Tricycle Accident
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Yesterday, Anya tipped forward off of her tricycle and landed right on her face. Although it's tempting to think of this as karmic payback for the piggy-back incident, it's probably mostly because she just isn't great at catching herself. The thing where Guen split her lip was a rare exception — normally, she catches herself on the brink of disaster, movie-hero style. Anya, not so much. So, cracked tooth:
(Dentist appointment this afternoon.)
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True Knowledge Takes the Long View
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Yesterday, I went to a demo given by Stephen Wolfram about his new Wolfram|Alpha project. Some people are hyping it as a Google-killer, but it's not really like that at all. It's more like Encyclopedia Britannica with a built-in calculator — a cathedral of information built carefully by Top Experts™ behind a context-sensitive query engine with the ability to automatically produce charts and graphs for the output.
It was particularly interesting because it seemed much more in-line with the vision of the future lauded in Bill Gates's original version of The Road Ahead — where CD-ROM-based information was poised to reshape the world1 — than with today's Web 2.0 common wisdom. There's no user-interactive experience, no crowd-sourcing, no social anything. Instead, you ask questions, and the almighty black box delivers Answers from on high.
That seems like it might be useful if it's got answers in a domain you're interested in — and if you can see where those answers came from and their justification — but it's no Google-killer, nor the next Wikipedia.
So anyway, today I came across True Knowledge, a competitor of sorts — it tries to "know" the meaning of your query by means of a big database of semantic connections and then give you The Right Answer. After getting bored of trying it out on practical questions (sometimes it knows, usually it doesn't), I asked it the thing that's on Anya's mind these days: "Are monsters real?", and it came back with "Sorry, I do not know whether real is untrue of every fictional species."
Okay, fair enough. And the cool thing is that it shows the interpretation of the question below: "Are any fictional species (made-up species in a novel, movie, game etc.) real, implying a perceptible existence to a significant subset of people?" Of course, that raises another question: when you put it that way, and still can't give a simple answer, isn't it obvious that this whole enterprise is doomed?
So next, I discovered they've hard-coded in an answer about the existence of God — it doesn't know, but unlike the monsters question, doesn't give you the opportunity to give the answer. Total cop out.
Next up: "When will the universe end?" And the answer:
Well, there's some perspective!
Permalink | Comments: 2 | Rating: 0 | Tags: anya apocalypse geek meaning monsters semantics web2.0
Eventually Clock
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In case anyone is needing a clock like this.
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Drool
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Looks like rumors are solidifying — 100% viewfinder, better AF, many ergonomic improvements from the K20D (which in turn had many little improvements from my K10D). And it looks so pretty. Time to break open that piggybank that got dropped on my head.
The Japanese text translates roughly to: "Inheritor of a proud legacy". Hopefully, something like thie Pentax LX in digital form.
And also hopefully somewhere near my price range. Sigh.
Permalink | Comments: 0 | Rating: 0 | Tags: camera gear geek pentax want-want-want
Emotional Math
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Guen told me tonight: "Daddy, it's easy to be sad when you are already sad."
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Friendship Math
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The other day at the park, Guen introduced Christina as "our babysitter". Later, I asked her if Christina was our friend too, and she said no, just the babysitter. So I asked if a babysitter was more or less special than a friend.
Guen considered for a bit, and then said: "More, because we have twenty-one2 friends, but only one babysitter."
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Bedtime Song
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Hush little baby
Don't say a word
Papa's gonna buy you an elephant
And if that elephant's too big
Papa's gonna buy you a cute little pig
And if that pig can't find no truffles
Papa's gonna buy you a skirt with ruffles
And if that skirt with ruffles ain't cute
Papa's gonna buy you a magic flute
And if that magic flute gets out of tune
Papa's gonna buy you a hot-air balloon
And if that hot-air balloon floats away
Papa's going to buy you a bale of hay
And if that bale of hay goes rotten
Papa's gonna buy you a field of cotton
And if that field of cotton ain't organic
Papa's gonna buy you some Manic Panic
And when that Manic Panic washes out of your hair
Papa's gonna buy you a comfy chair
And if that comfy chair gets lumpy
Papa's gonna buy you a frog that's jumpy
And if that jumpy frog jumps too high
Papa's gonna buy you the sun in the sky
And if that sun in the sky don't shine
Papa's gonna buy you a silver mine
And if that silver mine don't produce
Papa's gonna buy you a glass of juice…
And so on.
Karen started singing the more-traditional version of this song to the girls at bedtime, which made them demand it of me. I couldn't remember the words, and when I asked Karen, she said to quit bugging her and to just make something up. So I did. This totally backfired on Karen, because now if you sing the song with less-silly words (and in particular if you omit the elephant), Anya gets very upset.
Permalink | Comments: 2 | Rating: 0 | Tags: anya bedtime elephants karen music
