i haven’t been to a McDonald’s in many many years so you could probably guess (correctly) that i don’t have anything particularly nice to say about them. however, i can only laugh when someone finds a chicken head in their wings and gets all grossed out and offended.
in other parts of the world, it is considered good form to serve you your chicken and fish along with the head to prove that it was freshly killed. however, someone should have warned the chinese that if you give a bunch of drunk american college students some chicken and fish heads, modern art is a likely outcome. tuck also has some fascinating footage of the entertainment possibilities inherent in chickenhead soup.
(my apologies for the poor quality of the chicken/fish sculpture. i scanned it in a few years ago when i didn’t really have access to a decent scanner.)
for fun i implemented a dynamic programming algorithm for finding the least energy conformation of an arbitrary RNA strand and added a bit of code for drawing a nice ASCII representation of the complementary pairs that it finds. not tremendously useful but fun to play with. i would do a terrible job of explaining what a “least energy conformation of an RNA strand” is or why anyone would care about such things so i won’t. if you don’t know what “dynamic programming” is, take a gander at the source code and marvel at the counter-intuitiveness.
not only does Cradle of Filth (british black/horror metal band) have a new album “Midian” out which is kicking some serious ass on my little speakers, but Dani Filth, the lead singer is starring in an upcoming horror film called “Cradle of Fear.” he plays a deranged psychopath (how did we ever see that one coming?).
i’m tempted to go out and buy a new hard-drive so i can install BeOS just so i can play around with this guy’s audio software. i’m particularly interested in the one called “american_thighs.” it “buzzes and burps and makes really loud sounds and feeds back and screams and all sorts of other nice things.”
while everyone else in the US was gorging themselves on tryptophan today, i was hunched over my keyboard eating triscuits, listening to Disturbed, and birthing the newest incarnation of /dev/random.
it’s not much to look at yet as i’ve decided to eschew fancy design for the time-being until i get everything working just the way i want it to.
but there are lots of fun new toys. obviously bookmarks and sketches are now integrated in what i hope is a nicer way than before. unfortunately i have to repost the sketches by hand so it may take me a few days before i get them all up in the new section.
bookmarks should be fun. i’m hoping that if the other seeders all post their bookmarks up on here, we’ll have sort of a nice little micro search engine of our own consisting entirely of links that were hand-selected to be useful and interesting.
there is a little search box now too. it works. it doesn’t do anything fancy and it’s one of the areas that i’m working on improving.
and perhaps you noticed the “random post” above by “markov” and you’re wondering what the hell the deal is with that? markov is the statistical hive mind of the seeders. specifically, markov is a second-order markov chain algorithm as applied to the total text of all the posts in the database. a first order markov chain would store a matrix of the transition probabilities for all the words in the text that we are looking at. then, a random word from the text would be selected, it looks up the possible transitions for that word (eg, if we randomly selected the word “the”, the matrix might show that statistically the word “the” is followed by “cat” 20% of the time and “dog” 80% of the time so we pick one of those probabalistically). then, that word is looked up, a new word is picked based on the transition matrix and the process continues. our markov chain is 2nd order though. that means that instead of looking at a matrix of the transitions from one word to another it looks at a sequence of two words transitioning to another (eg, instead of “the” transitioning to “dog” or “cat” we have “the dog” transitioning to “runs” or “barks”. then we randomly pick “runs” and we repeat the process with “dog runs”, etc). the net result of all this is that you can generate cool random texts that tend to almost make some sense and can be quite amusing. markov is still pretty stupid and can’t do basic things like starting and finishing sentences when you would expect, but i’m working on that.
so enjoy the new toys and let me know if you find any bugs (i wouldn’t be surprised) or can think of anything that would make it even nicer. i’ll be posting the new source code once i have a chance to pretty it up a bit.
and, once things are settled down a bit, i’ll be putting together a shiny new design.
a while ago, a friend who works for the IT department of a big firm said, while describing a coworker, something to the effect of “what do you do when you’re 20-something and making a little more money than you actually know what to do with? you collect the toys that your parents wouldn’t buy you when you were a kid and you cover your desk or cubicle with them.”
i have one of those coworkers. actually i have several of them. one day (when i reach the “making more money than i know what to do with” stage), i will probably become one of them.
anyway, today i get the following email from said coworker: Subject: Zoids
Some people have asked me about the wierd things on my desk…
“Zoids” are available from an importer based in Berkeley, called ActionAce. I’ve ordered from them several times now and never had a problem. These toys used to be available in the US market in the ’80s, but the ones for sale now are Japanese. However, the instructions are picture-based and all you’ll be missing are some safety warnings (do not eat batteries).
Generally the ones under $12 are wind-up, and above that are battery-powered. You twist or cut the plastic pieces off of sprues, then fit them together. None require glue, they all use small rubber caps which hold the pieces together.
My recommendation is to start with one of the $5-$7 types, such as the Scorpion or the Dinosaur:
i’m hacking together a new version of /dev/random with all kinds of neat tricks and features right now. get in any suggestions now while it’s still early enough for me to add them. already it will have: bookmarks integrated, sketches seperated into their own section and posts will appear on the page in order of the time of the most recent comment attached to that one and by order of the time the post was posted. that means that it will be easier for people to see if a comment has been posted since their last visit since it will move that post up to the top. it will also make it so comments on posts that have moved off the front page won’t get lost in the archive, never to be read. it would also mean that any topic that is particularly interesting to people will stay up for longer as long as people are interested in the discussion attached to it. search capabilities will also make an appearance.
