maybe for 9 out of 10 facts your answer in the end is still: "I really don't have a clue why I chosen that", well, then this is not useful. Maybe 1 out of 10 results in a usable heuristic. I propose a heuristic in this thread, the "A, B of C"-pattern, with some constraints on what A, B and C can represent. Read back. :)
- Meryn Stol
Meryn -- show me the code! Show me the output! :) Everything else on this topic is jibberjabber.
- Sean McBride
Sean, I don't think that really does justice to what I wrote in my comments. I'll leave it at that I think...
- Meryn Stol
Meryn -- I am simply requesting an example of a piece of software that can extract some semantic content from this text (or any other natural language text). It seems like a reasonable request to me.
- Sean McBride
Sean, I don't know if you know, but countless of "vertical" search engines do this very thing, to index properties of products for example. That's the beauty of vertical search: They use specialized code for the problem domain. That's totally different than domain-generic code. Also, what's the upcoming Google Squared, which goes a step further because I think it's domain generic.
- Meryn Stol
Oh and this is just in the news: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...
- Meryn Stol
Meryn -- give me an example of a specific vertical search engine that will extract semantic content from this text, along with the output. The Yahoo Placemaker project looks promising, but that kind of semantic processing represents only a minuscule percentage of the cognitive activities in play when understanding natural language texts.
- Sean McBride
Sean, I'm not talking about "understanding natural language texts". Why do you think a computer needs to understand natural language to build up huge numbers of *correct* triples? It doesn't have to understand a thing! Read back.
- Meryn Stol
Most of the text can remain totally opaque to the computer. As long as the computer can recognize *some* data, it's enough. In fact, it doesn't matter if the computer can't read one bit of one or thousands of articles at all: It just won't just *those* specific articles. It just goes on with the next, and looks for some easily parseable stuff there.
- Meryn Stol
Wow. Much ado about nothing. The best example is Google's use of brute-force pattern matching to translate text into various languages. There is no reason to have sophisticated AI, because for pure information, that is context-less data, we can communicate in a simplified language consistently. This to me is the real problem. Vernacular, slang, and casual phrases have all slipped even into scientific papers.
- Aaron deMello
The challenge then becomes disambiguation, which I think will be solved long before any of the much harder problems in NLP & AI.
- Aaron deMello
If you guys haven't seen it, dig up the paper on how Google Translate works. Its breathtaking in its scale, and with scale came simplicity.
- Aaron deMello
Another assay at this: #nml:movierating[/movie The Bourne Ultimatum /moviedate 2007 /rater IMDB /rating 8.2 of 10 /ratingdate 200905]
- Sean McBride
How do you get credibility with me? Point me to the best sushi restaurant I have ever been to. Rob Shore. You are the man!
Mark Andrew Catton, Martin Lindeskog, Jeff (Team マクダジ ) and 2 other people liked this
Are you a traditional or sushi nouveau lover? In the latter case, you gotta try O Ya and Uni next time you are in Boston.
- Simeon Simeonov
I kinda dug Hana Zen. :/
- Sean Oliver
1) Teppay, Houston TX.http://www.igougo.com/dining-...
- Neil Simon
2) Matsuhisa, Beverly Hills, CA. http://matsuhisa.com
- Neil Simon
Great! My wife loves sushi and she's in NY this week; I'll let her know about Yasuda.
- Andrés David Aparicio
Robert: if you ever find yourself in Rochester, NY, well--we can't compete to SF sushi, but I promise you the best sushi in Rochester--my treat. House of Sushi- 101 East street.
- Larry Roth
One of the tiny, tiny, tiny restaurant/cafe's in Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo. Hands down the best you will ever eat. A father owns one, and his son runs the one next door. A matter of taste as to which one is the best.
- Jordan Brock
So you have been to all of the best sushi restaurants in the country? and you want us to match our list with your list? why don't you share which ones you feel are the best?
- Bobby Kircher
@Bobby: Robert is talking about a previous post where he asked for restaurant options in NY and Rob Shore suggested a great one.
- Andrés David Aparicio
Been to Nishino in Seattle?
