Rational versus Irrational

Rational versus Irrational
Computers vs. Humans. Up front, I'll say it. I'm an LSU fan. I think they are the most deserving champions. Probably more important is that I'm a computer scientist. I think the BCS functioned exactly as intended. The computer programs are supposed to evaluate each team over the course of the whole season and assign rankings based on that. They did that. When you look at the opponents, schedules and whatnot, you have to admit that OU and LSU had the tougher road to a one loss season. That is the rational way to look at it - judge the whole season, pick the two "best" teams, and let them play it out. The human polls are all about, "What have you done for me lately?" Humans like to consider the most recent events more strongly than those that take place further in the past. That is natural and, frequently, wrong. Although, frequently correct as well. Depends on the situation. (Here is great way to find stuff on a particular subject www.keepmedia.com - here's a bunch on the BCS.)

We like to make predictions. This is what all of science is about. Based on things that have happened in the past, we form hypotheses. We test them, we create models, and if they work out well, we call it a theory (or even a law) and use it to build things for the future. As our understanding of science has grown, we've found that all of our theories are imperfect. Some are quite good, but we always end up with things which are not explainable by that theory or model. Much of this has now come to be lumped as "complexity." Things which can't really be explained except as being inherently inexplicable. We form boundaries and determine what we can about these boundaries, but the predictability of them is beyond us.

This is one of those which isn't predictable. I find it interesting that we look at it as Human's vs. Computers. Humans programmed the computers in a way that did not weight recent games more importantly than games at the beginning of the year. It worked perfectly. It just didn't agree with what the poll voters said. Perfect. It is a different model. If the computer rankings perfectly replicated the human polls, why would we want computer rankings? Neither one really determines a national champion. In sports, they have tournaments. There is no theory, no model, only experimental outcomes. And, in most, there are no repetitions to validate the result. Those are the best. Live in the moment and deal with the event. Baseball is fine and, in many ways, ensures that the "best" team will win (ask the Yankees if that worked in 2003). There is no perfect system for college bowl ranking. If I found one, I wouldn;t tell you about it - I'd go to Vegas and bet on the games. I'd have perfect knowledge of who the best team was in any particular match-up and I'd bet. I'd get rich.

And that is the point of the BCS. Getting rich. Money. That is the bottom line in college football polls, rankings and bowls. Its all about the Benjamins. And we don't really need a poll or a computer to know that.

Yahoo! News - Student Finds Largest Known Prime Number

Largest Prime Number
So, I'm all for computers and grid computing and stuff, but I find the fact that this story even shows up as sort of disappointing. It is nice, but it really isn't news. The guy didn't do anything. The story should be about what the guy says it should be about. The technique and how it can be used for other things that may have a more obvious use. Interresting, but somewhat pointless. I suppose the story could give some attention to the computing technique, but really, it is nothing.
Yahoo! News - Student Finds Largest Known Prime Number

Of course, we may find this prime to be useful after all . . .

RSS Tools

RSS Tools
So, like here is what I was reading today. What I like about this is that it somehow is possible that the little RSS feed could cause the downfall of Microsoft. I think it may be true. I also think that their downfall has already begun with the decadence of the abuse of their monopoly. A sign of rot from within. That the empire must be maintained at all costs.

Anyhow, I like the RSS feeds. Especially since no one can even agree on what the acronym means. That is excellent and a sign of vitality. And no one really cares. Everyone knows what it does and what it is called, but who really cares what it means. It isn't even an acronym - it is an abbreviation. At least, I've never heard the pronunciation of RSS, but I suppose you could say "riz" or something.

I'm Tired

I'm Tired
All of the time. Everything exhausts me because most things seem to have too much energy put into it. I think there is a relationship between how much energy is put into something and how much energy it takes to get out whatever was put in. May be related to the process of entropy. We are constantly losing energy and most of the crap that takes our energy simply isn't worth it. There are things that seem to be energizing. I think this is what the academics call elegance. You get more out of it than you put into it, at least, intellectually. Maybe.

Maybe this is just me being tired. I don't think so though. Music and athletics. Academics and dance. They take some energy to do, but when done well, return more than you put in. Politics is a great example for the general populace. I think most people feel they don't get a return on the energy that they have to put into it. So, nobody knows what anybody stands for, the parties simplify it for us to the extent that it is meaningless, and the end result is that nobody votes. It isn't too much trouble to go the polls. It is too much trouble to understand what everyone really stands for to make an thoughtful decision. Don't vote or vote the party line to feel like you have something. I don't know how you change that. Personality rules.

Sorry. No links. Just complaints.

Rush is an Idiot

Rush is an Idiot
This isn't racist either. Not only does he make a patently stupid and unsupportable accusation against the media (the sports media, that serious branch of the fourth estate that is critical to a functioning society), now he is allegedly involved in buying thousands of black market pain killers for his, it seems, personal use. Maybe this explains his behavior.

