Of course, they didn’t ask “Can you make your hard drive work?” Also, an IQ score is supposed to be normalized. When half of the respondants are getting over 110, it needs to be renormalized. I wonder if this is just that MS (NBC) underestimates the intelligence of their users.
Mackay said such firms gave a bad name to the penis enhancement business. – CNN.com – Male enlargement ads prompt spam rage – Nov. 24, 2003
Does this need further comment?
I’ve grown soft. I fully expected to, in a single evening, update my motherboard and CPU. I wasn’t doing anything crazy: I got an Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard, with new memory and an AMD Barton 2500+ CPU. And it doesn’t work with my newest hard drive. It will boot, it runs, but I get a BSoD on every Windows install.
So, I turn to the web. This isn’t just my problem, others have had the same difficulties. Do I return the board? Maybe, but I am stubborn enough to not want to do that. Instead, I am trying all of the fixes I possibly can: new IDE cable, new power supply, new (different) memory, and finally, maybe a SCSI boot drive instrad. And knowledge that my next mobo will be an Abit.
(Before I get “Just use Linux,” I have a strong feeling that this is a hardware or driver issue, and layering another operating system on top of that won’t help. Besides, there are still a number of programs that are MS-only that I can’t afford to ignore.)
Assembling computers and getting them to work used to be this hard, but I thought it had gotten much easier lately.
An article in the New York Times (Could I Get That Song in Elvis, Please?) introduces a new technology called “Vocaloid” that makes use of a singers performed phonemes to replicate his or her voice. This process is referred to as making voice “fonts” and while they only have two so far, the article suggests that it might be able to “rip” such fonts from signers with a large existing corpus. It also predicts that the technology is relatively cheap, and will reach consumers soon.
Of course, I want to play with it. It’s far from perfect (download samples here). But this seems to be the first step toward a refinement that will allow you to put words in people’s mouths. It’s already very difficult to trust images, but we have an innate feeling that we trust voice recordings. I want to emphasize the upside, which is a great new tool that can increase the creative output of music professionals, and also amateurs. But it does, once again, separate us from our traditional view of human skill. Just as word processors have eliminated the need to know how to spell all but the most commonly used words, and the calculator has moved the location of calculation from the head and hands into a machine, children (and, unfortunately, school administrators) may begin to ask if it is necessary really to teach voice. In either case, it would be a mistake not to recognize this as more than a novelty.
I begin my collection of “frequently asked questions” with this one, not because it is so frequently asked, but because it is asked far more often than I would expect, and it so often leaves me without an answer. “Stuff I’m interested in” is probably the most accurate, but also the one that seems the least satisfactory. Sometimes I launch into the reasons for having a number of books on hand, and why—even with a serviceable library of several million volumes less than 50 steps from my office door—I have given over a small part of one of my office walls to a bunch of books.
Now, I have an alternative. Click on the chart above to see a breakdown of the Library of Congress subject headings that dominate the books I have at my office (fun with Excel!). I’ve pulled out the Hs because that was the largest category. A list of the books that generates this is here.
Don’t read too much into this collection. It’s what I have at work right now. I am very happy to have suggestions (“You mean you don’t have the new edition of the complete works of Grotius yet!?”), but this list doesn’t include the books I have tucked onto shelves at home.
Hard not to love this. Ethan Zuckerman has a system that watches Google News (among others) for mentions of the countries of the world, and then plots their frequency on a map of the world. This is a very simple, and very clever, thing to do. I was ready for some cringeworthy wild assumptions about what this meant, given that it wasn’t coming from someone who necessarily looks at global news flows in general, and was pleasantly surprised to find a nice discussion of what this means and how it can be used. (OK, the example of “Scotch whiskey” needing to be disambiguated from other Scotch things was a bit off kilter; what other Scotch things would that be?)
Interesting stuff, well worth checking out. I suspect the link is already everywhere on the blogosphere, and if it’s not, it should be..