These are not quite resolutions, but a short list of my (personal, not professional) goals for this year. I’ve never been in to the whole ‘make resolutions and change your life on the first of January’ thing. Maybe it’s because I’m not really that long out of school, and the start of the school year always seemed like a more logical place trace in some vices for virtues. So these are goals, they’re fuzzier than resolutions and if I get […]
A few weeks ago, Ken Jennings (of Jeopardy! fame–74 straight wins) came to visit Google. He was doing the tour for his new book “Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs”. I managed to get myself a copy of the book, and stuck around long enough after his talk to get my copy signed.
I recently finished reading the book, and I highly recommend it. It’s a nice, easy and entertaining […]
I recently finished reading ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’ by Ray Kurzweil. I had been meaning to read it (or really any of his books) for a while, and after I saw him give a public lecture at Stanford back in mid-May, I ordered the book.
It was an interesting read, and nobody’s ever going to claim that the man doesn’t have some wacky ideas. But he also has […]
As many of you may know, I’m currently heading to California for an on-site interview with Google. I had intended on posting while waiting for my connecting flight in Toronto, but I’m shocked to find the lack of a wifi connection (well, except for an ad-hoc network called “pocket_pc2″, and I don’t believe that I’ll get very far with that). So this message will get posted when I next find a good net connection, most likely at my […]
I just (last night) finished reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins with Sandra Blakeslee. It’s a great read, highly recommended to anybody with even the smallest spark of interest in artificial intelligence or intelligent systems. I found the book through an article in IEEE Computer.
The book starts out with the nickel tour of ‘classic AI’, which has led to some good technologies, but nothing that we’d […]
As seen on Lori’s site:
Grab the nearest book. Don’t search for something cool. Grab what’s actually closest to you.
Open the book to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Rather we have to ask how invariant representations are formed in every single cortical region.
Man, my books must seem pretty dull.
Edit: That line was actually from page 125 of the book I’m reading; I accidently opened to the wrong page… […]
I just recently finished reading Paranoia by Joseph Finder. Although it’s not the type of book I normally read (science fiction, fantasy, general tech.) I did find it to be an entertaining read. It’s the story of a slacker who throws a lavish retirement party for a blue-collar worker (on the company dime) and gets caught. Instead of firing him, or having him arrested for fraud/embezzlement, they train him, help him get […]
I received a copy of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (the special illustrated edition) for Christmas this year, and just got around to starting it this past weekend. I had been told on a couple of occasions that it was a really good book, and each of those people were right. An interesting and entertaining book that’s very difficult to put down–which is why I also finished it this weekend. For anybody who hasn’t read […]
