whitez

Statistically, if you pay $247.27 to Charity: Water, you save a person's life.

I've been doing a lot of programming recently. Unable to sleep thinking about apps, reading up on new ideas.

I made this common sense viewer too. You can try your own words.


Click for big
There are more apps coming. Yay! :)

Good morning!

It's another beautiful day in Japan.

Man plans. God laughs.

Apparently, life is a game.

Awesome public speaker... with tourettes.

And as an extra... a stage actor with a stutter, a swimmer with no limbs, and a deaf spanish-as-a-second language speaker.

Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

Read that again.

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/12/scientists-extract-images-directly-from-brain/

This is going to change the world.

http://dailyburn.com/foodscanner

It seems to me, the first step to improving something is to understand it.

I thought I'd track my spending as an experiment, and found I spend much more than I thought, and mostly on drinks from vending machines. Now that I know this, I can reduce my outgoings very effectively by just taking my own drinks to work, instead of feeding the vending machine there.

I was tracking (and still am), my time on various applications on my computer. Seeing the amount of time I spent on Second Life caused me to make a change - it's no longer installed.

For me right now, the things I can think of to measure (and improve) are:
How my time is money spent
How my time is spent
What food I have eaten (To see if I'm being healthy)

Money is easy to measure, just write down when you spend cash and add it to your account statements at the end of the month.
Time spent is a little harder, but you know when you work, and when you use the computer, and a little bit of awareness helps you keep track of the rest. (I'd still like some way to completely track this though.)
But nutrition is much harder. I haven't the energy to look at every label with fats and carbohydrates to see what's good for me - and to be honest I don't know what to look for. My nutritional knowledge is at the "Fruit and milk good, burgers and ice cream bad" level.

This app is a fantastic idea. I haven't got an iPhone yet, but imagine the app telling you "you need more vegetables", or "you've had too much sugar today". Just follow the advice and there's nothing to remember. Just optimum nutrition.

I've just run across this personal mission statement builder - I think it's really good.

http://www.franklincovey.com/msb/

Can you help me? I'm hoping someone can host a Java app for me on their always-Internet-connected box.

The app is called "DistanceServer" and can tell you how many hops it takes to get from one article to another on Wikipedia.
It is quite friendly, just run it on boot and it listens on one port. It doesn't write files, and sleeps until someone connects to it. It stores a lookup table in memory (about 15MB).

I'm using it for LifeMapper (http://software.tanos.co.uk/lifemapper/), which is a program to predict new experiences you would be interested in.
At the moment, LifeMapper is hosted on a DreamHost private server, since I need to run this Java app non-stop. (It would be killed on shared hosting.) However this is costing me about $50 a month on an unusuably slow setting and about $130 a month if I speed up the server to be responsive.

I'd like to get someone to host my app, and then I can downgrade back to shared hosting and save myself about $60 dollars a month. (Probably making the web app quicker in the process.)

Have a play:
http://remote.tanosgroup.com/livejournal/LifeMapperDistanceServer.zip
(Just connect to the app and type something like "tennis<_sep_>tokyo<_sep_>5")

If you can host this app, please write me a comment! Pretty pleeeeeeeeease.

Let's read the Daily Mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-398998/How-feminism-destroyed-real-men.html

"Mineral water is more than a thirst-quencher. It makes a bold statement of brand preference, an essential ‘cosmeceutical’ and can also be distinguished according to taste and mouthfeel to complement food and wine."

From: https://www.mastercardmoments.com/en/index.aspx#/article/3/21

Whoo! 7,000 people on one beach.

...and crashing waves that send you rolling underwater.

Sunburnt. Ow.

This is happiness. Picnic atmosphere, non-pro guitar music, nothing to rush to. Just need a girlfriend now. :)

It's at the 42,093,461st digit of PI.

...67284454547410437761 76798669 57333737023752367166...

...C,66J+M= LOVE 9!%%%4$GB...

Welcome to the uncanny valley

Videos under the pictures.

http://www.aist.go.jp/aist_j/press_release/pr2009/pr20090316/pr20090316.html

Have you "Said what you need to say?"

I got an email earlier today about the (possible) coming technological singularity. This is where an AI of above human intelligence is developed, this AI builds a higher intelligence AI, and so on. This fast iterative improvement of machine intelligence would leave humans far behind, as a species of lower intellect.

Should this AI decide that a human (or humans) pose a risk to its aims, it may capture or destroy them (us). Look what happens when we get bees in the attic or a rat infestation in our house.

Sounds like fun.

