"Venison with morel mushrooms (port wine) We don’t know about your neighborhood, but around the MeatWater plant, we got tons of deer! They love to nibble on the clover and dandelions that grow on our industrial park. And that’s when we hit ‘em with the Compound Bow, baby! Thwak! Arrow through the neck! We lovingly hang the bifurcated carcass from a pair of trees then butcher that buck into lean and flavorful steaks. After a long braise with imported German morels and a port wine reduction we get the gamiest MeatWater of them all! You can really taste the meadow!"
- Amit Patel
from Bookmarklet
Try it in real life. It's a nifty demo but it's still much easier to read the label or upc code and search on that. Going from question to answer it has about a 10% hit rate.
- Hayes Haugen
Hayes, have you seen this video? http://www.youtube.com/watch... Taking old vacation pictures and finding out what the buildings are. The good stuff starts about 4:30 minutes in. :)
- Matt Cutts
So he taking pictures of his computer using his phone, finding out what the object is, then going back to the computer and typing it in? Something seems terribly inefficient about that ;)
- Amit Patel
Amit: my point is that by the time I start the app, take the picture and get a false hit it's faster to just recognize the object myself and search on it (with my phone).
- Hayes Haugen
Matt: like I said it does cool stuff sometimes but as a general purpose tool for identifying the things I run across it has not done well. I'm not claiming anything other than how it's worked for me. Suggest people use the product instead of watching promo videos! And I'm not crapping on the concept - looking forward to its evolution.
- Hayes Haugen
From most recent search history: miss: $20 bill, Norwegian flag, a Sitar, a MacBook, an iPhone, a Leatherman tool, the box for the Leatherman, a Canon Ti, a photo of Venice with a tower. Hit: box of Pepperidge Farm Entertaining Quartet crackers because it recognized "Entertaining Quartet" in huge letters - just like I did. What I really need it to do is recognize things I don't recognize. So I'm off to do some tests....
- Hayes Haugen
“The SiON library works on ActionScript3/Flash10. This provides a simple sound synchronization with DisplayObject and an easy dynamic sound generation. You can generate various sounds without any mp3 files and wave data. The musical sequence is represented as simple text data “Music Macro Language”. It makes your sounding SWF file very very small.” via Andy Baio
- Amit Patel
"Twitter makes a search tool available on its own site. But Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, said that Google would be better able to provide Tweets that were relevant to a particular user’s questions. “We’re not good at relevancy right now, and they are,” he said. “More people will get more value out of Twitter because we are doing this with Google.”" I think that would be great--easier to search Twitter means more people tweeting.
- Matt Cutts
from Bookmarklet
I suppose that if somebody wanted to search Twitter, Google would be better at it. I just can't imagine why anybody not searching Twitter would want those results in their searches.
- Gabe
Gabe - Try again. Imagine someone searching for "Honda Civic", gets regular Google results but also a few tweets on the results screen. Those tweets mentioning "Honda Civic" could be very revealing. Like, dislike, problematic, cool feature found, just bought... Can find people thinking or doing the same thing you are right now. It is the future of search, come on.... I think so anyway.
- Odi Kosmatos
Odi — I don't understand the “Honda Civic” example. What are you looking for, when you search for “Honda Civic”, that you'd rather see what was posted 5 seconds ago instead of 5 minutes or 5 hours or 5 days ago?
- Amit Patel
I'm having a hard time trying to imagine a query where I would want to see the latest out-of-context chatter about the topic.
- Gabe
Gabe, it's mainly interesting as a way to see what people are thinking about something "right now". It's fun to watch during product launches and other events.
- Paul Buchheit
I think it's most appropriate for current event and news searches. If something big has gone down in a certain location... you would be able to have real-time accounts of the action fed into your google search. That makes it cool.
- SAM
Two slider controls are needed to customize page of result set: Pagerank<Low---|---High> and Date <Old---|---New>
- Micah Wittman
That's great but when can I get a pubsubhbbadabub Google Alert feed from that search?
- Bart LePoole
“Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.”
- Amit Patel
"Eureqa is a software tool for detecting equations and hidden mathematical relationships in your data. Its primary goal is to identify the simplest mathematical formulas which could describe the underlying mechanisms that produced the data."
