Thinking

7 February 2006 ⋅ 4 min read ⋅ interesting thoughts

I have just been watching an interesting TV program about robots we have today, their intelligence, outlook etc. Quite thought provoking. It may appear disconnected, but what I started to think about after it was how do we think in general.

Everybody knows that we barely use 10% of our mind potential. Basically, it means that either our decision making is slow or the quality of the decisions leaves the room to wish more. Here’s the connection… Did you notice how you think? When we think, well I do it this way at least, we talk to ourselves in our minds. When we read, most of us does the same. It appears that the speed of reading and thinking is artificially limited by the speed of our speech. It gets us to some several interesting conclusions:

A. If we had no speech, we could either think faster or couldn’t think at all.

B. We feel comfortable in our environment because other speakers think at the same speed with us. The one doing it faster is “the genius”, the one slower — you know.

In my opinion, one possible way for improvement could be cutting our mind off the physical abilities. But how the hell we would learn the result of some computation if we didn’t say it loud in the mind? I suspect, that it’s the place where our intuition connects to our thinking.

Intuition is something that is used to foresee the future, and silent thinking, as I call it, to process the facts. Both work silently and emit thoughts and conclusions we could use. Hope the chain of conclusions isn’t broken somewhere.

One other random thought: what if what we call “reaction” is something that’s connected too? What if in the critical situations we manage to make decisions without doubling them in speech what makes our movements faster yet still well-coordinated?

Pretty good pile of random thoughts, hah.

Some Positive Spam

23 January 2006 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ interesting thoughts

I never payed too much attention to what is in the spam messages I get. Well, until this morning. I briefly scanned the spam from two last days and was surprised with what I discovered. I am winning in at least two lotteries daily, each of which brings me about a million. Now look at it from the funny side.

It’s inconceivable how cool am I that I even don’t bother watching what and when I win, putting it in spam folder all together? I’m just too lazy to grab all this cash. :)

Have a good day… and see you soon!

Clever Paging

14 December 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ development interesting

Maybe it’s somewhat usual nowadays, but I was impressed to the tips of my fingers with a paging functionality I came across on the SourceForge.net site. The paging is those numbers below the list of items you see when, for example, looking through the results of a Google search. So the guys at SourceForge made it slightly different from the traditional approach we see everywhere.

Assuming that you have a list of 505 items, 10 items per page setting and the first page selected, you will see the following pages listed below the main items list “1 2 10 20 30 40 50 51″. Clever, huh. If you now select the page 2 then it would be “1 2 3 10 20 30 40 50 51″ to give you an opportunity to jump one or several pages fore and one page back from where you are.

What is particulary amazing about it is that the functionality appears to work well both for those whole wish to review all items page by page and those who wish to briefly check the contents of the whole results set.

My sincere respect to the SF.net team! Bravo!

Quake 2 on coffee beans

23 November 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ interesting

Two days ago one good friend of mine showed me a link to another rendition of the famous ID’s Quake 2 — Jake2. What makes this reproduction stand out of a crowd is that it’s rewritten entirely in Java. An exciting side is that its last version is very close to the original in terms of performance. You can find their benchmarking reports amusing to look at. And now some spectacular moments…

Liquid Sculpture

18 November 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ interesting

Photographers never stop to surprise and creativity of some of them knows no limits. At that very moment when I start to believe that there’s nothing conceptually new one could create, I immediately find the proof of the opposite. This time it’s absolutely unbelievable pictures of liquids, forming amazing breathtaking sculpture. Take a break and spend some time with a natural beauty — visit Liquid Sculpture.

Google: Magic Tips

16 November 2005 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ interesting

Something that I always missed in Google Search was the fexibility of expressions building. Sometimes those tricks mentioned in the advanced search facility is barely enough to fulfill my immediate needs and I have to make series of searches and combine them later. That’s what always bugged me. Yesterday I was doing some collocations searches for my English classes after my working day full of coding was over and unexpectedly typed in an expression looking more like something from a programming language. To my astonishment it worked finer than fine and returned lots of useful results.

Singing F1 Engines

4 November 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ interesting

I’ve just stumbled across an interesting article by Stuart Waterman on Renault’s RS25 V10 engine, used in Formula One racing cars, has been taught to sing “We are the Champions” by Freddy Mercury.

It’s amazing how precisely this rendition sounds! At a glance I was slightly confused by this fact. What should be happening to the engine internals, switching RPM’s that fast? But the next moment I realized that it could be another wonderful and very artistic way of testing engine reliability and robustness. They could think of some application which takes popular or famous tunes in MIDI file format and use them to make a sound test for engines they produce. The whole factory could sing one song today and choose the other tune for tomorrow. Of course, it sounds weird and this is how it is. But it’s just fun to think about and even more riverting to imagine. :)

Anyway, the MP3 sounds totally amazing and worth listening even if you aren’t fond of Freddy Mercury’s songs. Watch it!

Weird Photoshop Math

4 November 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ interesting

Today I was put into a deep shock with how Photoshop calculates final color of the dot which has several semi-transparent objects on its way. Assume for a second that you have a black background and two 50% white squares on top of each other and the background. What do you think, will the resulting picture show grey square or will it be entirely white?

That Amazing Spotlight Feature of Mac OS X

31 October 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ interesting

It’s not a secret to anyone that Mac OS X has a wonderful feature — Spotlight — which greatly helps to simplify your daily life by providing surprisingly fast search facility. It helps to find almost anything in your Mac without diving deeply into the folders hierarchy. Yeah, everyone knows about it, but what was really exciting for me to discover is a way you can tell it what kind of stuff you are looking for.

Migration To Mac

28 October 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ interesting

Yes, we finally did it with Kate. We decided to replace Kate’s desktop PC with an iBook from a new updated line (14″/1.44GHz/1GB/60GB/SuperDrive/AE/BT). So why have we decided to make this step? Here’s the list of our most important points: Mobility. Kate is a designer and it’s essential for her to be mobile in order to talk with her clients effectively, showing the demos et cetera. Furthermore, we always keep in our minds a potentially-soon migration to Australia and her desktop PC could be an anchor. We both got tired from Windows platform. These endless problems with registry which becomes overflown once a year requiring whole system to be reinstalled can make mad anyone. Also, what makes me sick is that such a big company as Microsoft is unable to show something really revolutionary. Instead, it always repaints Start button in different colors and sells that again and again, while the whole other world is evolving.