Category: personal AnGoL

Nods head in agreement!

Unfortunately, I hear all the time from singles that their work usually lasts until 8 p.m. (or later), and there’s barely enough time to grab some dinner and a drink before collapsing into bed and starting the routine again the next morning. Despite all the possibilities to meet new people, the reality seems to be that a single in a big city is confined to a narrow set of acquaintances and co-workers; sort of like dying of thirst in the middle of an ocean.
Bert Sperling Answers Your Best Places To Live Questions – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog.

I’d be lying if I said i would be a little sad If i haven’t even contributed to the field of artificial intelligence and the suddenly all the major obstacles have been solved. I would be but i would also be elated and would do everything I could to help this old but still infantile persuit.
Almost human
October 12, 2008
In the final round of competition for this year’s Loebner Prize in artificial intelligence, held today at the University of Reading in the UK, a robot came within a whisker of passing the Turing Test. In a series conversations with people, the winning robot, named Elbot, fooled 25% of its interlocutors into believing it was a genuine human being. A score of 30% would have been sufficient to pass Turing’s criterion for a true artificial intelligence.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Almost human.

I’m typing this on opera because firefox keeps on crashing, I want to debug this but I’ve got eclipse open and If I tried debugging it with Visual Studio, I’m sure to get an unresponsive computer.! If Opera had as good as a plugin system as firefox, It would probably be my primary browser.!

Well at least the electorate is responsive. In the philippines except for the presidensy you can buy your way into any elected seat! And because the president cannot go for re-election and there really is no party system , we have a personality system of government, this means we are screwed!

On its own terms, though this can sometimes produce unfair outcomes (like Jimmy Carter getting booted for problems that were far beyond his capacity to control) I think swing voters’ habit of punishing incumbents for poor performance is an okay satisficing strategy. It’s part of the reason why democracy manages to work despite massive voter ignorance. The electorate may be composed of people who don’t understand the issues or where the candidates stand on them, but the people running the government have an incentive to try to implement policies that work out okay in order to avoid “throw the bums out” sentiment. The trouble is that Bartels’ study of American elections, at least, suggests massive myopia on the part of voters. Economic performance in an election year has a big impact on election outcomes, but economic performance in other years doesn’t get you anywhere. If that carries over to the UK (and, indeed, it seems to) that means that Labour won’t get any credit from voters for the fact that current problems were preceded by a long and impressive string of growth. And by the same token, voters don’t understand comparative issues — the fact that your country is doing better than most other countries amidst a global downturn won’t get you any credit.
Matthew Yglesias » Democracy’s Myopia Problem.

At the end of the day what we leave this existence when we cease to be are the ideas, the ideas behind what we write, the ideas behind what we paint, the emotions that we put into each song, dance, or instrument we play.
We can’t live like this forever. We don’t have that much time. We must try doing someting of significane. Making art or music that would endure. Thinking thoughts that grows, thoughts that are passed on!
thanks to j kottke for the pointer:

Beyond Flash

Jonathan Harris recently gave a talk at a Flash conference, attended by a community of people that pride themselves on producing amazing work, and his constructive criticism didn’t go over too well.

With a number of notable exceptions, most of the work I see coming from the Flash community is largely devoid of ideas. There is great obsession with slickness, surface, speed, technology, and language, but very little soul at the core, very little being said. I believe that in the long run, ideas are the only things that survive.

That seems about right.

I first learned about Yom Kippur from the tv show The West Wing, I feel that it is a very nice oliday, you ask forgiveness from everyone for a couple of days before you ask God for forgiveness. Hope people from all religions do this. It is a cliche but this is because there is a grain of truth in it but, a lot of religous people are hypocrites , I know of a a very religous man who doesn’t talk to his gay son, and a couple of other stories like that. I consider it right that before God can forgive you you must first ask and give forgiveness to others.
Happy Yom Kippur to our Jewish brothers!
Yom Kippur from wikipedia

Happy Yom Kippur
Forgot to post this at the appropriate time. Oh well, better late than never.
By way of explanation: my father worked at a New York insurance company that was, rather oddly, an overwhelmingly Catholic institution. (A relative from the Sephardic side of the family, named Menahem, also worked there; everyone called her Monahan.)
Anyway, my father did take the Jewish holidays off, as a matter of principle — and his co-workers tried. So they would indeed wish him happy Day of Atonement.
Happy Yom Kippur – Paul Krugman – Op-Ed Columnist – New York Times Blog.

