The current situation in academia is silly. People write papers, which may be of variable quality. In order to weed out bad ones, and, more importantly, fix ones that have problems, they are reviewed by anonymous other people in the same field, who point out problems and suggest changes. Then they are published in journals, which are read by people in the field. After this, the journals end up with the publication rights. This made sense when only journals could easily publish things, so neither the author nor the peers would have much use for the publication rights anyway. But now it is easy to publish things yourself, so the main work the journals do that the authors cannot do easily is arranging the peers.

I would like to set up a P2P system for this task. An author would submit a paper to the system, which would randomly chose reviewers, who would then get the paper and a psuedonym for giving responses. Reviewers, either anonymous or not, could sign statements about the paper which include system-wide reasons the paper is worthwhile (e.g., "This paper is correct", "This paper is inspirational", "This paper should be considered"). Once the anonymous review period had ended (either the deadline passes or all of the reviews have been submitted for a final version), the paper is published if it meets the publication criteria; it has attached the system-defined signed statements which demonstrate it as worthy of publication, and thus appear on people's lists of new papers. People could also add statements saying what they think of the paper, so that other people could essentially search for the papers a given author likes.

It would be easy to have a web-of-trust mechanism for the creation of accounts which can publish papers, can be chosen as reviewers, and can make statements in their own name. The anonymizing protocol doesn't have to be particularly robust, since the authors tend to not want to know who the reviewers are, and could probably figure it out by analyzing the style if they wanted to. The protocol would presumably avoid giving a paper to its own author, or someone from the same organization.

It seems like it would be possible to do all this with a relatively simple web+P2P app. I may sit down and write something of the sort at some point.

Foreign body removed from domestic cat.

It's really impressive how cute a cat is doing nothing in particular after you've been worried about him for a while. Compared to throwing up or hiding, sitting on a futon and washing is so cute.

I'm having some sort of odd dream. There's some music playing, and the sound of breaking glass. I realize it's a dream, and try to wake up. Then I'm having a different odd dream. My roommate is standing over me, and I'm sitting in what seems to be a dishwasher. After continuing to try to wake up for a bit, I realize that it's not a dream any more. I am, in fact, sitting in the dishwasher, and my roommate is now removing a two-foot piece of glass (with only a tiny bit of blood on the very end) from my shoulder.

Turns out that the music was, in fact, playing on the TV, and the breaking glass was real, wasn't dishes (which I thought at first), but was the window by the sink, which I broke with the back of my head. Walking away from the sink, I'd passed out and fallen backwards into the dishwasher, which was fortunately nearly empty and can evidentally support my weight.

I then drank a glass of sugar-water, ate my stew (which had finished microwaving by that point and was getting cold), started to get cold when I had removed my overshirt (since it might have broken glass on it) and was sitting next to the broken window, moved to the other room (without much difficulty), ate a bunch of gummy bears, and drank a mug of hot tea and a bottle of iced tea. By this point, I was feeling pretty much fine, and managed to go out that evening without any ill effects. The only damage seems to be a small puncture wound on my shoulder and the broken window.

My house had a party on Saturday. That morning I got up late, had a big breakfast, and then started to clean up to get ready. By the time I was done, it was time for the party (I got distracted for a while). So I didn't get a second meal, although I ate a bunch of snack and dessert food during the party.

Sunday morning, I slept late, ate another reasonably-sized breakfast, and then hung around the house, but didn't have lunch, since it was getting close to time for dinner. As I was getting ready to make dinner, my roommate cut his finger on a can. Blood doesn't bother me, but wounds make me a little light-headed, and I was also really low on food by this point. So I'm feeling dizzy, and I go and sit on the couch. But that isn't going to get me any food, so I get up after a bit when I'm not feeling quite as bad, and I put a can of stew in the microwave, and then I go and wash out the can for recycling.

I've been messing with povray, just looking at the examples (so far), and I've noticed that the samples don't include any spaces; just objects.

I think it lacks the right camera for spaces. I've been thinking about the vision AI problem, and have realized a few things that I haven't noticed in the books I've seen (admittedly, I haven't really read that much of many books, but...): you have two eyes. They angle outward, so they can see different things, as well as being in slightly different places. You move your eyes around without thinking about it, so you see in a bunch of directions at almost the same time. You also move your head nearly without thinking about it, and your neck is not pivoting around the focal point of either of your eyes, which means that you see things from a number of slightly different positions.

All together, this explains why a picture of a place is barely recognizableand is hard to work out much 3-d information about, in part why the vision problem is totally impossible as generally assumed, why it's really hard to avoid getting totally confused in FPSes, and why plays don't videotape well.

So I've been trying to figure out how you could make a picture that was locally consistent (preserves angles at every point), and contains the information you ought to get out of looking around in a room.

It would be really nice if, when slashdot was having trouble and went to serving only a static version of the front page, it was marked as such, so that you could tell if it was worth trying to log in.

There ought to be a way to moderate individual comments without having any effect on the poster's karma. Certain comments are useful to see, but don't have anything to do with whether the poster is generally any good (e.g., summaries of linked but /.ed pages). People complain because the poster isn't actually doing anything to earn the karma, but the post is actually worth being highly rated, so people will see it.

As a nitpick, the karma limit of 50 is annoyingly implemented; I've hit it, and then when I post something that people find pretty interesting, it gets modded up to 5, which doesn't change my karma, and then modded down as "overrated", which drops my karma. I agree that these posts are mediocre, but it seems silly to lower my karma just because other people modded me up too much. And I did still post something that got increased by 2 overall. It's probably a pain in the butt to implement correctly, though, and only costs a single (basically irrelevent) point until I get modded up again.

Turns out that there are at least two solutions. For one of them, all segments spend some time off; for the other, one of them stays on for its full lifetime consecutively.

Haven't worked out whether any further answers are possible.

Recently, when I couldn't get to sleep, I came up with the following puzzle.

You have a normal digital 12-hour clock. Each of the segments will last an equal amount of time, and then burn out. You start it at a certain time (it somehow determines the correct time without any wear to the segments). A single segment burns out first, and a single segment burns out last. Which segments are they? What can you say about the time the clock started and the time the segements last? Note: the colon is just painted on, and doesn't burn out; the bottom segment is on for a '9', but I don't think that matters.

I haven't worked it out completely, but I'm pretty sure that the described situation is possible, there is a unique first and last segment to burn out, and there is a reasonably narrow range of starting times and segment lifetimes. Of course, so far, I've only worked on it late at night, and without paper, so I could have entirely missed something.