The Great All-Knowing Google is upon us

Almost. This nifty paper, Automatic Meaning Discovery Using Google, describes a method for extracting meaning from Google searches. The authors compute probability functions based on the number of hits for each term. They take two terms, measure the number of hits for each term separately, and then measure the number of hits with both terms together. These probablities are combined to form a distance measure between the two terms. This distance measure can be fed into various knowledge classification and learning algorithms.

I'm not the only one

I'm not the only who takes pictures of breakfast cereal with a microscope. The folks at Molecular Expressions and Florida State University have these pictures of Rice Krispies (taken with the same kind of microscope).

Sweet roll

Here is the picture promised in the last entry

It took me a while to get put up because Flickr kept crashing. (If you have no need of excruciating technical details, stop reading.)

Okay, so it was the Flash player that was crashing, not Flickr (but it was crashing on loading the picture page in Flickr.) I had figured out a few weeks ago to upgrade to the latest version of Flash (I'm running Mozilla on Linux). That seemed to solve the problem.

Then the crash came back. Using the handy --debug switch on mozilla to start it in a debugger, I was quickly pointed to an old version of Flash in my ~/.mozilla directory. Deleting that version of Flash solved the problem. And now the world can resume peeking into my breakfasting habits.

On the road

I'm in Niles, MI for a wedding. A good friend of my wife's is getting married (as often happens at weddings). We drove up here on Thursday (and very thankfully, not Wednesday, as the weather and roads were clear on Thursday and icy/windy on Wednesday).

If you're wondering where the breakfast picture is - fear not. The hotel we're staying at has a continential breakfast and I had a sweet roll. A picture will be forthcoming.

Prophesy: What is it good for?

I'm in a group studying Isaiah this year (a small group Bible study with Graduate Intervarsity). Since Isaiah is a book of prophecy, the question naturally arises: What is the purpose of prophecy? Two purposes, actually. What was the purpose for the intended audience of the time, and what is the purpose for it now, for us? (Assuming that it was kept in the canon for a reason, and therefore does have something to teach us.)

It's common (and easy) to think of prophesy as a telling the future (like a fortune teller), or a checklist of future events. I suspect this is partially due to the two major Christian events - Christmas and Easter - being associated strongly with fulfillment of various prophecies. (Side note: even in these cases, what is the significance of the prophesy being fulfilled? Is it just a checklist on some countdown to Armageddon, or something else?)

One practical problem with treating prophecy as a checklist is connecting the portended events with historical events. In the study, we were confused about the beginning of chapter 22, but turning to Oswalt's commentary we found, "The historical setting of vv. 1-14 has been the cause of a great deal of scholarly interchange." The experts and scholars don't know - how are we supposed to be able to understand it. And if understanding a precise connection of the prophecy to history is a prerequisite for understanding the prophecy, this is a problem.

Another problem with the checklist approach is that it doesn't help with the question of meaning - especially the question of what does it mean for us today.

In wrestling with some of these questions, an analogy occurred to me. Comparing prophecy to anti-drug ads or anti-smoking ads. My favorite was "This is your brain (picture of an egg). This is your brain on drugs (picture of frying pan smacking the egg)."

Imagine an anti-smoking prophet approaching a smoker on the street, saying "You're going to die. Those cigarettes will give you emphysema and lung cancer. Not to mention yellow teeth, bad smelling clothes, and a 50% increase in alien abductions"

Now, what is the point? The smoker may not suffer all, or even any, of those consequences. They may get hit by a bus instead. But suppose they do get lung cancer - what was the point of the anti-smoking prophet? To provide a checklist of future events? The smoker then can see what the prophet was predicting, but it doesn't do them much good then. In this analogy it seems the point of the prophecy is a warning of the consequences, and to give a chance to change behavior.

I can think of a couple questions from this: First, what do these historical prophecies tell us about the nature and character of God ? Second, more of an application - are there any areas in our lives where we know truth about our actions, but are ignoring the consequences?

[Edit 1/12/2005 - changed the ending somewhat]

Banana Bread

Truth in Blogging Notice: This was last Sunday's breakfast. I'm behind in posting stuff.

Blog Names

Dave Barry has band names. I will have blog names.
Possible blog names:

• Hammer, Nails, and Keyboard - Tools for the Information Age
• Nearly Brilliant - Tales from a man who is a Legend in his own Mind.
• The End - Where Ideas Come to Die
• Edgar and The Albino Cheesits (Oops, that fits the band name pattern)

Extreme Closeup, Breakfast Edition

I acquired one of those Intel toy microscopes a few years ago. What better use than to get a closeup view of breakfast?

Grape Nut at 10x

Grape Nut at 60x

Breakfast

Through the magic of Flickr, here's a picture of my breakfast this morning.

Grape nuts with good stuff on top - blueberries, dried cranberries, coconut, chocolate chips, and brown sugar. Yum.

Aliens find TV weird

Aliens would likely find TV to be very strange. And I'm not talking about reality shows, either. They might find Computer monitors strange as well. TV's and monitors exploit the fact that our eyes are sensitive to only three colors, and so only produce those three wavelengths (red,green,blue). Unlike the real world, which has a more varied spectrum.

So assuming an alien being would see a continuous spectrum (assuming they see visible light at all), or even that they would see different discrete colors than humans, color CRT tubes would look very strange. The strangest part might be for them to realize that we believe the picture on the TV matches what we see in the real world.

Even our line drawings might look strange. Our brains operate by doing edge detection (among other things) and performing pattern recognition. (suggested activity: start drawing lines on paper until it looks like something recognizable. Repeat until you figure out what lines you have to draw to evoke various images.) Alien brains might not do such processing, so line drawings would not have the same impact to them.

Obligatory First Post

This the obligatory introductory post. I wanted to preserve the purity and goodness of my other blog about Quantum Monte Carlo. Therefore I created this blog as a place to rant about various non-QMC topics, including software development and what I had for breakfast.