Ben Slade

An article in Time magazine talks about a new wave of video games requiring body movement to play the game.

Examples of this are the Nintendo Wii, Dance Dance Revolution, and video games bikes:

Image from the above mentioned Time magazine article

One more idea which I haven't seen yet is bicycle generator powered TV's. You've gotta pedal to watch. It would bring a whole new dimension to power hungry high definition TV's.

My beautiful daughter was born this past summer:

I'm not going to bore people by posting all details of her development here, but something like this does change your sense of priorities. I look forward to raising a beautiful person.

More pictures are available online. Email me for access.

This is an example of real interactiveness on the internet, where the interaction is designed to scale with a large number of people participating.

"Hastert and DeLay's insight," wrote Schmitt, "seems to be that a bill that gets 218 votes in the House is just as much the law as one that gets 430. And for every vote they add on to the necessary minimum majority, they might have to compromise in some unnecessary way, whether with Democrats or their own fiscal conservatives. In other words, they see every vote over a bare majority as the equivalent of leaving money on the table or overbidding in an auction."

The timing is amazing. Cheney got the power to classify documents just a week before the first hearings of the 9/11 commission (which subpeonaed a half million documents).

And less then four months later, Cheney selectively declassified documents to punish vocal critic Joe Wilson.

From the NYTimes article:

Even now, few have made the connection between this month's Cheney flap and the larger scandal. That larger scandal is to be found in what the vice president did legally under the executive order early on rather than in his more recent rejection of its oversight rules.

But it's still not enough of a smoking gun to get impeachment going.

..participating in the patent system is not optional. Independent invention is not a defense to patent infringement, and large software companies now hold so many patents that it is almost impossible to create useful software without infringing some of them. Therefore, the only means of self-defense is to stockpile patents to use as bargaining chips in litigation. Vonage didn’t do that, and it’s now paying a very high price.

From The Chattanoogan:

President Bush, without so much as issuing a press statement, on May 9 signed a directive that granted near dictatorial powers to the office of the president in the event of a national emergency declared by the president.

The "National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive," with the dual designation of NSPD-51, as a National Security Presidential Directive, and HSPD-20, as a Homeland Security Presidential Directive, establishes under the office of president a new National Continuity Coordinator.

From TomPaine.com:

Private equity funds are taking aim at America ’s public infrastructure. The next two years, Business Week predicts, could see “$100 billion worth of public property” turn private. Private firms can skimp on maintenance—or attack worker wages. Higher tolls, cheaper workforces. Do the math. Wall Street analysts certainly have.

This paper surveys some of the literature analyzing the ways in which CMC (Computer Mediated Communication) has been applied to online collaboration and consensus building, as well as notes some of the limiting factors uncovered to date.

Probably, most of the algorithms/systems discussed in this paper are more oriented towards intense participation type events. They need to be tuned more for casual interlopers visiting a website

"Memory of what a dog looks like is not stored in one location. Low-level visual details such as fur, ears, and eyes are stored in low-level nodes, and high-level structure, such as head or torso, are stored in higher-level nodes.

the low-level nodes learn first. Representations in high-level nodes then share what was previously learned in low-level nodes.

each node in the hierarchy learns common, sequential patterns, analogous to learning a melody. When a new sequence comes along, the [lower level] node matches the input to previously learned patterns, analogous to recognizing a melody. Then the [lower level] node outputs a constant pattern representing the best matched sequences, analogous to naming a melody. Given that the output of nodes at one [lower] level becomes input to nodes at the next [higher] level, the hierarchy learns sequences of sequences of sequences."

A graphic (PDF) from the article demonstrates the point:

What the article sort of talks about is the intrinsic role of time based feedback loops as part of how a node recognizes a pattern. I'm guessing that rather than process a wide bit pattern directly, "nodes" process the wide bit pattern in chunks remembering the node's state based on the previous sequence of chunks and determining the new state based on the previous state and the current new chunk (and maybe neighboring/parent node states)