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| Dare to dream. That's what they always tell you, right?
I want to be able to control a computer with my mind. I want to think a thought, and with that thought, launch thousands of computational processes marching in order, performing the tasks outlined in my thought and playing Beethoven's 9th symphony while they do it. When I'm lying awake in bed at night, and my mind wanders from place to place, if I stumble on a creative insight and think gee i should write this down, I want my computer to write it down for me.
I want my computer to distill my muddled thoughts and spit them back out at me, rinsed, washed, dried, and folded.
I want my computer to take my fantasies and paint me a picture of wondrous lands and places that I've been to in my dreams. Then I want to put on a headset and explore the world I created.
I want to pace around the room, muttering jumbled thoughts to myself. But when I stop and look at the computer and tell it something, I want it to listen and do what I say.
But if I think a shameful thought, I want privacy. I don't want my computer to decide good from evil, truth from falsehood. If I have a secret to keep, I don't want my computer to ever be able to pry it out of the deepest vaults of my mind in a thousand years.
I want a computer that knows what's going on in the world, that knows if it's going to be snowing three months and two days from now, that knows the cheapest and fastest way to fly to taiwan. And when I ask it, I want it to tell me.
You got all that, god? My birthday is next wednesday. Thanks. | | |
| I am a firm believer that laptop keyboards are bad for your wrists. The small keys and small size force your arms into an uncomfortable position, and are a nightmare for people with RSI.
Stacy started to have problems with her wrists last year. Carpal tunnel problems, pretty standard. She has this Acer laptop, and even when you know it's not good to use the laptop keyboard, you use it anyways, because it's there and it's so convenient.
So I decided to remedy the situation. When she came up to boston a couple weeks ago, I ripped the keyboard out of her laptop and replaced it with a piece of cardboard.
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| So that HIPAA thing that I've been ranting about... yeah, well the national deadline for implementation was originally October 16 (last week). All health care organizations were to have implemented the standardized electronic data interchange protocols by that date. Well, they did a survey a little earlier and the results were disastrous. Fewer than 20% of all surveyed organizations said they would be "HIPAA compliant" by the deadline. So then they were like, maybe we were a little strict, and pushed the deadline back to February. *sigh* Expect to hear me rant again later.
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The name of my research group is Oxygen Research Group. We are in the field of pervasive computing. Explanation:
Early developments in computer science resulted in many people using one single computer (mainframes and timesharing systems). Later on, in the 80s, was the advent of the personal computer - one person to one computer. Now, the theory goes, we are shifting to one person using many computers. Already it's happening - computers in your car, your cell phone, pda, your desktop computer. Computers are becoming ubiquitous, pervading our lives.
Project Oxygen is an effort by MIT to study this phenomenom, to study how we might best utilize computers as they change in our society. There is a vision of a day when computers are taken for granted, much like the air (oxygen.. haha) we breathe, when they truly are pervasive (like oxygen.. haha) and fade from the monstrous attention demanding behemoths that we toil in front of today to the invisible technologies that are woven into the fabric of our lives (fabric.. haha).
Nobody really knows where the deep academic subjects are in pervasive computing. It's not like AI, or supercomputing, where the problems are very clearly defined. In supercomputing, you just make the computer go faster. In AI, there's an aim to create rational decision making programs, to build machines that can perform complex tasks.
But there are no unproven theories in pervasive computing. Hell, there are no real theories. If you read the academic papers and proposed scenarios, it's all lame stuff like being able to tell your car to book you a plane ticket to london while you're stuck in traffic on the 95N, or about your television magically knowing what channels might interest you given your mood and the phase of the moon.
But there's definitely something there. Oxygen Research Group was founded to study pervasive computing from the computer science perspective, and that's what I'll be doing (I think...) | | |
| Question: What happens when you add yourself to your own buddy list on AIM, and then block yourself? What if you warn yourself?
Hypothesis: Due to the self-referencing nature of having yourself on your own buddy list, blocking yourself should cause a rift in the fabric of space and time, thus causing the universe to implode. Similarly, the double effect of warning yourself should trigger an incosistency in AIM's Oscar protocol, disabling their servers and forcing thousands of users offline at once.
Method: 1) Added myself to my own buddy list. Sent myself a short IM consisting of the message "lkj.jk". Blocked myself. Sent myself another message. 2) Warned myself
Observations: Blocking myself didn't seem to do anything. The universe continued to function normally, and all subsequent messages were delivered. Warning myself increased my warning level by 20%, which seems to be four times the amount of a single warning.
Analysis: Conclusive evidence for the existence of multiverses. Due to the fact that this world continued to function, we must have forked at that moment in time, and the other universe that forked off of ours must have imploded. The Oscar protocol must have been upgraded recently to compensate for the warning deficiency.
Conclusion: I am slowly going insane... | | |
| in other news, my roommate's wife just moved in with us. straight from china, doesn't speak a word of english.
my roommate introduces us, and she's like, ni hao, and then I just kinda stare at her for a couple seconds before going, "uh... hey, how's it going?" (in english) | | |
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