- Amit Patel
from Bookmarklet
If I didn't already have an eye-fi card, I'd take one look at that page and think, gah, maybe I'll figure this out later... and then never buy one.
- Adam Lasnik
I found eye-fi to be a frustrating experience. I simply wanted a local wi-fi connection to get photos and videos from my camera to my computer (no uploading or passing through anyone else's servers), but found that it didn't handle videos, and that I was forever tied to an external account, service, and web site to keep the tech I'd bought functioning. I ended up giving it away. What I wanted was feasible technically, but not offered.
- LogEx
I think eye-fi has developed since you last tried it. As I understand, it now uploads videos (albeit through the eye-fi servers, I believe), and you *can* choose to have the photos and videos from your camera just saved on your hard drive and not posted on any third party site like flickr or picasaweb.
- Adam Lasnik
The Eye-Fi hardware is great. The software really annoys me. It would've been great if it offered sync or acted as an ftp server. People would've been able to use it for all sorts of things (like picture frames that take SD cards). But instead of making simple software that was very flexible, they made complicated software that limited what you could do with it. I gave mine away and switched to a regular SD card.
- Amit Patel
Brian, that's assuming it's been dissociated from a heat source. If, say, it's still wrapped around the baked potato, you'll find that it's pretty good at dissipating heat into your fingers.
- Michael R. Bernstein
That's because the foil is directly touching the—pardon the pun—hot potato as opposed to being tented.
- Akiva Moskovitz
We're baking a pie right now at 375 °F and I put foil along the edges to prevent them from burning. About halfway through I took the foil off, and within seconds it was cool enough to crumple up by hand. In fact, it wasn't even warm. That surprises me every time.
- DeWitt Clinton
(Sitting here with my aluminium foil hat on)
- Joe
DeWitt, so what you're really asking is "why doesn't foil stay hot?". In which case Brian's answer is correct.
- Michael R. Bernstein
Ahh, so the foil was hot while in the oven, but because it is so thin and so good at conducting heat that it dissipated nearly instantaneously. Thanks, everyone. I can sleep at ease now.
- DeWitt Clinton
Will this become a Googe interview question? :P
- imabonehead
I used to have this metal (unknown alloy) oven pizza plate that was pretty amazing like this. After taking it out of the oven and removing the pizza, it was almost instantly room temperature.
- Ray Cromwell
DeWitt, one correction -- aluminum has very low specific heat, 0.9 J/gK. Thus it is a very _poor_ conductor of heat. Foil also has very little mass. So 20g cooling by 200K only releases 4000J. If your 100g fingertips were mainly water (4 J/gK), they would gain only 10K from that 4000J, a condition which our nerves describe to us as "not hot."
- Daniel Dulitz
Daniel - that's not a correction, that's a freshman year physics class in comment form. You win FriendFeed.
- DeWitt Clinton
This was like a mini stackoverflow-style Q&A in a friendfeed thread - who knew the ff team built-in that in that kind of virtualization!
- Micah Wittman
I'm going to memorise that comment for the next time I'm cooking.......
- Roberto Bonini
Well, if this is freshman physics quiz... Aluminium is a good conductor, it just can't store heat. Conduction and heat storage are different (like resistance and capacitance). cpu heat sinks are often aluminium because they quickly conduct heat to the surface of the fins.
- Tracy
So aluminum is the opposite of the space shuttle tiles?
- Amit Patel
"The game is also more than happy to bribe players for participating in its viral spread: cute lonely animals will show up on your farm periodically and as a player you face a dilemma in sentencing them to virtual abandonment and death unless you post on your Facebook wall that you need one of your friends to start playing Farmville and "adopt" the adorable little self-promoter. "
- bob
True - these things are popular and addictive, but hardly social and you don't learn anything. (And I would have said so as a comment on the blog post, but woo-wee that's a lot of information they want for a registration!)
- Ciaoenrico
I'd have not problem sentencing an IMAGINARY animal to the death chamber. It's make believe! Then again, I don't spend my time playing these silly time wasting games either....