Its all a bunch of shit
What, you may ask, is the all that is a bunch of shit. Perfectly valid question. Today, it just seems like it is just about everything. Like, the end of the war in Iraq - that is a bunch of shit. It is not over. The easy part is over. The California Governors race - now that is a bunch of shit. No real need to expand. TV, reality and otherwise, is (almost by definition) a bunch of shit. The UN certainly seems a good candidate for a bunch of shit. Maybe the economy, but the really shitty part of the economy is all the pundits talking about it all the time. Right now, controlling the economy is equivalent to controlling the weather. Good luck with either.

OK. So "all" isn't everything. Today, it just seems like a large portion of stuff in our ears and eyes is a bunch of shit. Personally, I rock. I just need less oral and aural shit.

I feel better. Thanks for listening and looking. Bill me.

Slow Leaving
Always has been my problem. I never leave fast enough. I hang around too long. At parties. At school. Everywhere. Eventually, I leave and it is best for everybody. Especially me. Not that I'm leaving here. Because here follows me around. It is always with me. Maybe this is one similarity that the internet has to the soul.

Alabama

What the hell is wrong with the state of Alabama? Why are they always at the forefront of the behind? On the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington which was preceded by the imprisonment of civil rights groups in the state of Alabama. Now they need to be able to have a monument to judeo-chistianism with the Ten Commandments. Now, I'm as christian as the next guy to be thrown into the arena, but even I can see this is a blatant violation of the seperation of church and state. And they have some nut-case of a chief justice that can't see the issue. What is wrong with that state?

Recession
Some things just amaze me. Like a bunch of economists getting together and deciding that the recession had ended like 18 months ago, but nobody noticed. They didn't even notice. You'd think someone would have noticed and let the rest of us know so that we could have spent more last holiday season and all that. Simply amazing. I feel much better knowing that the recession was over a long time ago. I wonder if we'll find out 18 months from now that really there was another recession going on right now, but it ended two months from now or some such nonsense.

Give me a break.

This is Funny
Its about the phrase clue-by-four and its potential trademark. This response is a classic.

Business
I'm slow, but it has finally occured to me how to use all this blogging stuff for business. Not like for me to start a business and get all rich and snotty and stuff, but to actually use it within a business. The brilliance of the idea is that I don't have to do anything to make it work. Actually, anything that I do to make it work will make it not work. Just like blogs in their natural environment, you have to just provide access and let it live on its own. So I will.

Time
And so it goes. I'll simply share one of my favorite sites of all time. Because it is a cool idea that serves no real purpose except to entertain and give the owners someplace to display all their cool pictures. I hope the purity of it never ends.

War HUH Good God Ya'll
What is it good for . . .
I found the link to this at JOHO's blog. An excellent demonstration of political double-talk, back-pedaling, crawfishing, whatever you want to call it.

Way too many people found it and commented, but I like the basic content alone. Some of the comments are good, but it is too painful to read all the freaking things to find the good ones.

I'm Down

My goddamn rock solid ghetto shiznit name is Gangmaster Jaam.
What's yours?
Powered by Rum and Monkey.

And on a totally different note .

Terror Alert Level
Keeping you posted with help from a friendly neighbor.

The Fifth Estate
So, I had a thought. Most recently inspired by an article in Sports Illustrated about the downfall of a couple of college coaches. The scandals that proved their undoing were first reported on the internet. On sites that were run and read by sports fanatics (I use the original term since I think that these folks qualify). The internet seems to have become the fifth estate. The fourth is the press, but the internet has enabled a fifth estate of the people that gives all a voice. Of course, given the origin of the term, the internet may simply be a re-invention of the third estate as initially stated (priesthood, aristocracy, the commons). More modern interpretation of the estates are, in the sense of the a democracy, the legislative, the executive, the judicial, with the press as the fourth. It is perhaps this modern interpretation that begs for a fifth estate. The people given voice via the internet. Just a thought. I'd like to work it over more, but figure that I'd share early.

Woodstock
So, the original was the seminal defining event of the 1960's. Google couldn't even find a decent link in the first page of hits for the 1995 version. The 1999 Woodstock wasn't even in Woodstock, but took place in Rome, NY and enjoyed looting, burning, and other assorted fun. I wonder what it is all about that changes the peaceful 69 from the violent 99.

Maybe it is the lack of a solid cause like Vietnam. Maybe it was the attitude of commercialism that pervaded the Rome version. (Did Rome fall in a day? Maybe so in 1999) Maybe it had to do with it taking place on an abandoned airfield instead of a dairy farm.

