There is a blog on the discussion at the Text Analysis Developers Alliance blog. This is being updated by participants.
Text Analysis Summit
For today and the next two days I am at the Text Analysis Summit that I blogged earlier.
I am typing my notes into a wiki page on a new wiki about text analysis; see wikiTA.
Unready.org
Thanks to Vika of words’ end for pointing me to unready.org. She pointed out that Ready.gov has been around for a while. (See my earlier post, The new cold-war: Ready.Gov.) I still wonder why they would be advertising so widely and in the Guardian of all places.
Blogshares: Blog Stocks
BlogShares – Fantasy Blog Share Market is a site where blogs are treated like stock. Players get a fictional $500 and can invest it in blogshares. I’m not sure how they calculate the value of the stock (something about incoming links), but my blog’s stock seems to have gone down recently. Please link generously 🙂
Victor Pelevin: Omon Ra
“I wonder if anyone who sees a photograph of the moon-walker in the newspapers will imagine that inside this steel saucepan, which exists for the sole purpose of crawling seventy kilometres across the moon and then halting for eternity, there is a human being gazing out through two glass lenses? But what does it matter?” (p. 69)
Omon Ra by Russian author, Victor Pelevin is a dark science fiction novel about a young Russian who wants to be a cosmonaut and discovers that the Russian space program is a sham and that supposedly automated moon exploration robots actually have young men like him in them (who never come back.) And there’s more. I’m not sure if it is science fiction or surreal anti-science fiction.
I found the full text of a different translation into English at Lib.ru, see Victor Pelevin. Omon Ra. There is a menu which lets you get a text file version.
Continue reading Victor Pelevin: Omon Ra
Creative Science Fiction
So a student at MIT and his friends are slipping invitations into books for future people to come back to our time for a time-travel party. Will anyone show up? How would we know if the person had really come from our future?
See Student organizes time-travel conference, Friday May 6, 2005 – From Associated Press.
Eric Rice: Podcaster, blogger and videoblogger
Eric Rice has emerged as on of the cult podcasters/bloggers.
He has even come to Toronto, see Eric Rice :: Video: Toronto Podcasters Meetup.
Audioblog.com: A commercial blogging/podcasting service
Audioblog.com is a commercial video and audio blogging service that are setting things up to make it easy for us to podcast or vblog. They seem to use Flash recorder utilities to make it easy. In the basic service that you get audio clips of up to an hour and 1 Gig of downloads a month (which they say would be 5000 downloads of 1 minute audio clips.)
How long before someone offers this for free?
Make: A Suitcase PC
A suitcase computer? Neat. See www.chriskaufmann.com/suitcase/.
This from the Make:Blog.
First Cellular Phones
The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was one of the first modern cellular phones. It was a brick, but consumers lined up for them in 1984. See the story at CNN.com – First modern cell phone was a true ‘brick’ – Apr 27, 2005.