...So, anyway, the point. Life. Often on computers people will use genetic algorithms to simulate life, or to get to a solution to a problem. Using the principles of evolution, let the items breed which match your goal, and remove the ones that don't. The problem in using this for evolving the ultimate intelligence is that you are limited by the environment. The program in which all your artificial life lives. The only evolving part is the "DNA" of each organism. So you are limited by the rules in the program that interprets this DNA.

So remove the limited set of rules.

Make a program that searches for others of its kind, copies its content, and creates a hybrid of its machine code operations with that of its new friend, applies a little mutation to the hybrid and writes out an executable file and runs it.
This first generation would make sure the new life was created correctly, checksum matching, data and operation code in the right place. Maybe the code wouldn't do anything sensible, and would probably crash with a out of range memory error, but it would run.

So build a few, and let them go... (after a backup, obviously)

There's a good chance you'd get at least a few fertile organisms to continue the system as both of its "parents" were fully working.

If it accidentally evolves into an organism that uses up all the memory or disk space (or even shuts down the computer it is on), then so be it. Just like natural life. Animals caused their own extinction by using up the food or resources in around them... and we're heading the same way.

The vast majority will die immediately; the EXE checksum not matching, invalid memory access, operations and dlls. But should a few live, and continue to breed, you'll get more organisms. Your limiting factor is memory and disk space.
If things don't go well, you can always seed the environment with more robust and ability-filled lifeforms later (with skills such as directory movement, deleting competitors, FTP, etc)

Given enough time, and enough space to breed, why wouldn't this become a superintelligence?

Quote from a website:

"After three years of the Ph.D. program in Economics at M.I.T., I noticed that my weight was higher than it ever had been. My close friend experienced the same problem. We were equally dismayed with ourselves - how we had let our studies get the better of our bodies. Our financial circumstances were considerably leaner; we each had savings about equal to a few years of annual income (which wasn’t very high, given that we were in graduate school). So we entered into a contract to lose 38 pounds each. I had to drop from 208 to 170 and my friend from 218 to 180. The targets were based on the high end of the optimal BMI (Body Mass Index) range. We set our target date based on a reasonable weight loss of 1.5 pounds per week. The stakes were steep: half of our annual income.

Here’s the funny thing: at first, neither of us lost weight. Why? Because we hung around together and kept noting that neither of us was doing anything. So we renegotiated and extended the deadline! That‘s when we realized the obvious; that if you have the ability to renegotiate, it inevitably kills the deal. So we added a clause: any attempt to renegotiate the terms of the contract would result in an immediate forfeiture of the bet. It worked. Both of us lost the weight, weighing in at 180 and 170 in January of 2002.

We then drew up a maintenance arrangement to ensure we each kept the weight off. But we didn’t follow through and each of us gained back about 20 pounds. So we put a new contract in place which required us to lose weight and keep it off. By now we had “real” jobs so our salaries had increased, but we kept the stakes the same: half of our annual income. It worked. We both lost the weight and then maintained it. At one point, my friend bounced up a bit, so he had to pay me $15,000. This payment was an investment in his ongoing health. Had I refused to accept it, no future contracts would ever work. Eventually, the contract ended by mutual agreement, and I moved on to a contract with Ian Ayres since we were founding stickK together.

The gap between ending the contract with my graduate school friend and starting a new one with Ian is telling. Without a contract in place, I gained 15 pounds over 5 months. So the first phase of the contract with Ian required me first to lose that excess weight and then maintain it. That contract is still in place, with $1,000 at stake each week. I have designated Ian as both referee and recipient of the money if I fail – with the understanding that he’ll send the money to a charity of his choosing.

I also entered into another contract to exercise regularly. My referee is a visiting student who lives in my guest room. What a slave driver. According to her, playing tennis on the Nintendo Wii with my son doesn’t count as exercise!"

$15,000?! I'm blustering about keeping to goals on my website, but Stickk.com is just terrifying.

Two things:

1) We're watching you, Obama.
2) I found this on iKnow, it's being used to teach Japanese people English. Recommended time of study: 30 days, but I understand it effortlessly, noticing the differences between English and American pronunciation... So many straining to understand - learning a new language. I feel quite humbled. This is why I need to teach.

I've had a long weekend reading self-help websites... maybe you can tell. :)


I've been thinking about purpose.

Here I am, in Japan, doing a job I enjoy. I'm much happier with it than the one I held in London. So generally, happiness is up.

I don't believe everyone has a single goal they are "meant" to do as their life's work - becoming president, or ending cancer. I think that people have different things that make them the most fulfilled, and a life spent well is a life following that fulfilment. If that leads to such a BHAG, great.

So, my thinking turns to me. What should I aim for. No, not a goal. What will (or does) drive me to be most fulfilled?

