Just months after launching its CreateSpace site for people who want to be published, Amazon has asked readers to download and rate the semi-finalists in their author competition. Check out the sci-fi/fantasy selections and help them pick someone good! Although all of this reeks of the beginning of a good Bulgakov novel/play, I can't help but read all of these entries!

So, as you may have heard, the Alpha for Wikia Search has been launched and it is interesting. The UI is clean and looks very mellow in bluish cloudy ways.

Oddly though they had nothing when I searched for 'slashdot' so instead I tried searching for 'bears' to get a result.

The most interesting aspect is the 'miniarticles' that I had the option to start at the beginning of the search results. The purpose of these are mentioned briefly as "Short definitions, Disambiguations, Photos, See also."

I wonder what will start to pop up there and/or why they didn't take shortened versions of wikipedia to seed that. Well, to be fair this is an Alpha and they have a disclaimer:

A Hawaiian surfer has published a paper with the title An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything[PDF Warning!] that is now up for review. As a result, he has stunned physicists who seem to be mixed about his paper. Interestingly enough, he feels that E8 is at the heart of the universe and how physics works in reality.

I just read a story on a study that concluded that the risks for asthma among children were about 2.3% for farm children compared to 5.3% for other rural and 5.7% for urban children. The research is currently up for review in the journal of Respirology but the abstract can be found here. I've been ridiculed for my anecdotal analysis of this kind of rationale so I found this research particularly interesting.

Favorite Banned Book?

• Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
• Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
• Ulysses - James Joyce
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
• The Lorax - Theodor Seuss Geisel
• Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Rights of Man - Thomas Paine
• Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Personally, I'm going with Ulysses because it's my favorite book of all time.

Alright, after reading an outbreak of people arguing over the Kessel Run comment that Han Solo makes in Star Wars: A New Hope & after seeing Family Guy parody it, I'm going to have to speak up and make a statement. In my youth, I read many a Star Wars book from the expanded universe. The word 'kessel' is German for cauldron or kettle and a 'kessel run' was actually used to refer to German Luftwaffe pilots trying to bring aid via air to stranded German troops in the Battle of Stalingrad (Operation Uranus). It was met with disaster.

In the Star Wars universe, the Kessel Run refers to series of dangerous areas a smuggler or wanted person would take to escape pursuit which included the Maw black hole cluster. The shorter you made the distance, the closer you came to the black hole and oblivion. A sign possibly only of impressive stupidity or cases of extreme need when the Imperial forces are after you.

So effectively, either George Lucas had this planned out or authors helped him cover his ass after the mistake. It's hard to say but in the novelization of "A New Hope," Han uses 'standard time units' instead implying guilt on George Lucas' part.

Most underrated & unappreciated scientist (of any field--mathematician, physicist, physician, engineer, etc.)?

• Nikola Tesla
• Alan Turing
• Yi Xing
• Robert Hooke
• Max Planck
• Sushruta
• Carl Friedrich Gauss
• Song Yingxing
• Ctesibius
• Gan De
• Richard P. Feynman
• Su Song
• James Clerk Maxwell
• George Gamow
• Shen Kuo
• Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
• Gottfried Leibniz
• Zhang Heng
• Scientologist CowboyNeal Hubbard

While I know that some of these people have things named after them (Gauss, Tesla, Planck), they still may be conceived to be under appreciated. I imagine you would measure how under appreciated they are based on how much their work influenced our lives today without anyone knowing what they did. Anyone have any other favorites?

The edge of scientific endeavors is often paved and extrapolated by science fiction. And researchers work ever diligently to bring Star Trek-like teleportation to be a reality. Slashdot has covered teleportation by way of quantum mechanics but one of the unfortunate prerequisites for such a scheme to work is that both sides share quantum entanglement which is not only difficult/impossible to achieve over long distances but also suffers the issues associated with degradation of the entanglement (must occur very quickly). To alleviate these problems, a team has recently theorized and proven on a small scale that it is indeed possible to 'beam' macroscopic matter between two Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) without the problems associated with quantum entanglement. Interestingly enough, this method does not violate the No Teleportation Theorem since the atoms transported are first encoded through the BECs which are matter frozen to within 100 billionth of a degree of absolute zero causing there to be no measurement step. The paper is available on arxiv.

