I once told someone glibly that I didn’t believe in luck. That triggered a lengthy discussion about being hit by lightning and other instances of unpredictable mishap or serendipity – aren’t all of these luck? I’m closer now to articulating what I meant. I don’t believe in systematic chance. Or to put it another way, some […]
[together with Carolina] Roller skate from Regents Park to Hyde Park Walk along the canal behind London Zoo and try and guess the animals from the backs of their cages Peer into the houseboats along Little Venice and tell stories about the people inside Run a sprint along the Millennium Bridge and feel it vibrate […]
mumblings and misconceptions – half-formed thoughts about AI, cognitive science and philosophy (250K) blatherings and babblings about more or less (80K) and even more The Oxford Consciousness Society webpage (now very defunct) I tried stand-up comedy a couple of times. This was an early version Statement of purpose for application to MIT Media lab Project proposal, smattering of ideasand final paper for Deb Roy‘s Computational Semantics class – […]
We’re building a site that we want people to love using, so we want as much feedback on it as we can get. From the get-go, we’ve had a big red UserVoice ‘Feedback’ button on the lefthand site of every page. But only a tiny proportion of our users ever suggested, voted or commented on […]
Preface: I wrote this to a friend asking me for advice about whether to embark on a science PhD. At the time of writing I still had more than a year to go – so I could see the summit in the distance, but I was feeling grim about the steep icewall I had to […]
I said that I thought “there’s something irresponsible about making money from advertising”. Matt Weber was right to point out that although people hate the idea of targeted ads, they can be genuinely useful. Though I don’t think a very large proportion of the available advertising real estate offers the possibility for really great targeting. […]
Every time a programmer goes away for a few days, a piece of infrastructure they know best breaks. That’s just Murphy’s Algorithm. If they they had only written a 100-word overview with some examples, that would have saved someone else a painstaking day figuring out how things should work, why they suddenly don’t, and righting […]
In a not-so-distant dystopia, you might be placed in a brain scanner to test whether you’re telling the truth. Here’s how to cheat. The polygraph First, you’ll need some background on old-school lie-detection technology. [This is a simplified story – see polygraphs for a richer account.] Polygraphs are seismographs for the nervous system. They measure […]
So often, when I’m searching on Google, I want to give it some context. For instance, I’m looking for pages about Django (the Python-based web framework). They’ll probably mention ‘python’, ‘web’, ‘database’ and ‘programming’. I could feed in this query: Django python web database programming But I’d actually get a very restricted set of results […]
Alarm clocks are temporal. They tell you when some time criterion has been reached. They’re very useful. But often, I really want an alarm with a spatial criterion – a location alarm. Let’s consider some possible uses: Beep shrilly if anyone tries to steal this device from its current location. [I think there are accelerometer-based […]
Greg Detre 