I didn’t say it would be easy but you know you can live no other way.

Elgin lived through some things during his career that we like to forget happened now. Lord knows how many racial slurs bounced off him, how many N-bombs were lobbed from the stands, how much prejudice he endured on a day-to-day basis as the league’s signature black star. Russell bottled everything up and used it as fuel for the next game: He wouldn’t suffer; his opponents would suffer. Oscar morphed into the angriest dude in the league, someone who screamed at his own teammates as much as the referees, a great player who played with an even greater chip on his shoulder. Elgin didn’t have the same mean streak. He loved to joke with teammates. He never stopped talking. He loved life and loved playing basketball. He couldn’t hide it. And so his body soaked up every ugly slight like a sponge.
ESPN Page 2 – Simmons: The forgotten pioneer.

I’ve seen his stats on only playing 48 games but I thought it was due to an injury.
One of the reason’s this blog was started was the thought of happiness, The thought that there exists a place , a state wherein you are happy.  One of the things that make people happy is if they are doing something they love, and it is extremely hard to find something you love, and when you’ve found that something you do it there is no ifs and buts you do it because you nothing can stop you.
I write about this often but this is important to me. If you can find your place in this earth. If you can find the thing that would make you happy and do it. If you can’t help yourself from waking up early because you want to return to your work, we can live in a far better world than what we have now.
as mahatma gandhi say: there is enough for everyone’s needs but never enough for everyone’s greed.
If everyone could only find their place in this world, maybe we wouldn’t have to try having everything.

It’s impossible to fully capture Elgin’s greatness five decades after the fact, but let’s try. He averaged 25 points and 15 rebounds and carried the Lakers to the Finals as a rookie. He scored 71 points against Wilt’s Warriors in his second season. He averaged 34.8 points and 19.8 rebounds in his third season — as a 6-foot-5 forward, no less — and topped himself the following year with the most amazing accomplishment in NBA history. During the 1961-62 season, Elgin played only 48 games — all on weekends, all without practicing — and somehow averaged 38 points, 19 rebounds and five assists a game.
Why was this better than Wilt’s 50 per game or Oscar’s season-long triple-double? Because the guy didn’t practice! He was moonlighting as an NBA player on weekends! Wilt’s 50 makes sense considering the feeble competition and his gratuitous ball-hogging. Oscar’s triple-double makes sense considering the style of play at the time — tons of points, tons of missed shots, tons of available rebounds. But Elgin’s 38-19-5 makes no sense whatsoever. I don’t see how this happened. It’s inconceivable. A U.S. Army Reservist at the time, Elgin lived in a barracks in the state of Washington, leaving only whenever they gave him a weekend pass … and even with that pass, he could only fly coach on flights with multiple connections to meet the Lakers wherever they happened to be playing. Once he arrived, he would throw on a uniform and battle the best NBA players alive on back-to-back nights — fortunately for the Lakers, most games were scheduled on the weekends back then — and make the same complicated trip back to Washington on Sunday night or Monday morning. That was his life for five months.
ESPN Page 2 – Simmons: The forgotten pioneer.

So True!
Often is the day that doing small things, doing chores, doing minutae, and poof the 8 hours of work is done, then time for self begins, its starts wit reading something, a few articles from hacker news or reddit, cleaning out my inbox, reading my feeds, postingon my blog,  and poof 8 hours passes without doing anything significant.
The good thing is that there is never a week where I do not spend at least 4 hours straight on doing something of significance for me. The truth of the matter is that these four hours are the fuel for me, keeps me happy, probably my biggest luxury.
No great thoughts are hard to come by but I believe it starts with the desire to and the will to have the time and concentration necessary for it.

For most of us, even those with the best of intentions about getting earthshaking ideas, the minutiae of life bubble to the top of our consciousnesses, crowding out any incipient great thoughts. When we have no great things to worry about, the small ones rise up and keep us awake at night.
I once heard a story about Einstein that is probably apocryphal, but I like the message it conveys. Supposedly, Einstein was confronted by a student who said that he kept a pencil and paper by his bed in case an idea surfaced while he was sleeping. “Do you do that?” he asked Einstein. “Alas,” Einstein replied, “I seldom get ideas.”
IEEE Spectrum: Great Thoughts.