I think that maybe we are or, at least, have been moving through a transitional phase of interaction. People are holed up watching TV, playing video games, playing with their computers. Maybe we've lost the ability to act appropriately in large crowds since we spend most of our time alone or in small groups. Maybe the advent of instantaneous communication via cell phones has made our crowd socialization skills atrophy. As great as the internet is as a communication medium, it is still lacking in crowds. Maybe that is what chat rooms are, but it is different. We are what we are face to face, but we assume differnt personas in the internet, in our blogs, and within chat rooms. The key to the web is the communication. Markets are conversations. Maybe so. Conversations are fine, but our massive social interactions are somehow skewed. You can't even attend a sporting event without expecting a lot more than a game and a marching band at halftime.

Events like Woodstock are too unscripted for us to know how to behave correctly. We lose contact with our individuality within the crowd and allow ourselves to act in ways that we never would in "normal" circumstances. To let ourselves go, seems to be the equivalent of allowing ourselves to be violent. Even our "spontaneous" celebrations of the home teams championship erupts into violence. Where am I going with this?

Just this. The internet, the web, cell phones, technology, whatever is still lacking a true integration with the crowd. Chat rooms are almost it, but how do we take the chat room into the crowd and the crowd into the chat room? There is a basic disconnect with other humans on a day to day basis that hasn't quite been answered by all of our wonderful 21st century technology. I love the technology, but the next round needs to address the crowd, the crush, the street, the celebration and provide us with meaningful ways to interact with others within the crowd. With love, respect, and generosity.

The Interconnectedness of It All
So, everything is connected and we need to visualize it all. Somehow. A few thoughts occured in a form of strange (or not so strange) synchronicity (this or this or maybe something else). Some things that have bubbled to the top of late, although seemingly unrelated to what I am supposed to be doing or have been doing or had been planning on doing. Anyhow, here they are. Started with becoming briefly re-acquanted with the term Semantic Web. Here is a nice Scientific American Article about it. Basically, it is about defining ways in which context can be encoded so that meaning can be shared between various applications that can create agents that can automagically do our bidding. For real. More simply, it is the next generation meta-data effort. Meta-data never really resonated with anyone. Semantic Web is a much more exciting and provacative term. The W3C folks are in the final stages of defining the standard for managing this information.

So, really. This is cool. Interesting. Sort of acedemic like most of Berners-Lee's stuff. After all, the dude invented the world wide web. That's cool. All this interconnected stuff came in when I was reading the JOHO blog. There I ran across this link to Touchgraph. Now this is cool. Not really the semantic web stuff from W3C, but the inherent and explicit connectedness of links in web pages. Even less scientific (in a sense) is the truly artful connectedness of Alice In Wonderland.

So, like, really, dude, its like, you know, totally all connected. Is there some depth to all of this? I think so. But maybe less in the formalized markup of the W3C standards and maybe more in the way of the touchgraph sort of thing. An emergence. An emergent meaning not designed into the web, but part of the natural (natural?) order of things complex. Or social. Is society complex or is complexity social? Chicken or the egg. Theory would argue that complexity in physics led to complexity in life which leads to complexity in societies.

So, it is all connected. But I still search for the meaning. Maybe that is the significance of the Semantic Web. That there is meaning. The links hold explicit meaning instead of the implict meaning of all the links pasted in above. What is my meaning of having all these links? They must be related if I put them there. Right? Right. Even I can't really tell you the meaning of them all to me without your own interpretation of their meaning which may be very different than mine or Tim's or David's. Does that matter? Probably not. But they are there, so perhaps that is enough. It is enough for me. And enough of this.

Keeping it Alive
Regardless of the team, I feel the need to keep this going. I'll be inviting others eventually.

I like Opera. I wish that the sites were more compliant with the standards that Opera supports. It is amazing to me how much faster most pages load in Opera. Of course, if you go with the evils of MS, you end up with all kinds of crap that doesn't work. I'm bitching from the pits of hell - IE is my default browser. Because of the monopoly (legal or otherwise), everybody uses their tools which force you to use their browser. Excuses for my sins - I was just taking orders. Whatever.

April Arrives and . . .
. . . still I blog alone in my team blog. What could it be? It can't be body odor, since it is virtual. I suppose that I may have some sort of virtual body odor, but I'm not sure what form that would take in cyberspace. Maybe it is cyberhalitosis. The emanations from my entries make the so-called teammates turn away, avoid contact, maintain their distance. Maybe, just maybe, I'm a cyberass. I do know what that is and there are certainly some cyberasses in existence. I'd give links, but the list is simply too long. Let's just decide that this is my problem. I'm a cyberass.

I kind of like it. Cyberass. Cyber ASS. CyBeRaSs. CYberAss. Or maybe cyBERass. That's me. I'm gonna find new people to add to the council. Some that will blog like they have never blogged before. Er, I think maybe that was the problem. Maybe I'll get some that will blog like that have blogged before.