Adriano

"A guy gets diagnosed with cancer, then gets on his motorcycle and rides west and comes across all kinds of people and places. At one point, he goes on a hike, gets lost and meets another hiker there, a woman. They end up camping around a fire and he asks her at one point, “If you knew you had one week to live what would you be doing?” And she says without any hesitation, “What I’m doing now.” So what better definition of true happiness than that? And that’s definitely obtainable." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

We want to be precise in our communications -- but that must be balanced with the need for efficiency. The paper above uses information theory to argue that ambiguity is necessary in any efficient communication system when content is informative about meaning. Also @amirask refers to another interesting paper, Compression without a common prior by Brendan Juba et al. (Proceedings of ICS 2011, 79-86), in which speaker and listener have different prior beliefs about what a speaker may say. Again, information theory shows why ambiguity is necessary for the purpose of efficient communication (compression): https://docs.google.com/viewer... - Adriano

That's great, thanks :-) - Maitani

"The reason all those projects fail is that this CANNOT BE ACHIEVED IN PRINCIPLE: a "standard" ontology would be a static one, and NO usable ontology is static. As information grows it becomes difficult to manage without some organization. We also want to understand the relationships between entities which are assumed to exist within specific areas of interest, thus new meta-information can surface." \\ The effort is educative, but in short, it goes against evolution. - Adriano from Bookmarklet

If you liked the Silvio Dante character in The Sopranos, and the film Fargo, you will really enjoy this black comedy with a Norwegian accent. \\ "After he testifies against a Mafia boss, ex-gangster Frank Tagliano enters the witness protection program and asks to be sent to [Lillehammer, Norway (1994 Winter Olympics)]. Despite the peaceful surroundings, it's not long before Frank strays from the straight and narrow." \\ "The first season premiered on Norwegian NRK1 on 25 January 2012 with a record audience of 998,000 viewers, and premiered on the Netflix stream http://movies.netflix.com/Movie... in the United States, Latin America and Canada on February 6, 2012. It will air on BBC4 in the UK. A second season has already been commissioned." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Adriano from Bookmarklet

Van Zandt interviewed: http://youtu.be/2O6MoG7geJU - Adriano

Tversky is the founder of behavioral economics, and had he been alive, would have won the Nobel prize in economics with Daniel Kahneman. - Adriano

currently 22.5%, details https://www.intrade.com/v4... \\ Another indicator is the USDIRR http://finance.yahoo.com/q... NB: "Iran's rial currency has declined 40% to 55% against the dollar on the black market since December. Iranian inflation, meanwhile, now exceeds 20% a month, according to the Central Bank. While the rial has been falling for almost a year, the latest drop appeared to be triggered by a recent U.S. announcement that it would penalize companies that do business with Iran's Central Bank, and a proposed plan to ban Iranian oil purchases in the European Union later this year. The rial was changing hands at 16,000 to 17,000 in recent days, down from 11,000 to 12,000 in December." http://online.wsj.com/article... - Adriano

Leon Panetta stated that Iran would be able to reach nuclear-weapons capabilities within a year... Q: "Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack? Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran’s nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack? Can... more... - Adriano

11 Feb spike to 45% -- media portrays the light, now yellow for Israel, will turn red after the November elections in the US. - Adriano

Director and choreographer: Pina Bausch (also playing the first figure). This important piece was featured in the recent Wim Wenders' film "Pina." \\ Cast: Malou Airaudo, Domenique Mercy, Jan Minarik, Nazareth Panadero, Jean Laurent Sasportes. \\ "Her parents owned a café attached to a small hotel. The little girl learned to amuse herself sitting quietly under the café tables watching the customers or entertaining them with impromptu dances. Early on her parents sent Pina to ballet classes, where, she recalled in an interview, "I loved to dance because I was scared to speak. When I was moving I could feel."" see Choreographer whose seminal work gave an unsettling view of the human condition, http://www.independent.co.uk/news... - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"Try to send no more than one email a day. Emails should be 3 sentences or less. Better if you can get the whole email in the subject line. If you need information, ask yes or no questions whenever possible. Never ask a question that requires a full sentence response. When something is time sensitive, state the action you will take if you don’t get a response by a time you specify. Be as specific as you can while conforming to the length requirements. Include obvious keywords people can use to search for your email. Anecdotally, such emails have a 10-fold higher response probability. The rules are designed around the fact that busy people who get lots of email love checking things off their list." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

+59 Seconds: "do not send your message to an entire group. When people see that an email has been sent to lots of others, the diffusion effect arises: everyone thinking that it is everyone else’s responsibility to respond. To increase the chances of getting people to help, send the message to each person individually." - Adriano

