NPCT

If Central Ohio is too liberal for you, it might be time to rethink your political leanings: the NRA is moving its 2007 convention after Columbus passed an assault weapons ban. “The party is canceled because last week your city council unanimously voted to revoke the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens in Columbus by banning [...]

CNNSI has put up their NFL Team Previews. I think their assessment of the Eagles is spot-on: For the Eagles, the biggest challenge may be internal. Many players, including Terrell Owens, Corey Simon and Brian Westbrook, were unhappy with their contracts. Coach Andy Reid, who basically stood pat with his roster, is counting on those [...]

I’ve changed hosts from the University of Cambridge Student Run Computing Facility to a private provider. I’ve upgraded my installation of WordPress and am making some layout changes as well.

So, Senator Clinton has gone off and attacked the game industry, spurred on by the revelation of a mini-game within Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The mini-game 1) requires a fair amount of work to find and 2) involves sex. Never mind the rampant violence of the game, Sen. Clinton has chosen this as a [...]

Are you as football-starved as me? CNNSI has a photo gallery – NFC East Players to Watch.

I’m settling down on an interface, here, and have decided that the best thing to do is to make it as much a Lisp-ified version of the standard gnuplot interface as possible. So here’s what I’m thinking now: ; make data series (defparameter series1 (make-series-2d ‘((1 2) (2 3) (3 5) (4 7) (5 11) [...]

This week’s Offtopic Lunch will be Keith Vertanen: “Photon Collection Paradigms: Exposure Control in Photography” In this talk, I will discuss how light is metered and recorded in photography. Fundamental limits of the medium will be described as well as techniques for dealing with these limitations. I will introduce Ansel Adams’ zone system and describe [...]

Ok, I’ve given this gnuplot thing a little more thought, and I’m pretty sure that the interface is going to need a little more complexity in order to wield any sort of power. Since I’d like to be able to eventually use a significant subset of gnuplot’s features, it will need to be extensible. Continuing [...]

Using floating-point math on computers sometimes results in frustrating round-off error. One example is this: [tex]\ln\left(\sum_{I}\exp(-x_{i})\right)[/tex] My supervisor showed me a trick to approximate it without experiencing as much round-off. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. Since you have this identity: [tex]\ln\left(\sum_{I}\exp(-x_{i})\right) = \ln\left(\sum_{I}\exp(-x_{i} + \alpha)\right) + \alpha[/tex] A good approximation [...]

In my continuing saga to find the ideal solution for performing machine learning research, I have decided that Common Lisp is probably the way to go. It has the interactive-development approach of MATLAB, integrates extremely well with Emacs, runs with comparable performance to compiled C code, is elegant and powerful, has extremely easy storage of [...]

Some folks in Helsinki has put up a nice tutorial on Independent Components Analysis. It is available in postscript, PDF or as HTML.

The 2005 NFL Schedule is up, I just noticed. (It’s probably been available for a while.) The first game is Oakland at New England at 9:00pm Eastern on Thursday 8 September.

From someone unknown, via Brenda: The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year’s winners: 1. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was [...]

Slate already has an article about the terrorist attacks in London today. I like his assessment of Britons: The natural state of the English is a kind of gloomy diligence, which is why they do so well in hard times. In 1940, Londoners went dutifully on with their business while the Luftwaffe bombed the hell [...]

I don’t think I need to say much about this:

New Scientist has a report on a new article to come out in Technological Forecasting and Social Change that, while it seems to be focused primarily on the United States, takes a contrarian stance on the rate of change of innovation. The crux of his argument is that innovation, as defined quantitatively by number of [...]

It looks like the traitor is… Karl Rove.