I'm a guy, so girls will come high on the list I guess. Not "girls", but a single girl who you like deeply, for beauty and mind, to share (both ways) the sparkly, wonderful, uplifting parts of discovery on this round soily thing we all live on.
Also, the love of my family. Miles away, but happy to natter about "things and stuff" with an aim to quietly communicate "we're here, don't worry" while chatting about the little things in our ongoing daily lives.

Things make me happy, yes, but fulfilment is a slightly different animal I think.

Tim Ferris (Since atheism has grabbed me, and I need a new spiritual leader) suggests that life "purpose" doesn't exist; you are born, you die, so try to enjoy it while it lasts. In his book, he wrote something that was very interesting to me. Happiness isn't the goal in life (since you can get that by stupid videos on YouTube or a cold Maxibon), but excitement. Excitement happens when you are growing mentally, feeling new things, breaking old boundaries. Enlightenment on page 52. Well worth the cover price.

Happiness wobbles around, for me, Christmas and New Year, up, Flight home, down, and lots of sub fluctuations within that. It's too variable to feel if you're on the right track. Excitement should be your compass.
It sounds as if I'm a bit homesick, which I am, but my point is different. When you're stuck for what to do now, if your compass is happiness, you look around, find something fun and close, and do that. With excitement, you pick somewhere new. Growth.

I'd like to create a balanced hierarchy of all human knowledge.

I was looking at the Dewey Decimal system but it looks dated with bias towards Europe and America.

I was thinking of document clustering all of Wikipedia, but I worry the results will be skewed in a technical direction.

Thoughts?

I love my life. Hope you do too.

I've just been rung by a fashion magazine, and they want me to do modelling.

Yes, I'm as confused as you are.

I've got hopelessly addicted to Second Life, and was wondering if there was anyone on my friends list who was a member too...

I had Frosties this morning. Oh, so good. :)

I took the http://www.colorquiz.com/, just like snowfields. I found it extremely accurate.
( My Results )

Just had my first Japanese earthquake.

2 "shindo" on the Japanese scale:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency_seismic_intensity_scale

The table wobbled, the bottle of soy sauce rocked a little on the shelf. It was for about 40 seconds.

It was fun. Though it does remind you Tokyo is well overdue for "The Big One"...

Sleep well everyone. :)

Hello everyone.

Short notice, but I'm going to see Hillsong at the Dominon on Sunday. It's a church service with lots of great music.

Here's a video:



If we're honest - I'm not so religious, so just looking for friends interested in coming with me. Might be fun. After we could have pizza or something. In the evening, I might go to a club, but you don't have to come to that if you don't want.

Anyone interested?

Ok, so I'm going to be commuting through the busiest station in the world at the busiest time of the day. Maybe that wasn't the most cunning plan... :)

At least it's only 2 days a week!

Meet Eric

By the way, I'm back in the UK. Anyone want to meet up for a Saturday?

Wow. Thought I'd better share. :D

This is my favourite piece of music at the moment. A great mix of old and new Japanese pop.


I quit school today. I'm coming home.

It's amazing how many silly things you'll do in life for a girl. I wouldn't change anything. :)

Aha!

I like Japanese and computing. All this time I was trying to figure out where I should be heading. Both are fun. Do what you like. :)

I have just got a new job in Japan (Yay!), it starts in April, working in the reception for an optical clinic. All seemed fine until I started looking into what kind of visa I will need.

I'm currently on a student visa. This will expire at the end of March if I do not continue my course. I can't afford to continue my course if I don't work.

I want to work in Yokohama, doing this reception job.

There are many choices of visa offered, but only a few potential options... ( Read more... )

It's the sort of cold when you stop for a moment on your bike, wearing three layers, gloves and a woolly hat, and say "Good grief it's cold".

It's that cold.

I've got an interview on Saturday, wish me luck. :)

:(

Edit:
Sorry. Thank you so much.

Look what I found on my way back home today...

When I say we should do something sometime, I'm secretly hoping you'll say 'Why not now?'

Taiko is awesome.

Homework is fabulous fun, but rather ample.

Life is amplified.

There is more than enough of the resources you want, you just have to learn to use them.

Transitive and intransitive verbs are terrifying.

To be polite, just be passive.

Edit:
Also, Japan is uncannily like anime... even the school bells sound exactly the same!

...now in Japan! :)

Now in the UK...

A collision of deadlines, and my forth 4am finish in as many nights. Freelance work is a lot more fun than permanent work, but if only I could do it just from 9 till 5!

In Japan in nine days. Eep.

I'm not going to finish my Japan diary - it's taking way too long.

Instead, here are all the better pictures from the trip, arranged into a shiney video. Enjoy! :)