I just saw "Live Free or Die Hard" and I'm a bit disappointed.

Like a lot of action packed movies today that feel the need to remain current, the plot of this movie hinged heavily on--you guessed it--hacking and network security. The problem I face is that the "security issues" we face today are obvious to me and so I don't find this plot innovative. Furthermore, it is quite difficult to swallow a lot of the feats in the movie done to surpass network and computer security.

So, this challenges my ability to suspend disbelief and, consequently, enjoy the movie. I have no problem with the old John McClane coming in guns blazing and killing many people (when he's obviously outnumbered) because he's, well, John McClane. It's scientifically proven that

But once this exact same type of 'magic' enters a realm I understand, it's no good. I find myself incredulous that someone could hack the DoD so quickly or that there are these gurus just laying about able to do anything but doing nothing with their lives. I need to know how they got past so many levels of network security.

It's a difficult thing for me to swallow and it really destroyed the movie for me since the plot was so heavily dependent on it. To make matters worse, video feeds are thrown around like desktop sharing applications between users (who conveniently run the same kind of operating system) and, again without the ability to do this, the plot falls apart.

Another huge plot point is helicopters and jets (that's right, an F-35) are seen in this movie to be maneuvering around urban areas between buildings at break neck speeds with no problem. I'm pretty sure there's only a few pilots in the world that would attempt that and survive and they're all on the crack.

So where does this leave me? Pretty much unimpressed and sorry I departed with $7.50.

Aside from the cosmetic problems that come with your action movie (bad guys' guns set to 'miss', cliche catch phrases, questionable physics, etc.) there are two important concepts I would like to point out that this movie adheres to.

The first is simple: all the bad guys have accents or can speak in foreign languages. What's so bad about that in this one? Well, the people aren't even supposed to be foreign (to my knowledge). Instead, the writer/director relies on evil sounding languages (not unlike the first three movies) which due to some war or conflict, we can instantly hate. The bad guys turn into faceless corpses with a language barrier separating us so we can instantly hate. Has thousands of years of living together on earth really lead to this?

WARNING! <SPOILER ALERT> WARNING!

The reason I'm putting this out on Slashdot is because the bad guy in the movie has a half hearted attempt at calling himself a 'good guy' as he explains that he was merely pointing out the problems with our nation's computer security and exploiting them. He cites the money he is taking as "payment for work" and since he used to work for the government and warned them about it, he's just preventing the nation from being hit by a much worse attack. This idea that people out there should expose security problems as soon as possible with little or no repercussions is not foreign to Slashdot. While the evil villain poses several qualities that truly does make him evil, it's interesting that the rest of society would see him as being evil just exploiting the lacking defenses of so many government agencies.

How would you think the populace would digest this? Are we so inclined as a culture to accuse any attacks no matter how soft or how hard to be bad? There are entire penetration testing companies out there that make profits on such a basis and now a major motion picture has a rogue jaded programmer exploiting flaws in our system as a purely evil person. Why is it that society sees hackers in such a negative light? Are people who identify and bring to light security problems forever condemned to be 'evil' in the eyes of our culture? Are we setting ourselves up for a complete attack on all electronic fronts one day?

WARNING! </SPOILER ALERT> WARNING!

Overall, this is, in my opinion, the worst Die Hard film which is really too bad since I so dearly enjoyed the first and third ones.

At the risk of referring you to SomethingAwful, there is an article that drew my interest in that it points out a problem with Wikipedia. Although the beloved open encyclopedia has overcome many problems of graffiti and defamation, there are subtler problems with it--like the fact that the entry on Modern Warfare pales in comparison to the entry on Lightsaber Combat. But it doesn't end there, the article offers up quite a few examples of what seem to be obvious inconsistencies between two articles where the former should ideally be more thoroughly explored than the latter. Most of this is for your enjoyment, however, as this topic is often merely a matter of perspective.