- Jeff P. Henderson
Nice review. Now I don't have to figure out what Farmville is :)
- Peng-Toh
Google web search is changing too fast for me to keep up with the changes.
- Amit Patel
from Bookmarklet
Barely 8 things this week, including changing the home page. Quiet week? :)
- Matt Cutts
I wonder if our occasional promotions (like the recent Droid launch, or PSA-like links) would be part of the initial clean-page, or whether they'll be part of the faded-in links.
- Aaron D'Souza
Oh it was a total blast, Jenna. <name deleted> showed off the new <service deleted> <version number deleted> and we all drank <deleted> and ate <deleted>. <name deleted>, <name deleted> and <name deleted> were all there! You missed out! It was epic.
- Louis Gray
What's interesting is that Facebook doesn't make you wait until you confirm your email address before you can start using the account. So I'm seeing her add friends, get messages, etc. The "if you are receiving this in error" link in the email takes you to a "Report Abuse" page, which has a button that does nothing but return you to the Report Abuse page.
- DeWitt Clinton
People have signed up for so many services using my email addresses. I'm amazed by how many services don't require confirmation of the email account — including banks!! I'm getting people's bank statements and the bank ignores my protests.
- Amit Patel
Reported the link not working correctly as a bug. Let me know which email address of yours it was and I'll try to get it sorted out.
- David Recordon
Thanks for looking into this, @David. The email address they signed up with is 'dewitt' at gmail, which I don't use myself, but it forwards to my normal account. But the real bug isn't the Report Abuse form, of course. Why not verify email addresses before enabling the new account?
- DeWitt Clinton
"When we talk about making games culturally meaningful we often limit the discussion in three important ways. The following constraints are completely arbitrary, yet we stick with them like they are some holy mandates from a greater god." […]
- Amit Patel
from Bookmarklet
The old one died; after my computer was on for a few minutes, the screen would turn a uniform color (the first time it was pink, then blue, then black). I got one of these: http://www.nvidia.com/object...
- Tudor Bosman
and that was when it decided to boot; after a few reboots, it wouldn't boot at all, and the computer made the "bad video card" beep sequence during POST (1 long, 2 short).
- Tudor Bosman
896 MB! Wow things have changed since I last had a gaming desktop
- Benjamin Golub
512 MB is still the most common, I think. The new video card I got (nvidia gts 250) has 512, and Steam's survey is showing 512: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurve...? although that's not only new systems.
- Amit Patel
I don't know, I haven't read the article that this is referring to, but the claim is Causality, from my reading. The claim : 'he authors estimate that reducing daily salt intake by as little as 5 g at the population level could avert 1.25 million deaths from stroke and nearly three million deaths from cardiovascular disease annually.' is astounding
- Rob Schonberger
Meat takes so much space, water, and energy to produce, all because we grow animals to hold our meat while it's growing. Let's grow our meat in vats.
- Amit Patel
I doubt it would taste very good. Also the lack of bone could be a serious obstacle to some people. :-) But we could replace a portion of in vivo meat in hamburgers and hot dogs with something that has mediocre taste and a better health profile, and no one need even notice.
- Daniel Dulitz
What would make in vitro meat taste different from real meat?
- Amit Patel
How much a muscle works, how the fat and muscle fibers are joined, are key -- that's why different cuts of meat have different flavors, why foie gras tasks different from liver, and so on. Texture is also very important to flavor. Bones and marrow add their own flavor to cooked meat. And many organs besides muscle are very tasty (I can say, having recently been to Incanto's Head-to-Tail Dinner).
- Daniel Dulitz
BTW, I love having a meat discussion while I'm on the farm. It's such a... meaty thread!
- Daniel Dulitz
Perhaps we'll end up using in vitro meat to feed to carnivorous pigs. Mmm, bacon-fed bacon.
- Amit Patel
I just had delicious (!) vegetarian chicken. No bones, and has very nice texture. One thing with getting rid of our meat producing industry is that it could render some animals almost extinct as we wouldn't "need them" anymore. My feeling is that anything done on a too large scale is unhealty. Meat industry is there. Farming is there.