- Jeff (Team マクダジ )
Yasuda is awesome. saw Martha Stewart there the night before she went into lockdown. Also right across the street, down in the basement of the building is a place called Sakagura. Not so much sushi, but great little Japanese plates, and a really large sake selection... In SF, try Ryoko's. Sit at the bar and order from the special board. I haven't found much better in the city.
- John Stanford
Jeff: yes, doesn't compare.
- Robert Scoble
@Larry I would assert that Edoya on Buffalo Road in Rochester is better than Golden Port/House of Sushi... Also, if you are in SF, Hama-ko (108 Carl St) is fantastic.
- matthew john ernisse
Well I am in Tokyo this week, so I am rocking good Sushi left and right :).
- Jeff (Team マクダジ )
Amura in Orlando FL, Vizen in Sarasota FL -- my two favorite sushi joints.
- Jonathan Brown
In New York: Yasuda, Sasabune, Masa (if you want to drop big paper). Those are the very best on the East Coast, each with their own quirks.
- Aaron deMello
No. Next time you are in San Diego (the ONLY place to be, btw... don't know why the hell I'm in Jersey), go to Sushi Ota in Pacific Beach --> http://www.yelp.com/biz...
- Pete
*jealous of Jeff*
- a runcible MiniMage
fuku sushi, newmarket, auckland is pretty good, but it is really just a cafe, not a "restaurant", for a sushi bar, try tanuki's cave, downtown auckland
- Paul Tudor
paul - fukme Sushi ? ;)
- Jeff (Team マクダジ )
wow. Google indexed this pretty quick. I typed "rob shore sushi" and this was the top link
- Jeff (Team マクダジ )
The one mentioned above in LA is good but only by local standards. Tokyo's fish market is a famous tourist attraction, but the highest quality fish never goes there. Kyubei, most regards as best in tokyo tries too hard too scale - they use too much formulas and source that defeat the real purpose of sushi: Freshness and raw skill. Kenjo in Hong Kong is by far the winner with a huge margin. (disclosure: master kenjo didn't charge me for one of the meals last time I left HK.)
- Tim Lai
robert, posts from a fishmarket in Japan? you need to expand your venue ;)
- bob phillips
yeah Jeff, don't you just love that name???, the owner does not speak english that well, so the irony is lost on him
- Paul Tudor
if your that much of an aficionado, the mecca for sushi lovers is the Tsukiji market. After that, you can head over to Kobe for some Matsusakaya steak (after a brief stopover at Akihabara to oogle the latest Japanese tech toys)
- Serge
Blue Ribbon has excellent Sushi in NY
- Bill Zaccardi
@TimLai where in HK is kenjo? thats quite a statement, now you've got me curious and I would like to try next time i'm over there ;)
- Serge
drunken shrimp in a chinese restaurant in tokyo. pyrex bowl of sake. shrimp dance. chops head . get the gaijin presentation.
- bob phillips
For sushi, visit us in Tokyo. Go to Sukiyabashi Jiro in Ginza or Roppongi. There is no better.
- Eric Hamilton
I've been to the fish market. Maybe it was too early for my brain, but it was good, but not amazing
- Jeff (Team マクダジ )
The best sushi restaurant is here in Hawaii; it's Sansei Restaurant, there is 1 here on the Big Island and 1 on Oahu.
- Sandra
Try Wasabi's, State St., Charleson, SC
- Leigha Baer
Robert:if you dont like this one I pay you the trip :-)) http://www.bellagio.com/restaur...
- Johni Fisher
I'm partial to Shiro's in Seattle (http://www.shiros.com/). おまかせ
- Hiro Asari
Robert, Enjoy your time in the Big Apple! If you come to Gothenburg, Sweden, visit Sushibiten. My favorite in USA: Arang in Troy, Ohio.
- Martin Lindeskog
@Serge 30 Miden Ave (cross road Mody Road), Ground Floor, Tsim Sha Tsui, HK tel:2369-8307
- Tim Lai
www.sushiofgari.com in NY. Am surprised no one has mentioned it. Above the rest.
- William Mougayar
Been away and just saw this - so glad you enjoyed it!
- Rob Shore
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