"Loading your message with words such as "confirm," "join," "press," or "invite" is not a good idea if you want a response. Baydin extracted data from five million emails and found that some subject-line words, such as "apply" and "opportunity, [connect, payments, conference, cancellation]" got better responses. Best time to send emails is before work." see infographic, http://mashable.com/2012... - Adriano

"Bausch's work, especially her later pieces, could include speech, social dance, repetition, dramatic, comic or surrealist situations, nudity, cross-dressing, brutality or tenderness, all adding up to an often uncomfortably perceptive commentary on the human situation. You might be annoyed, upset or even distressed by a work by Bausch; it's unlikely that you would be bored: singing from the dancers, brutality, terror, mourning, dreams and nightmares. The settings are extrordinary." see also http://friendfeed.com/search... - Adriano

"The drawings of butterflies done by Vladimir Nabokov were intended for “family use.” He made these on title pages of various editions of his works as a gift to his wife and son and sometimes to other relatives. In Brian Boyd’s words, “in these highly personal and affectionately playful drawings the scientific accuracy Nabokov needed in thousands of illustrations of the specimens he studied under the microscope was no longer relevant, and his imagination could take flight. In the butterflies Nabokov devised and labeled for Vera he mingles fact and fancy even more sportively than in his fiction.” None of these drawings portray real butterflies, both the images and the names he assigns to them are his invention." - Adriano

Love these! - Kelli H. from Android

"The brain contains 100 million neurons, and each neuron makes thousands of connections on average. If we assume that each distinct connection pattern gives rise to a distinct brain state, the number of brain states exceeds the number of known particles in the universe. Your experiences, memories, personality and thoughts are thus encoded in the ways your neurons connect to one another. The next big frontier is mapping those trillions of neural connection patterns to their brain states. The associational networks of your brain determine to a large degree how you understand the world and your place in it: "Information is the new soul." The book offers the equivalent of a college course on neuroscience, covering such technical matters as spike trains, cortical layering, ion channels, and the function and structure of axons and dendrites, with a bit of neurochemistry." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"Connectome" is a term originally coined by Olaf Sporns in a 2005 paper: "A connectome is the totality of connections between the neurons in a nervous system. It is all of the connections." - Adriano

Jan Schnupp: "Neuroscientists have long believed that the brain works by translating aspects of the external world, such as spoken words, into patterns of electrical activity. But proving that this is true by showing that it is possible to translate these activity patterns back into the original sound – or at least a fair approximation – is nevertheless a great step forward." Experiments on 15 patients showed that a computer could decipher their brain activity and play back words they heard, though at times the words were difficult to recognise. Problem: distinguishing between words a person wants to say and thoughts they would rather keep private. Full article: http://dx.doi.org/10... - Adriano from Bookmarklet

Image retouched and color-corrected (click on it to enlarge). One of my favorite rooms in the world :-) - Adriano

"Mayan documentation can be interpreted as saying that the end of the world should be seen not as predicting an apocalyptic end but a rebirth, which always happens at the end of a calendric cycle. Fears of the end are often related to fears of having lived a meaningless life. People spend too much of their lives in trivialities and thus feel trapped in an empty existence when, instead, they should be investing their time in generating something that "stands the test of time," "the test of excellence." We only truly disappear when people stop remembering us. But it's quite difficult to come up with universals of meaningfulness. And a life that was well-lived would never be long enough. This, perhaps, is the essence of the human predicament. We all struggle to find our own way out of it." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"Floods of raw sensory data trigger perceptions that fall into categories designated by “symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world,” Douglas Hofstadter asserts. Human brains create vast repertoires of these symbols, conferring the “power to represent phenomena of unlimited complexity and thus to twist back and to engulf themselves via a strange loop.” Consciousness itself occurs when a system with such ability creates a higher-level symbol, a symbol for the ability to create symbols. That symbol is the self. The I. Consciousness. “You and I are mirages that perceive themselves.”" - Adriano

"Gödel’s proof emerged from deep insights into the self-referential nature of mathematical statements. He showed how a system referring to itself creates paradoxes that cannot be logically resolved — and so certain questions cannot in principle be answered. Consciousness, in a way, is in the same logical boat. At its core, consciousness is self-referential awareness, the self’s sense of its own existence. It is consciousness itself that is trying to explain consciousness." - Adriano

