sylloge

I AM SHARING THIS WITH YOU

Sunday, July 28, 2002

Pictures from this year's Illuminares. (Update: And Bill Stilwell has some good pics, as linked in the comments below. We got there late and it made me sorry I missed the dancing with fire action. And — oops.)
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I looked long and hard for a good FTP client for OS X, and I finally found it. Use Transmit: good enough to pay for.
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Friday, July 26, 2002

Just when I think Gawd, weblogs are lame fluff ...

About this Blog - Questions you might have

Just what is a Blog, Papa?
Blogs are just a short, catchy name for "web logs", online journals-a place to record information that might otherwise be forgotten.
Why did you do this?
I did it because after I am gone, the information will be gone. I think you should know about your family. Particularly all of those who are no longer living. This way you can get to know them even though you didn't have the chance to meet them. The Holmes' family was a proud family and I want you to be proud too.
So this is only about your side of the family?
Yes it is. I can only write about what I know. You should be proud of the other parts of your family as well, but I can't write about them because I don't know them as well as mine. Your Mom can tell you about her family, Nana can tell you about hers, and Mimi can tell you about hers. I encourage you to ask about your heritage. All of these pieces went into making you what you are.
What is all of this other stuff? Stuff that isn't about our family?
Well, Brenden, as I write this I don't know what will eventually follow this paragraph. I suspect that I will try to document things that I think are important for you to know. I will also probably write about things that I will do and the feelings I may have. Your Papa is 56 years old as I start this and you are almost 3 1/2. By the time you are old enough to really understand what I am saying; I might be gone. If I am - please understand that I love you very much and that love is the primary reason for this Blog.

The latest entry begins

Your Great-Grandfather was Papa's father. He died of a heart attack at age 54 when your Papa was 14 years old. He was a very strong and very honest man, well respected by all who knew him. I don't know very much about his childhood, other than that he was raised in Pennsylvania, had a brother named George, and was crippled by polio at a very young age. I also know that his formative years were during the great depression. I wish that I knew more about his childhood; this is one of the reasons I am writing this diary for you. I will tell you all that I know, and what I know begins in 1945 in Oklahoma ...

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Wednesday, July 24, 2002

Three sweet links from Matt Webb (home):

This animated image of the Moon gives a great sense of its size*
Awesome diagram: Relationships of the SI derived units*
The Dasher Project, a zooming text input interface*

(!)
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Kung Fu Chess: real time Chess — no turns. (!) Java game, found on Joystick101, which was found in this blackbeltjones post. I don't have time to play it right now, but I loaded the applet and had a look: pretty cool.
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If you already know about slime molds, please go about your business. If you don't then: about a month ago I was talking to Benneb and the topic of slime molds came up. I thought “a good thing I could do if I started posting on sylloge again would be to alert a few people to the wonder of slime molds”. And so, to make a short story non-existent:

Slime molds are generally gross things which grow on filth, etc. But, the amazing thing about cellular (amebalike) slime molds is that a colony of single cells — each of which is an independent entelechy, er, organism, composite whole, or whatever — can spontaneously and without central direction co-ordinate themselves into a temporary multi-cellular superorganism, help each other find a better place to go about their slime molding and then go back to being autonomous whatevers.

... up to 125,000 individual cells aggregate and flow together, forming a multicellular mass called a pseudoplasmodium that resembles a slug and crawls about before settling in a location with acceptable warmth and brightness. — [source]

and

What [the] three groups [of slime molds] have in common is a life cycle that superficially resembles that of the fungi. When conditions become unfavorable, these slime molds form sporangia — clusters of spores, often on the tips of stalks such as in the sporangium of a Physarum shown at right. Spores from the sporangia are dispersed to new habitats, "germinate" into small amoebae, and the life cycle begins again. — [source]

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Sunday, July 21, 2002

A curious [im]possibility:

Write an algorithm that analyzes and abstracts over the code* for an artibtrary game, resulting in some standardized expression of the possibility space for that game.
Write an algorithm that creates mappings in real time between these standardly-expressed possibility spaces and finds the isomorph of any game state for one game in the possibility space of another.
Use that mapping to “transpose” a move or occurrence from one game into the other.
Use this system as an intermediary for allowing two people to play two different games against one another (i.e., Warcraft v Roller Coaster Tycoon or Civilization v Quake), while expressing the strategy of their play in one space into an entirely different system/structure.
Not everyone has to play a game: Counter-strike v Excel and Word.
No-one has to be (obviously) playing a game: surfing blogs v paying a bill online. Ebay v CNN.

*Just the gameplay logic, leaving out the UI components.
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Friday, July 19, 2002

I am almost certainly* in favour of the IMS / ISC proposal for the .org registry. Time is long past for Verisign to give it up. (For the last three years I've been sporadically trying to get Verisign to let me make changes to sylloge.com but I've never been able to. Verisign really sucks.) Spread the dot.

* I use those qualifiers only because I just haven't had time to read the proposal in its entirety.
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Thursday, July 18, 2002

Here is a .wav file of every phoneme in the U.S. phoneme set used by the CMU Pronunciation of Proper Names site (which I found on 50cups).
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Do you want to know how to barely legally fire your boss because you are making so much hardcore money ($5 to $10,000 per week!) sending emails to 100 million email addresses on disk about mortgage-refinancing, penis-enlarging video of amateur celebrities summoning beasts to rape their families? Because, if you do, rates have never been lower.
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Wednesday, July 17, 2002

I don't care it's illegal! There is something post-funky (in the sense of being even more funky than funky, rather than in the sense of resembling the "faux-intellectual blather of the visual elite" (to use a phrase picked up from a review in the Post recently (it might have been the Globe though)) — think of it as being “beyond the funk” as some things are “beyond the pale”) about the Janurary 24th, 1998 performace of Wiggly's Way by Medeski, Martin & Wood. Or maybe it's groove instead of funk. Howeverthenonetheless, it is something that you should pay special attention to, in particular in between 0:58 - 2:05 (the inital statement of the theme, as it were) and 3:23 - 4:06 (a pleasing variation, if you will). Thanks.

(Actually, there's nothing illegal about it.)
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Wedding!
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