Gratuitous iPhone Post
This is a post to test out my iPhone and the wordpress app. I am really starting to understand why cut and paste would be such a killer feature.
The keyboard works fairly well even with my paws.
Popularity: 1% [?]
This entry was written by , posted on 23/01/2009 at 14:04, filed under Uncategorized and tagged gratuitous, iphone. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Failing CAPTCHAs
Every time I fail a CAPTCHA, I feel my humanity is slightly impugned. Given Flann O’Brien’s theory about bicycles and their riders merging, isn’t it also likely that someone who uses a PC as much as I do will suffer a similar, digital fate?
On the other hand, sometimes the tests are just too hard:
Popularity: 2% [?]
This entry was written by , posted on 05/01/2009 at 14:15, filed under Uncategorized and tagged CAPTCHA, internet, web. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Feynman, Wilkes and more
None of these things are going to get a full entry, so I will put them here for posterity.
The Feynman point
is the first instance of six consecutive 9s in π
Feinman said he wanted to be able to recite the 700-odd digits of π up to that sequence, and then say “nine nine nine nine nine nine nine and so on”. Brilliant.
Early programmer Maurice Wilkes is attributed as saying:
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
It’s still true today, despite the amazing tools that now exist to support programmers.
One of the great problems is that the human brain is so good at decoding information, it’s very hard to decide what is helpful to a user. Many of the tasks that are feasible with a computer are so trivial to a human that when they go wrong even a small number of times, they create real anger. A small insight into the power of the brain can be perceived with the following experiment on Sine Wave Speech. I was blown away by the gap in understanding before and after the process.
Popularity: 1% [?]
This entry was written by , posted on 17/12/2008 at 16:59, filed under Uncategorized and tagged cool, perception, science, web links. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.