thoughtcrumbs : january 2000

This blog done moved

Hey, friends (again). Glad you found the new address. Once I get the bugs and broken links fixed, I'll start posting here. More regularly than at this blog's last home. But in the meantime, you can read tasty seasonal recipes over at my food blog, Veggieburgh.com.

This blog is moving

Hey, friends. I'm moving my blog to another domain, but haven't come up with a good name yet. Do you have any ideas? Email me at my first name at cmu.edu.

I'll announce the new address shortly here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mkburke.

Mapping ambient tones to intervals, or why my office makes me sad

Toby Lester mapped the ambient drones of his office machinery to musical intervals and discovered that the reason he felt unsettled was his office heater, computer, and telephone formed a tritone. Heating his morning bagel created a minor sixth (between the Bb microwave hum and the Gb timer beep).

This American Life contributor Jack Hitt asks, "Might there be a connection between the low, consonant humming of our industrial culture and the dissonant mood of anxiety and irresolution that seems to characterize our century?"

As I type this, my laptop fan cycles between E and F, just a bit slower than in the Jaws shark attack theme. Wonder if Apple knows that.

Hitt points out that mapping ambient intervals changes your perspective, possibly to your own detriment. "Before Columbus's day, maps simply showed an arrow pointing to the mysterious west, with the line: 'There dragons be.' Maybe not every terra incognita needs discovering. But this is America. We don't just explore; we profit. Any day now I expect a house tuner to be ringing my doorbell . . . who'll promise to harmonize the whirr of my toaster with the flush of my toilet and thereby guaranteeing me an inner peace."

Naive Bayes stupidity filter

Niki pointed me to Stupidfilter.org, where they're building a Bayesian classifier for stupid comments posted to blogs. It works like a rule-based spam filter, and the features they've proposed include capitalization (too much or too little), leetspeak, use of exclamation points, etc.

Makes me think my plan to classify politeness isn't so far fetched. Of course, they point out that "a sufficiently advanced [stupidity detector] would probably filter out the whole of human discourse."

Best description of third-party apps on Facebook

The Times describes Super Wall, a wildly popular add-on to the social networking site a "barnacle on Facebook's hull." (Full article)

Nope, no news today