There was a brief note in the Journal of Nature that some colleges in the United States instructed their teachers and students not to fill out U.S. News & World Report surveys designed to rank higher education learning institutions.

This boycott last month has revealed to the community just how ridiculously backward the ranking process is and the article points out a couple other ranking systems. The most interesting part of this is an abbreviated table showing the rankings of a few influential worldwide universities in comparison to these reports. While this questioning might not usurp Cambridge or Oxford, it means quite a bit more to the other universities.

I myself earned my undergrad degree at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. While I may be one of thousands of graduates from 2004, it has become increasingly evident when I converse with colleagues that the standards I was held against are, on average, higher than many other schools. However, it is 67th on the rankings from U.S. News & World Report.

So this raises an interesting question--when one is selecting a college, how do you compare them to others on a purely academic level? Surely the number of papers published could be biased by the strength of only graduate students or the sheer population of a campus? What, then, would be a nice normalized statistic one could view without relying on a third party questionable questionnaire?

Both Microsoft & Google have started services to search books. But Google has faced litigation and even some publishers thanking Google for exposure. Recently, to avoid the problems Google faced, Microsoft has asked a select few publishers to allow users to see their books and a number have agreed: Cambridge University Press, McGraw-Hill Companies, Rodale and Simon and Schuster. Try searching on something like 'computer vision' [warning, browser intensive], you'll need to sign into Live but it will tell you a percentage of how much of the book you can view. The top result is 35% viewable while they all seem to fall within the 10%-50% viewable range. This means that you can select pages (and they have them coded for relevance of search) and view that percentage of pages. I pulled up "Machine Vision for Advanced Production" and was able to view 69 pages (of my choice) before I couldn't view anymore. Very interesting and quite useful, I must admit.

Interesting that these publishers would come around. I am personally of the opinion that if publishers would put their works online, they would not only see more sales but also build names & reputations for themselves. It's odd because I know the professors & authors aren't making much on technical books or theoretical books, it has to be the publishers. So strange that the only business model they know is to sell their product at an extremely high price to very few people. Hopefully we are approaching a future where publishers are willing to work together with search companies to make their books more accessible rather than being dejected & sued (Viacom/RIAA methods).

In response to Fox's subpoenas against YouTube users, Jorge Romero has been charged with a felony for obtaining episodes of the television series "24" and uploading them to LiveDigital.com more than a week before their debut date. Romero faces up to three years in prison. It makes sense that the time at which these episodes are uploaded directly affect Fox's viewership, however, to the defendant uploading them it could mean the difference between a cease and desist letter and a felony in LA.

I don't often find an album that I think I will listen to for the rest of my life.

But the other day, I picked up the album Friend & Foe by the band Menomena (for those of you indie rockers out there, try "air aid" or "boyscout'n" off of Barsuk's site). After I read the wikipedia entry on the band, I noticed a peculiar excerpt, something I previously didn't know about the band:

Digital Looping Recorder

The band uses a computer program called the Digital Looping Recorder, or Deeler for short, in the song writing process - it was programmed by band member Brent Knopf. Drummer Danny Seim explains the process, "First, we set the tempo of the click, which is played through a pair of headphones. We then take turns passing a single mic around the room. One of us will hold the mic in front of an instrument, while another one of us will lay down a short improvised riff over the click track. We usually start with the drums. Once the drums begin looping, we throw on some bass, piano, guitar, bells, sax, or whatever other sort of noisemaker happens to be in the room. Deeler keeps the process democratic, which is the only way we can operate"

Intrigued by this marriage of a computer geek and a band, I read further and found this article detailing the process by which this band records music. They essentially gather all their instruments of noise in a room and lay down a rough drum track. Then they pass around control of that looping scratch track to each other. The whole time, the digital looping recorder (or 'deeler') is running and recording on a computer. They use a democratic process to decide what stays in the loop and they continue to add or remove tracks as they see fit.

