kstruct

Yet another impro show. Same story as the last couple, 7:30pm at the Street Theatre, Sunday December 11th.

I’ve been meaning to write up something about the last show, but somehow hadn’t got to it until now.

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I’ve had an awesome run with amazon book recommendations lately. Sooner or later I guess they’ll recommend something I don’t like, but since I started paying attention to them recently, I haven’t been steered wrong.

Specifically, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Time Traveler’s Wife and Life of Pi have all been really great amazon recommendations. Next up is The Secret Life of Bees, which really doesn’t grab me from the blurb, but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt at this point.

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I found this search engine blind comparison site via Jeremy Zawodny’s blog earlier today. Jeremy linked to Seth Godin’s post about it, ‘Can more than 60% be wrong’. Am I missing something, or is Google solidly winning that in comparison, not losing as Seth implies. Yes, more people preferred Yahoo OR MSN over Google, but significantly more people preferred Google over either of the other two alone.

Generating search results is fundamentally a statistical process, and giving ‘not google’ two chances makes the whole thing very unfair if you’ve going to compare it in this way. You might as well give the worlds best marksman a single shot at a target, then say he failed if any of the second through hundredth best managed to get closer. How about we start electing politicians like that?

Looking at the results as they currently stand, about 10% more people judged Google better than Yahoo (in second place) and that’s pretty significant result if the number can be trusted. It would be interesting to extend the experiment and have users mark which results they considered relevant to their query to get the traditional search engine measures (like MRR and S@3). I suspect Google would still win on more queries than any of the other whole web search engines.

I’m assuming it’s not a novelty elsewhere in the world, but last weekend I did the ’self service checkout’ thing for the first time (buying a book at the new Big W store up in Gungahlin). There was nothing particularly eventful about it, except that the computer seemed to really want me to put my book into a plastic bag (which I didn’t need). I did get a bag in the end for fear of causing trouble, but with everyone else moving to reusable bags, it seemed a little odd. Perhaps I just wasn’t familiar with the proper ‘I don’t need a bag’ procedure, but given that the self service checkout thing is pretty new around here, I don’t imagine anyone will be.

Anyway, other than that it worked well, and saved me some queuing. Other people around the place don’t seem to have had any trouble with them either.

I’ve no idea if it’s true, but I remember reading once that instead of barcodes, someone once considered making supermarket items radioactive so that they would give off a level or radiation in proportion to their value. In spite of the (nowadays) obvious dangers, presumably you could then somehow detect the value of everything in a trolley in one hit, which would be pretty cool.

A little while back I was digging through a hard disk pulled out of an old computer of which belonged to my family back when I was in high school (if I remember it’s power supply died and wasn’t worth fixing). Somewhere in there, I came across the first proper application I ever wrote - Leela, a very basic neural network designed to learn to recognise hand written letters.

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Does it bug anyone else when cover versions have different lyrics to the original?

I’ve been listening to the ‘She Will Have Her Way: The Songs of Tim & Neil Finn’ album which came out a little while back. Basically, it’s a bunch of Australian female singers doing cover versions of Tim and Neil Finn songs. On the whole, very nice stuff. The one which is bugging me, however, is ‘Persuasion’ which is sung here by Stellar (quite a nice voice, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard of her before).

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I just finished watching the awesome Evening at Adler video (I wish these sorts of things weren’t always on the opposite side of the world). Somewhere in the middle there is a discussion of digital rights management and one of the guys (I think it was the shape shifter guy) says he doesn’t mind weak DRM (i.e. as long as he can circumvent it), and then in further discussion that’s determined to be a slippery slope.

I remember reading quite a while back (though I can’t find where now) a discussion of DRM from a legal perspective as an inflexible implementation of legal principles (which are intended to be flexible). I guess it sort of goes back to what I said previously about “Intention, technology and the law“; much as people like me might like hard and fast rules which can be implemented, neither real life nor copyright law are supposed to work like that.

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