"Harouni gives a useful introduction to this fascinating way of making things -- including intricate objects once impossible to create." Desktop 3D printers cost around $300. Self-fabricating machines are definitely possible... so throw in some genetic algorithms and self-healing circuits, and you have synthetic biology as a live evolutionary experiment. Soon. - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"The Tiniest camera in the world weighs only 11 gm and shoots video and photos. The MAME-CAM, is created by Japanese company Thanko. It shoots video around 640×480 resolution, pictures in 1,600×1,200 and records audio in mono quality. The mini camera cost around $100, and has a battery life of about 36 minutes." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"Anabelle Kienle argues, with Van Gogh's many letters as evidence, that the greatest Dutch painter since Rembrandt managed to survive, in part, by employing a kind of self-hypnosis, sessions of superhuman focus that helped Van Gogh put down the fires in his head. He brings a landscape right up to the viewer's toes, painting with painstaking detail the bark of trees, the twists of vines, the striving thistle. His landscape style was in part inspired by the high horizon lines of Japanese art, which Van Gogh deeply admired. The exhibit brings together a sampling of Japanese prints to provide counterpoint." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

I love Van Gogh's work. - Kelli H.

That one is rarely seen, even in the Dutch and French museums. Also couples seldom appear in Van Gogh's work. Interestingly, there's no clear path in view. - Adriano

"Researchers at the University of Illinois created microcapsules a mere 10 microns across, filled with a liquid metal alloy. They then bonded these capsules to the conductive material of a multilevel circuit (gold, in this case). When the circuit was bent to the point where the conductive line broke, the capsules also ruptured, and the liquid metal entered the crack, bringing the circuit back to life in less than 1,000th of a second. The microcapsules need to be made even tinier before they can be commercially applied, but the approach could also lead to batteries that fix themselves." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"... Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells." --Robert Grudin - Adriano

At <:,:,: <<< \\ But that's EST. ;) - Victor Ganata

Listen using your default MP3 player, Winamp/iTunes, Windows Media Player, REalONE Player, or from behind a firewall on port 80. - Adriano from Bookmarklet

RT @ericschmidt: Take 1 minute to sign Google's petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA. Defend the web! https://www.google.com/landing... \\ See also http://protestsopa.com for details. - Adriano from Bookmarklet

See also: Forget SOPA, Europe is about to ratify its bigger brother ACTA http://www.siliconrepublic.com/new-med... Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... Polish members of Parliment wear Guy Fawkes maskes to protest ACTA today http://www.facebook.com/photo... - Amira

Q: Does Buddhism allow self-immolation? "One could refer to Jataka tales, which concern the previous births of the Buddha. In one story, the Buddha, in a previous incarnation, gives up his body to feed a starving tigress and her four cubs. Some other stories also talk about self-sacrifice by the Buddha. Although suicide is violent and prohibited in Buddhism, some Buddhists believe it depends on the motivation. If you do it out of hatred and anger, then it is negative. But if you do it for a pure cause... it's such a complex theological issue. My stand on self immolation is the same as that of the Dalai Lama, who has always discouraged drastic actions by Tibetans. He does not even endorse hunger strikes." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

2011-01-25 Obama 56.5%, Romney 27.9%, Gingrich 8.2%, Paul 2.6%. - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"Intro to machine learning, datamining, and statistical pattern recognition. Topics include: (i) Supervised learning (parametric/non-parametric algorithms, support vector machines, kernels, neural networks). (ii) Unsupervised learning (clustering, dimensionality reduction, recommender systems, deep learning). (iii) Best practices in machine learning (bias/variance theory; innovation process in machine learning and AI). (iv) Reinforcement learning. Numerous case studies and applications, so that you'll also learn how to apply learning algorithms to building smart robots (perception, control), text understanding, computer vision, medical informatics, audio, and database mining." see also http://cs229.stanford.edu/ - Adriano from Bookmarklet

see also Tom MITCHELL's course at Carnegie Mellon University w/ slides and videos: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom... - Adriano

There are three rules: 1) Write and direct original screenplays, 2) make them with the most modern technology available, and 3) self-finance them. \\ "Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality. A screenplay has to be like a haiku. It has to be very concise and very clear, minimal. You’re going to listen to the actors because they have great ideas. You’re going to listen to the photographer because he will have a great idea. You can make the decision that you feel is best, but listen to everyone, because cinema is collaboration." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

cf. the iPhone's marimba ringtone which recently halted the New York Philharmonic during a performance of Mahler's 9th symphony! ... hear Alan Gilbert: http://youtu.be/4MwdPvA5nGw - Adriano from Bookmarklet

yes, it was equally significant! :-) - Amira

here's the salmon mousse... urrr, sorry, the chart: http://finance.yahoo.com/q... - Adriano from Bookmarklet