When they're done, they have a long song of looped repeating stuff which they then cut out, piece together & rerecord for the sake of quality.

I found this to be a very interesting process and I wonder that if there weren't more cheap set ups like this where young people could acquire cheap equipment and spend hours democratically making music ... could this be a more effective way of harnessing juices? Of all the times I've played bass, I remember playing something good but for the vast majority of those songs, I've long forgotten what it was I've played.

It's obvious that computers & technology has influenced music far beyond what we could have imagined. But this unique procedure of recording and editing one's entire practice is both intriguing and impressive. I don't imply that this will ensure better music but of all practicing habits and writing habits I've heard of, this one by far appears to facilitate the process of people expressing their emotions and ideas through music and lyrics.

A while back, I cancelled my Star Wars Galaxies account. Yes, I know that many of you reading this can identify with me. Someone somewhere destroyed that game (point the finger however you would like).

I'd be lying if I said that I didn't feel some form of remorse. But it wasn't only the remorse of losing my friends in the game and the daily grinding with my character--there's a little bit of affection I had towards the game that resulted in such fun times I had.

My father grew up with a single shot bolt action .22 caliber center fire rifle. I don't expect computer programmers to know what that is so I'll just describe as a tiny little rifle capable of shooting up pop cans and small game (don't worry, no one in my family is a member of the NRA). As a kid, he would use that rifle to target shoot and kill rats/gophers with his friends.

When I turned 13 or 14, I got my orange card and with that, my father's rifle. This wasn't a Winchester or Browning or even Remington rifle, it didn't even have a serial number on it. The fact of the matter is that the rifle was fired so much that the action eventually broke and my parents refused to spend the money to repair it. It's somewhere in my parent's house now (I don't have a need for a rifle now that I live in large metropolis--although you might be able to argue otherwise). I was sad that a tool and recreation device passed on to me is now gone.

What am I going to pass on to my children? I have no childhood toys that aren't rusted and broken in a machine shed. But I do have accounts to games like Warcraft III, SWG, WoW etc. that I have put many hours into. Further more; there are websites like HSX, MySpace, Flickr and even Slashdot where I have accounts with a lot of information about me. On top of that, what of my three or four free/academic e-mail accounts that I heavily use? Will I go through and delete selected e-mails or will I leave the access information to my family uncensored when I die?

Aren't these e-mails like correspondences of dead relatives except they won't be lost in a fire or flood? Wouldn't a Flickr account be like a photo album that you didn't have to fight siblings for? Isn't my WoW account much like the rifle that my dad passed on to me when I was a kid?

My dad and his siblings did leave me a pong paddle game. I understand that the future holds games far beyond the qualities of those above. But aren't they cherished classics? I spent hours upon hours playing pong with my friends after I inherited the pong console that my dad used. Call me easily entertained but those were some fun times. The pong game eventually broke and I think we went through three or four RF adapters (those things really are poorly made) as we played it into the ground.

We live in the information age.

Let that sink in. The games we play, the electronic trails we leave ... those things will most certainly persist--considering the redundant array of indexed disks that servers use, possibly indefinitely. Will you pass them on to your children? Will it be easier for your life's work to be cumulatively added to a family digital history book? Will my great great great grandson one day have access to the plain old java objects that at a young age set me on my life long profession? Will his eyes one day read this journal entry?

Do you have a digital will and binary testament with all your access information to personal accounts for your love ones to cherish after you pass? Could there be anything greater that would help your memory persist?

*my father aims his rifle and places a tiny hole inside the 'o' on a Coca-Cola can 30 yards away and imagines the future as I do the same*

... 25 years later ...

*I slap devouring plague on an alliance rogue, psychic scream him with my level 60 priest then sit back and watch him flail around a bit before dying ... and I imagine the future as my son does the same*