Michael Nielsen

"in 2003 alone, nine billion person-hours were spent playing the video game version of Solitaire — enough to create 500 Panama Canals." - Michael Nielsen

I often wonder about this. People on buses/trains are always concentrating so hard on iPhone versions of tetris - if only I could somehow harness that power to help with my literature searches. - Matthew Todd

"The Web has been called a "database of intentions." The bigger that database grows, and the deeper it's mined, the more difficult it may become to discern whether those intentions are our own or ones that have been implanted in us." - Michael Nielsen

"Forty years ago today, a team led by Leonard Kleinrock typed the “Lo” of “Login” into a Stanford computer, which promptly crashed before the command could be entered. But because Kleinrock’s team was sending this message from a UCLA machine, he had just taken part in one of the great milestones in communication history." - Michael Nielsen

Rob Carlson on current progress in synthetic biology. - Michael Nielsen

"This is a high quality crawl of top web sites, using AWS’s Elastic Map Reduce, Concurrent’s Cascading workflow API, and Bixolab’s elastic web mining platform. Hosting for the resulting dataset will be provided by Amazon in S3, and freely available to all EC2 users. In addition, the code used to create and process the dataset will be available for download" - Michael Nielsen

"The goal of our project is to build a system that can start from a limited amount of knowledge and gradually learn to understand language by utilizing millions of web pages. The project serves as a great case study for developing new Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing techniques. We use the Yahoo! M45 Cluster with Hadoop extensively in our work, and this post gives an example of how we use M45 and why it is essential to our research project. " - Michael Nielsen

Not very, according to this very interesting article by Charlie Stross. - Michael Nielsen

Informative interview with the head of Google's search ranking team. They run 6000 experiments per year, make about 500 changes per year to how search ranking works. Academic stemming algorithms don't really work for Google. They have a very low-friction system for running tests, making it very easy to deploy the large amounts of infrastructure needed to run the tests. - Michael Nielsen

English words that are prime when interpreted as base 36 numbers - "Animation" is prime, for example. Sentences made up with primes would be fun, or even a book. - Michael Nielsen

LOL, Steve. I learnt the Dvorak keyboard and wrote an experimental physics paper (I'm a theorist) to avoid working on my dissertation, oh so many years ago.... - Michael Nielsen

Galaxy Zoo is quite a sophisticated user of Amazon Web services. - Michael Nielsen

"[researchers Lipson and Schmidt] recently mined a large quantity of metabolic data provided by Gurol Suel, assistant professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. The algorithm came up with two "very simple, very elegant" invariants—so far unpublished—that are able to accurately predict new data. But neither they nor Suel has any idea what the invariants mean, Lipson says. "So what we are doing now is trying to automate the interpretation stage, by saying, 'Here's what we know about the system, here's the textbook biology; can you explain the new equations in terms of the old equations?'" Lipson says the ultimate challenge may lie in dealing with laws so complicated they defy human understanding. Then, automation of the interpretation phase would be extremely difficult. "What if it's like trying to explain Shakespeare to a dog?" he asks." - Michael Nielsen

Eric Drexler reminds us that the shift from hypothesis-driven to data-driven science in fact _is_ a shift, and likely one with surprising effects. - Michael Nielsen

"Good teachers have always had some measure of fame at the local level. Let's not kid ourselves: within a school, the students know who is a good teacher and who is no more illuminating than a wet pack of matches. The net takes that to a whole different level. Eventually everyone will know who the good teachers are, and will be able to tune into them. They will be rock stars." - Michael Nielsen

danah boyd's bibliography of research on twitter and microblogging. - Michael Nielsen

"An Australian intel analyst blogger, Leah Farrall, and an insurgent strategist blogger, Abu Walid, are now holding a debate in public across the blogs.... [Abu Walid is ] one of the leading figures in the interwoven tales of Al Q and the Taliban, a veteran muj from the Afghan fight against the Soviets with “a reputation as a skilled and pragmatic strategist and battlefield tactician”. He was an early member of Mullah Omar’s circle, has served as a correspondent for Al-Jazeera, and has penned a dozen books." - Michael Nielsen

Fascinating discussion by Linus Torvalds about the pitfalls of design: "And I know better than most that what I envisioned 10 years ago has _nothing_ in common with what Linux is today. There was certainly no premeditated design there. And I will claim that nobody else "designed" Linux any more than I did, and I doubt I'll have many people disagreeing. It grew. It grew with a lot of mutations - and because the mutations were less than random, they were faster and more directed than alpha-particles in DNA. " - Michael Nielsen

"An experiment at Indiana University brought in a group students and gave them insight puzzles, which measure divergent thinking and creativity. One was the compound remote associate test. If I give you the words “mile”, “sand”, “age” – what word can be added to all of them to make a valid word or a phrase? One group was told that the problem came from researchers down the hall. Another was told that it came from a team in Greece. The people told that the problem came from Greece solved 40% more of the puzzles. " - Michael Nielsen

A network of undersea sensors connected by 1200 kilometers of multi-gigabit cable. The data is, I believe, going to be open. Estimated cost is $600 million, and it's supposed to come online in 2014. - Michael Nielsen

You keep filling up my Book of Trogool "toblog" tag on delicious... I love it! - D0r0th34

Timothy Burke on teaching students about the presentation of self. - Michael Nielsen

There's a lot going on in this post -- I feel fortunate in that I teach at a center specifically dedicated to discipline-specific writing and speaking (in fact, Betsy, the description of what your sister does sounds remarkably similar to what we do!) and that we take many of these issues on with undergraduates -- although I am writing-focused, all my classes have some sort of speaking... more... - Mickey Schafer

And they say geeks have no sense of humor. - D0r0th34

These things need to be done worldwide, of course: "The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) aims to: * influence national policy in the area of data management in the Australian research community * inform best practice for the curation of data * transform the disparate collections of research data around Australia into a cohesive collection of research resources" - Michael Nielsen

I know a guy working on this - hopefully we'll end up doing some stuff for them, too. - Nick Lothian