This video says it all.

Go vote tomorrow!

I’ve seen a number of references to a Microsoft demo of speech recog­ni­tion that went famously wrong, but it wasn’t until this evening that I finally watched the CNBC Video that started the meme.

A TV reporter makes a snarky in­tro­duc­tion then cuts to video of a Microsoft PM demoing the new speech recog­ni­tion technology in Windows Vista. Dear Mom comma, he says. Dear aunt, appears in Word. It gets worse from there. Funny stuff. Go watch the original video.

But it’s not the whole story. There’s another video which sets the demo in context. Overall, the demo was reasonably successful and the speech commands worked fairly well.

If you think people …continue.

"This isn’t an election anymore, it’s an in­ter­ven­tion."

—Andrew Sullivan on CNN.

I don’t have much time for either Andrew Sullivan or Christo­pher Hitchens. Both of them bear a lot of blame for getting us into Iraq in the first place.

But here they are on CNN yesterday, ripping into Bush for saying that Rumsfeld is doing a fabulous job and that he and Cheney must stay until the end of his presidency.

(Via Amer­i­ca­Blog)

For the last few months, every blog post that I’ve made has been ac­com­pa­nied by at least one image. Sometimes I already have an ap­pro­pri­ate image. The rest of the time, I use whatever I could find after searching Google Images.

Earlier today, I came across 10 Tips for Google Image Search. I par­tic­u­lar­ly like the Grease­mon­key script which allows you to view the original image by clicking on the thumbnail.

Email is addictive because of "operant con­di­tion­ing":

This means the mechanisms by which behaviour is shaped by its con­se­quences; how what we do depends on the rewards and pun­ish­ments of what we did last time. … The most effective training regime is one where you give the animal a reward only sometimes, and then only at random intervals. Animals trained like this, with what’s called a ‘variable interval re­in­force­ment schedule’, work harder for their rewards, and take longer to give up once all rewards for the behaviour is removed. There’s a logic to this. Although we might know that we’ve stopped rewarding the animal, it has got used to performing the …continue.

I’ve up loaded my Halloween pictures to Flickr.

Windows deservedly gets a lot of bad press about the unending stream of security updates. But Linux, despite all of the propaganda about it being more secure than Windows, has its own security problems.

Take this post from LWN.net yesterday:

No security updates today

[Posted October 25, 2006 by corbet]

It is sad that this is worthy of note, but it is: on this day, Wednesday, October 25, we have not received a single security update for any Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion.

(This post was composed on a laptop running Kubuntu 6.06.)

I found a series of amusing cat pictures, via Ned Batchelder’s blog.

Update 2007/10/04: That site is gone, but fairly similar photos can be found at LOLCats.

My operatic education continues. Tonight we saw the Seattle Opera’s production of The Italian Girl in Algiers, aka L’italiana in Algeri.

The plots in opera, especially comedic opera, are always wildly improbable. This one revolves around Mustafà, the buffoonish Bey of Algiers, who wants to pass off his wife Elvira to Lindoro, an Italian slave, and take instead the newly arrived Italian girl, Isabella. Isabella has come in search of her lost love – Lindoro, of course – and has brought another lover, Taddeo, also a buffoon, who poses as her uncle. Isabella is more than a match for every man who crosses her path, twisting them around her little finger.

The per­for­mances …continue.

In my wanderings, I recently came across two sites where you can ask all kinds of strange questions, with a reasonable ex­pec­ta­tion of getting an answer.

Little Details: "writers have questions, other writers have answers". A Live­Jour­nal community for writers seeking all kinds of background in­for­ma­tion for their plots. Some samples:

• 1920’s cold remedies
• Danish drinking songs
• Control parents have over their children testifying.

Ask MetaFilter is more general purpose. It’s a good place to go when your question can’t be reduced to a keyword search on Google. Sample questions:

• What’s the fastest and cheapest way to paint a red room white?

• Is there a program for the Mac that will scroll a window to capture a

  screenshot of its entire contents?

• I want …continue.