Teh Journalz

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend – Okay, they do have some monetary value, but any girl who is shallow or socially dysfunctional enough to think that a gemstone is a substitute for human kinship and makes a good companion probably is not relationship material for anyone who isn’t a small piece of inorganic carbon.

People who talk about themselves a lot are generally disliked. A likable person will instead subtly direct conversation to where others request the information they want to reveal. Revealing good news about yourself is a good sign, but wanting to reveal good news about yourself is a bad sign. Best to do it without wanting to.

Many people have used random number generators in their programs to create unpredictability, make the motion and behavior of objects appear more natural, or generate textures. Random number generators certainly have their uses, but at times their output can be too harsh to appear natural. This article will present a function which has a very wide range of uses, more than I can think of, but basically anywhere where you need something to look natural in origin. What's more it's output can easily be tailored to suit your needs.

If you look at many things in nature, you will notice that they are fractal. They have various levels of detail. A common example is the outline of a mountain range. It contains large variations in height (the mountains), medium variations (hills), small variations (boulders), tiny variations (stones) . . . you could go on. Look at almost anything: the distribution of patchy grass on a field, waves in the sea, the movements of an ant, the movement of branches of a tree, patterns in marble, winds. All these phenomena exhibit the same pattern of large and small variations. The Perlin Noise function recreates this by simply adding up noisy functions at a range of different scales.

To create a Perlin noise function, you will need two things, a Noise Function, and an Interpolation Function.

Really useful technique for lots of things. Definitely one to keep in the back of your brain.

That iPad owners will likely consider taking a razor to the plastic SIM cards inside their iPhones, just so they can use the same portable data plan they’re already paying for, should tell you everything you need to know about the wireless data industry.

*sigh* I don't even want one of these and I feel robbed...

Crazy awesome visualization of the range of orders of magnitude that exist in our universe (click 'Play' to load it).

In late 2008, MailChimp Labs began Project Omnivore. Our goal was to build a massively scalable tool for our abuse team that could predict bad behavior.

The experiment started with an nVidia Tesla supercomputer, then grew to a cluster of Amazon EC2 servers running a genetic optimization program for 2 weeks nonstop, running over 61 trillion email data comparisons.

Really cool use of GA technology.

In 2009, Second Life Residents earned more than twice that amount -  US$55 million - while the total size of the Second Life economy grew 65% to US$567 million.

The other day someone sent me an IM and thanked me for my open source contributions. They then said something about wishing they had my gem/code creation talents. I didn’t miss a beat and informed them that I have no talent.

Wow, this is just perfect. I feel exactly the same way. Couldn't have written it any better.

From this NYT article: “It's rare that you've got a major breakthrough that wasn't developed by multiple people at about the same time,” said Mark Lemley, professor of intellectual property at Stanford Law School.

On both an ethical and economic level, liability for independent invention is a problem. Imagine that you have put great effort into developing a new technology, start marketing it, and then get a letter in the mail telling you that another party has already obtained a patent on your work, and you now owe them money for putting out the product you've developed. There you were, minding your own business, not copying anybody, and now you suddenly owe a stranger perhaps millions of dollars. Ethically, it is hard to justify the justice of the situation.

YES!!