Ahh, where to start. Well, Netflix (your favorite place to rent movies online, receive them through your mail, then mail them back) has been hosting a competition for a while now. The object is to come up with an algorithm to make helpful suggestions for what a person should rent, based on their rental history. Think of it this way: teams are given access to 2+ gigabytes of data. Within this data are many anonymous movie rental histories. So, let’s say you have a history of 30 rentals from one person. The goal of the competition is to examine the first 15 rentals, then correctly predict a percentage of the next 15 rentals.

A Slashdot discussion titled Psychologist Beating Math Nerds in Race to Netflix Prize inevitably veered off course into a debate about scientific knowledge and the interplay between different academic fields. With regards to the history of science and the average level of scientific knowledge, there’s quite a comment (it is in response to this misguided comment):

What a bunch of drivel. Just because their level of knowledge isn’t what we have today, doesn’t make it any “easier.” Do you have any idea at all, or can you even comprehend, the kind of mathematics that were employed back in the day to solve anything? Take a look at the Principia for example. The geometry is insane. I’m a graduate student in Physics and I can’t really follow his proofs.

Furthermore, because early scientists did not have as much to build on, that makes it all the more difficult. Where was Faraday to get his inspiration on lines of force? What lead Maxwell in the right direction to unifying light with electromagnetism?

It’s great that 3rd graders know about electric circuits. That’s the point of scientific progress. That doesn’t make the original task trivial in any sense.

In other words, I hate you.

Whether or not you like the punchline at the end (it’s pretty much the reason I posted all this), that’s a pretty good point.

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If you happen to be cooking a delicious chicken burger from Trader Joe’s on your stove top in your apartment, and you remove it from the pan in which it was cooking, you should make sure that you turn off the gas on the hot pan. If, in the event that you forget to do this, you should not panic upon realizing that the heat has been on an empty pan, and then pour water into the pan. This action will fill your apartment with incredible amounts of (admittedly delicious smelling) chicken smoke. You should, however, DEFINITELY OPEN ALL THE WINDOWS you can get to, turn on a vent fan, and hope to everything that is good in the world that your smoke alarm doesn’t go off.

If possible, after clearing out the smoke, you should enjoy your dinner, take a nice hard workout, and then shower with the window open, so the cold air from the outdoors fills your shower with thick billowing clouds of freshly scented steam.

Just some advice.

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Designers Toolbox: Proof Reading Marks. Many of these are obsolete in this era of computers, but I still use the marks for delete, new paragraph, comma insertion, transpose, and change to lowercase.

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Mykala was nice enough to frame some of my photographs and hang them in her apartment.

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Dan, of Dan’s Data (naturally), wrote a really informative article, called The Great Apathetic Revolution. It’s about this ridiculous situation: it is illegal to back-up copies of DVDs, games, etc. that you have legally purchased. Further down the article is a great set of facts describing the internet:

But P2P transfers, almost all of them copyright-infringing, now account for at least a third of all Internet traffic. Plus almost 10% for good old newsgroups, almost all of whose traffic, by volume, also breaks the law. YouTube accounts for about another 10% of all Net traffic all by itself.

One. Third. Of all internet traffic. Holy cow.

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