Page 1 of Google Search Results (YAY!)

Yay - I've made page 1 of Google's search results page - twice! How cool is that. I'm number 8 and 10... see image below (not edited, just cropped):

Finally after all these years, I've made it. Aaaaaaah. Now if only I can be number 1 (like my wife). Sigh.

Why I trim my goatee

http://dilbert.com/fast/2009-11-28/

Ahh! Scott Adams, you've done it again. This is why I trim my goatee... so that I can move freely throughout this wonderful democracy where you don't have to feel threatened if you have facial hair... or something.

One way that Open Source will defeat the ogres of Closed software!

I was doing my daily digesting of comics (you really should try it, a bit of laughter is good for the soul... or is it chicken soup?), and laughed at this comic at dilbert.com:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-09-01/

This reminds me of the fight over XML document standards... OO.o V MS anyone? I'm not 100% sure which one is which at the moment though. Hmmm.

I'm also just a tad freaked out that the guy doing the Kung Fu looks a little like me, and his Kung Fu is at about my level. Sheer coincidence? Quite possibly, but can we be sure? Hmmm.

Human fail of the Turing Test

Perfect proof that the Turing test doesn't really test machine intelligence... it simply tests the ability to hold a decent conversation. This means that some humans will fail. Epically.

I'm not usually one to hold Dilbert (http://www.dilbert.com) up as a noteworthy soothsayer of Artificial Intelligence, however, Scott Adams summed up my bemusement (there are plenty of other less savoury words which could be used instead... but I won't use them here - it'll hurt the Nets) at what some people will say.

(http://dilbert.com/fast/2009-03-16/)

Chickens.

More User Interface Issues... when affordance goes wrong...

One of my fellow teachers reminded me of this pearler of a video... tracked it down on youtube...

Interesting take on help desk support and affordance. Sometimes, while your user isn't you, they're just plain stupid.

Medieval Help Desk:

The Turing Test - Whaaaat???

For all you AI peeps out there.

Taken from: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/turing_test.png

Sometimes I wonder...

Rescuing big ships - really big ships

This month in Wired there's an article, High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace [link], describing the heroic efforts to salvage a very big ship. It's excellent reading and I was captivated. One member of the team died, but there could have been more. Reading the description of their entry into the cargo hold brought images of entering a tomb into my mind.

Take a read. It's worth it.