Google has just changed their interface. They now point to a “more” section with more services. Google Labs is one of the new services which has a number of interesting experimental projects including one that allows you to volunteer processing for academic use – like the SETI screen saver, but a generic service. Now they should try a Beacon-like volunteer archiving project. See my note Freenet and Beacon.
Vivisimo Clustering Engine
Vivisimo Clustering – automatic categorization and meta-search software is a meta search engine with a great outliner like interface that lets you move through lots of hits. They gather hits from other engines and cluster them into a hierarchy that can be browsed. The idea is obvious once you try it for searches where you want to manage lots of hits. Thanks to Matt for this.
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artdaily.com and thebestdesigns.com – Digital Art
Artdaily.com – The First Art Newspaper on the Net has an extensive list of digital art on the web. Many of the projects are Flash toys.
Another site with links to good designs is The Best Designs.
Visualization of Russian Novels
Your Literary Masterpiece Was Delicious is post in a blog called Idle Words which discusses a cool visualization to SVG that Maciej Ceglowski put together. Another graph of words and characters done in perl and other packages.
A history of computers
A History of Computers is a site that takes a broad view of the history of computers. It includes a page on Ramon Lull and his significance, for example. There aren’t as many entries for modern computing advances, but a good spread over time.
Update: Thanks to Jacinda, I was alerted to the fact that the link above is not longer working. You can still see the site using the Wayback Machine.
How Blogs Work
StreamLine :: How Blogs Work in 7 Easy Pieces has a nice diagram that explains blogs and pings. This is coutesy of Seb’s Open Research (Note: blog now disappeared). What is missing is how the blogspammers find you and spam your comments.
Letterpress in Hamilton
Reading MGK’s blog got me wondering if there is a letterpress printer here in Hamilton. Here is the closest I can find West Meadow Press. I wonder if they run courses.
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Fiona Kinsella – Artichoke Design
Fiona Kinsella has a clean black web site with her portfolio and cv. Click on the portfolio button. Very nice use of space.
I should add that she recently designed the web site for the transit gallery on Locke St. here in Hamilton. Check it out (both the site and the gallery.) – thanks to Fiona for sending me a note on this.
Kurzweil and Spiritual Machines
KurzweilAI.net is a site on Ray Kurzweil and AI. Like Hans Moravec, Kurzweil (of OCR fame) believes that machines as smart or smarter are inevitable.
Robot by Moravec
Just finished Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendental Mind. The book starts with a short history of robots and AI. There is a chapter on the computing and the mind where he predicts that we need something like 100 million MIPs (and a comparable amount of memory) to match the human mind’s processing. He answers critics to the effect that AI was oversold by arguing that AI has been stagnant partly because they were not using fasther computers. He then extrapolates from advances in robotics to science fiction claims about transcendental minds. I have to admit I started skimming when he went off the deep end – he may know his science but he isn’t that good on the sci fi. The chapter reviewing Turing’s responses to claims that artificial minds would not be possible is a good review of the arguments, but the rest of the book is a poor version of Kurzweil’s Age of the Spiritual Machine. Read on for quotes…
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