- Jonas S Karlsson
"Last year, researchers at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago showed that human cells in culture could synchronize their internal chemical processes even though they were mechanically, chemically, and electrically isolated from one another. The cells, it seemed, were communicating through the exchange of photons."
- Amit Patel
from Bookmarklet
Imagine Crazy Taxi, but with zombies. Instead of avoiding the pedestrians you have to kill them all, since they're zombies. $10. Watch the video.
- Amit Patel
from Bookmarklet
GDC was in March. Why is this just coming out now?
- Rob Shillingsburg
I have way too many comments to make on this to try to do so on my phone.
- Andrew C
from Android
Hey, I have a little time now, so. OK, the headline is just silly. DIY will no more supplant FPSes than indie movies supplanted blockbusters.
- Andrew C
The very sentence "Braid is something you could show to Roger Ebert and say, 'Here is a work of authorial intention,' " raises my hackles, perhaps unintentionally. I really don't like the auteur theory in film and I don't think it applies to most videogames either, Braid and other ultra-small-teams aside. By analogy, there actually are great works in TV and film that come from an entire team. A great screenwriter, director, editor, DP, composer, actors, production designer, sound editor, and so forth.
- Andrew C
I guess my point is implicitly made in that sentence "Some observers say the success of Braid is an "Easy Rider" moment for video games." Indeed, there was an explosion of indie films in the 1970s. And I applaud that. But H'wood films didn't go away. And now every major movie studio also has a unit devoted to making "indie" films too. Movies, of course, have a much better system of ancillary revenue streams than games do, but I think to some degree that problem can be addressed or otherwise worked around.
- Andrew C
Have you heard Jon's talks? I think he's right in that the major games that heavily abuse gamers by using techniques such as: "using levels as candy", "forcing gamers into repetitive task that are not in aid of the game". I think that having people like Jon around is good for reminding designers of such weaknesses.
- Piaw Na
No, I haven't heard his talks, but... what's wrong with candy?
- Andrew C
Jon has been at it for a long time. It's great to see him getting recognition.
- Tracy
Why are we equating FPS with the commercial mainstream? It is now, though there are plenty of other genres on the market. Will FPS be the primary genre forever? That's a depressing thought. I find shooting kind of... tedious. Braid was, of course, awesome. Passage is meh.
- ⓞnor
When I think of commercial mainstream, I think of Sims, World of Warcraft, Wii Fit, Mario Kart, Grand Theft Auto. But I guess there are some big FPSes too (Halo comes to mind but I think there's a new one released last week that's getting some attention).
- Amit Patel
Modern Warfare 2. Yes, it's pretty successful.
- Andrew C
from Android
Looks nice. We finally got our A4 a few weeks ago (hey, it's not the S4, but we still love it :). Audi has really started producing great cars in the last couple of years. If you look at their Consumer Reports ratings, it's like night and day from a couple of years ago. And that S4 looks like a lot of fun!
- Joel Webber
Excellent choice. I own a 2004 S4 and they've only gotten better with each rev. Did you opt for the Magna sport rear diff?
- Bill Strathearn
Bill: Yeah, I got the sports diff, the dynamic suspension and also the dual clutch gearbox. I'm used to a manual, but decided to go for the DSG this time and am pretty happy with the decision so far! :)
- Simon
Activator/inhibitor Flash demos. None of the demos are working for me at the moment. But look at the “fur” image. My eyes can't keep this steady. Is it bothering anyone else?
- Amit Patel
from Bookmarklet
Syntax-highlighting in the browser is tough, because textareas match the input data (plain text) but not the output (colored text), and content-editable matches the output but not the input. Plus, content-editable is flaky. This article is about parsing, coloring, and coping with browser limitations.
- Amit Patel
"We need people to help us tackle some of the hardest software engineering and computer science problems, including developing a ground-breaking programming system that decimates the time required to build a web application end-to-end." - http://www.asana.com/
Naturally :) What does it mean to decimate time though? Is that 10% less?
- Paul Buchheit
Yeah, decimate has such an awful sound, by in most real-world situations, getting rid of 10% of something is not such a big deal.
