31 December 2005

algiers by flickr

seeing as we're so crap at taking photos, here's some links to other peoples' shots of algiers.



12 December 2005

algiers by sea

wanted to test blogger's picture hosting, so here's a pic from our trip back into algiers via ferry. it was taken sometime in august, at sunrise, as the ferry docked.

progress report ..

on understanding life, the universe, and everything:
most of the very broadest brushstrokes are there. just some nagging bits like: the very start of the universe (and what possibly framed that event), the neurophysiological basis of consciousness, the assymetrical predisposition to baryonic over non-baryonic matter; and how to get along with other people.

05 December 2005

there's no time like, for instance... 'now'

"There's no such thing as an instant in time or present moment in nature. It's something entirely subjective that we project onto the world around us. That is, it's the outcome of brain function and consciousness."
In the paper, "Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity", Peter Lynds, a 27 year old broadcasting school tutor from Wellington, New Zealand, establishes that there is a necessary trade off of all precisely determined physical values at a time, for their continuity through time, and in doing so, appears to throw age old assumptions about determined instantaneous physical magnitude and time on their heads. ...
read more here. The article doesnt provide enough meat, but i like the basic idea.

UPDATE: the actual article can be found here, and Wikipedia has some info and links to discussions on the piece, including the possibility of a hoax, here.

my feeling is that it does contain a bit of bad science, but that the idea itself is diggable.

27 November 2005

my del.icio.us tagroll

the del.icio.us tagroll shows your del.icio.us tags as a weighted 'cloud' that can be displayed in any webpage - the more links contained within any tag, the larger it appears in the cloud. checkout del.icio.us help for tagrolls to get the code for your tagroll
For those that dont know, del.icio.us is an online bookmarking service that allows you to sort your sites by tags.

UPDATE: i moved the actual del.icio.us tagroll to the sidebar on the right as a permanent fixture

24 November 2005

a follow-up on the glen and raj saga..

the class worrier blog has a follow-up post of last weeks march here.
mentioned there, is another article worth checking out:
Democracy took a beating in Foreman Road,
Richard Pithouse, November 22, 2005, The Mercury

17 November 2005

Class worrier: Fucker stole my camera and shot my mates

extract from Raj Patel's excellent blog..

" It was an ordinary mugging. The bastard had a gun, a swagger, a gang and didn’t seem to want to me to take his photo when he was roughing someone up. So he came up to me and told me to hand over the camera. Timid as I am, and not wanting much further trouble, I handed it over. There were witnesses.

“What’s your name?”

“Nayager”, he said, pointing to his badge.

Superintendent Glen Nayager, it turns out...

...
read on

02 November 2005

Google Site Search Bookmarklet

finally got tired of having Firefox's google toolbar just sitting there doing nothing... so i dumped it, and scratched up this bookmarklet for the only thing i really do use the toolbar for anyways - quick searching a site with google

javascript:void(site1=document.location.host); void(srchstr=prompt('enter Search String :','',' Google Site Search'));{if(srchstr!=null) {location='http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A' +site1+ ' + '+srchstr}};


to use this bookmarklet on firefox :
- just right click the bookmark toolbar and select 'New Bookmark...'.
- then, in the dialog that appears, enter something like 'Google Site Search' for the Name and copy the short piece of script above into the Location field.

Now from any site, clicking the Google Site Search button wll prompt you for a Search String and find it on that site using google.

18 September 2005

Chavez at the UN General Assembly, September 15, 2005

cool speech - check it out here

contributing common sense to an Open Mind

MIT's Open Mind Common Sense Project is working to gather common sense knowledge that can be used to improve AI technology.
The Open Mind Commonsense project is an attempt to make computers smarter by making it easy and fun for people all over the world to work together to give computers the millions of pieces of ordinary knowledge that constitute "common-sense", all those aspects of the world that we all understand so well we take them for granted. This repository of knowledge will enable us to create more intelligent and sociable software and better understand the structure our own minds.

if you've got any common sense to spare, you can join the project and share. theres another article on this project here
...
then, if you're interested, the resulting knowledgebase is available for download from the ConceptNet project
ConceptNet v2.1 is written in the Python programming language. It is distributed as a Python API and a standalone XML-RPC Server.

16 September 2005

16 August 2005

an invitation to Stumble

checkout StumbleUpon - a social bookmarking tool, and a good way to share sites.

"StumbleUpon is a community-oriented and personalized approach to web surfing - a browser add-on which automates "word of mouth" recommendations of quality web sites. The people-driven technology combines human recommendations with machine learning of personal preferences and interests to filter through the vast amount of information on the web and direct users to relevant web sites."

my stumbles can be found ..here

The ZoomQuilt .. expressing scale

a brilliant piece of flash animation art at Flash The ZoomQuilt

16 July 2005

wikidpad goes opensource

WikidPad has been opensource for a few months now. the group has settled on using Trac/Subversion along with two google groups (dev and user).

25 March 2005

hoggar mountains, sahara

there's some pics from our trip down to hoggar mountains in the south of algeria on my flickr page

around Tamenrasset r />
around Tamenrasset
Originally uploaded by jaysen.

21 February 2005

BBC Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2003 - The Emerging Mind

BBC - Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2003 - The Emerging Mind: "Vilayanur S. Ramachandran" - Brilliant audio lectures from the forefront of evolutionary neuropsychology

Lecture 4 covering synesthesia and the evolution of language was particularly funky. you just need realplayer (downloadable from the bbc site) to listen.

27 January 2005

snowy algiers

snow for the first time.. lots of fun. apparently the most snow algiers has seen in 50 years. more snow pics on my flickr page.

2005.01.27.SnowyAlgiers2 009 Snow! Snow! Snow!
Originally uploaded by jaysen.

11 January 2005