True Knowledge Takes the Long View

29 Apr 2009 19:28

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:

Sorry. I couldn't find a meaningful interpretation of that. The universe, the entirety of space and time, all forms of matter, energy and momentum, and the physical laws and constants that govern them is not a prolonged event

Well, there's some perspective!

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Bedtime Song

16 Apr 2009 15:48

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.

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Thanks, Paul and Jen!

16 Apr 2009 00:11

For Easter, virtual-aunt-and-uncle Jen and Paul brought over mimosa and belini fixin's, including some plastic champagne flutes. Jen made special kid versions using sparkling water instead of champagne. It was all very cute.

This morning, I asked Anya if she would like her orange juice in her normal pink cup. (It's good to ask, because if you just choose and get it wrong, suddenly it's the Anyapocalypse. And you're not one of the ones being raptured away.)

She said, "No, I want it in a glass cup. A tall one."

I pointed to the normal grown-up drinking glasses. "Like one of these, you mean? Anya, those are hard for two-year-olds."

"No, I mean juice goes in ones with a on a stick!"

Ohhhhhhh.

"Yeah. Those are the ones for juice."

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Sure you can.

15 Apr 2009 00:04

Guen: "I can play tic-tac-toe when I'm asleep, if someone tells me when it's my turn."

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Anya Explains

14 Apr 2009 20:15

We were walking by the Charles River. I pointed out a Duck Boat.

Anya laughed at me: "Daddy, that's a person boat."

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Bloody-Lip Easter

13 Apr 2009 19:07

So, Guen and I both got dramatically bloody lips yesterday. Like, blood all over. Me 'cause Anya accidentally dropped a piggy bank full of coins on my face, and Guen because she accidentally dropped her face onto a wooden toy. Hers actually looks much better than mine, because for her we went to the ER and got her lip super-glued back together. Good times.