- j1m
The historical definition of decimate was to kill 1 in 10 of a group as punishment but the current accepted definition is to kill, destroy or remove a large percentage.
- Ed Millard
Asana is developing a functional reactive programming based server-synchronized web development framework. It includes a mixed presentation/logic mini language which gets compiled into JS. I'm sure they'd be happy to tell you more -- they're not terribly secretive.
- ⓞnor
@Micah, the original meaning of decimate is pretty hard to resist. Suggested rejoinder for anyone arguing with FakeAPStylebook types: if you just mean reduce, then say so.
- j1m
"Decimators of Time" sounds like a good band name
- David Vasileff
I was just thinking a few weeks ago that a new language may be just what I need for web programming. They seem to have an all-star team. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with.
- Amit Patel
FRP is a formalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...). More concretely, with Asana's system, you write a *function* that takes the model (database state, etc.) and returns presentation (HTML, etc.) -- just like a simple CGI script (only client-side). So far so ordinary, but with FRP the runtime evaluates the function *incrementally*. A small model change (a field value edit, or a new item in a list), causes only the necessary recalculation and an incremental page update.
- ⓞnor
This is coupled with a client/server sync/notification system, so real-time interfaces like FriendFeed's become the default, rather than requiring a big bundle of event listeners and careful handling of edge cases. The idea is that by eliminating event spaghetti, you can make really great interfaces much more easily. My understanding is they plan to use this to build workflow apps.
- ⓞnor
Nothing gets computer scientists excited like the possibility of developing a new programming language. Nothing makes on-the-line implementers cringe more than a new programming language. Ask Joel Splosky how Wasabi adoption is going outside of FogBugz. Of course, the probability of success is higher with languages that are more divergent than anything before it and solve real-world...
more...
- Bill Strathearn
As both someone who hates to have to deal with a new language, and at the same time loves coming up with new languages, the new language had better be either (a) hugely different and hugely more productive, or (b) my pet language. ;)
- Amit Patel
Easy coding of web-pages that update in real-time -- that sounds like something worth inventing a new programming language for. (I can't think of any other feature that I would consider to justify a new language :) )
- j1m
"Rejecta Mathematica is an open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals in the mathematical sciences. In addition, every paper appearing in Rejecta Mathematica includes an open letter from its authors discussing the paper's original review process, disclosing any known flaws in the paper, and stating the case for the paper's value to the community."
- Amit Patel
from Bookmarklet
I'd hope there'd be some kind of strategy to it! Though, if I were to take the "obvious" path, it's because people want less computer for their computing these days. And, as the video says, more people are spending more time in the browser, so...! why not just rid of all the other stuff that gets in the way?
- Chris Messina
Google Chrome runs web pages and applications with lightning speed. Chrome OS runs them even faster. Faster means more users on the web. More users on the web means more users using Google. That's a pretty simple, and highly effective, strategy.
- DeWitt Clinton
Well, I think the coupling of Chrome OS to specific hardware reqs is one of the more interesting things here. It gives Google a "hand to reach out into reality" in a way that it only previously had with Android/G1 devices.
- Chris Messina
(As always, speaking for myself, not Google) I assume the coupling to hardware specs is the only reasonable way to guarantee sane behavior. Encouraging people to install it on arbitrary hardware would open it up to all the problems that any non-Windows OS (and sometimes even Windows) has on arbitrary hardware -- driver hell and unpredictable performance. Very similar to Apple's approach, but without the overpriced hardware.
- Joel Webber
" Magnitude: 2.9 - duration magnitude (Md); Time: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 1:26:17 PM (PST); Distance from: Los Altos, CA - 3 km (2 miles) SSW (203 degrees), Los Altos Hills, CA - 4 km (2 miles) SE (140 degrees), Mountain View, CA - 6 km (4 miles) SSW (205 degrees), Sunnyvale, CA - 8 km (5 miles) WSW (248 degrees), San Jose City Hall, CA - 19 km (12 miles) W (272 degrees); Coordinates: 37 deg. 20.7 min. N (37.345N), 122 deg. 6.6 min. W (122.110W); Depth: 5.5 km (3.4 miles)"
- April Buchheit