Skip to content

raindropper

“pouring…”

Category Archives: Science

January 26, 2008 Radiohead – …

Crystal Set Radio - Neuron

… Learnings from The “On How The Brain Functions” Experiment.

You, the web wanderer, are perhaps aware that a bit over one year ago I posted my research paper about theory of how the brain functions. I also built a blog around it so that you, the brain researcher, can comment it with witty references to tin-foil hats. 😉

The current gain is zero remarks to tin-foil hats.

Seriously, though, I still stand behind the theory and see several strenghts in it. The question is: why I’m not building a working prototype as it only takes a few diodes, capacitors and coils to make it. Maybe it’s because I do not want to disturb the local neighbourhood with electromagnetic noise.  

And: I’d like to thank Joni Tuoreniemi and Paul Tudsbury for commenting it and creating conversation. Thank you!

January 20, 2008 Google Search Works in Mysterious Ways

The moment I saw the first prototype – my drawings in flesh – of the Deomo TV/HIFI unit (“tv-taso” in Finnish), I realized its potential and began marketing it. You can call it passion hitting when you least expect it – I’ve never been inclined in designing or selling furniture.

How do people find the great product (if you pardon these plugs)? Via searching the web, of course. So, the marketing plan is currently a simple one – it’s a start and one can build from there. Later on, the product will be on the shops at display and advertising moves on, the usual.

Selected a perfect name for the product. I chose the word “Deomo” because of its visual properties; it looks good and dynamic, and yet stands firmly. Say it out loud: the word starts sharply and ends landing softly giving nice contrast to it. And Deomo.com domain was available.

Then, I designed and built the Deomo.com website. Simple, once again. (I use Microsoft’s free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition.)

The point (gripe) of this post is: the whole site is based around one product “tv-taso” – and yet, currently, it only appears on the distant page 13 of Google search results for that word. Some sites on the results prior www.deomo.com are not that relevant, e.g. they contain random, one-off “I’m selling my piece of furniture” ads.

The other day, it was on the first page for a while, then it dropped back to depths. My guess is that the site had an overload of the term “tv-taso”, and Google punished it for that reason and gave a meagre PageRank. An additional factor is that Google servers are not all in the same state, data-wise, and this inconsistency generates irregular search result ups and downs, high rankings and low rankings making the analysis more difficult. 

Well, I’d guess that after GoogleBot comes and scrapes the contents of this WordPress post, the Deomo site will go higher. Or not, or get even blacklisted – hmm… not really. Who knows – The Google Algorithm, are you listening? Deomo.com is not a typo. 😉

In mysterious ways, indeed. The mystery recipe of The Algorithm keeps us website creators/marketers humble and not capable of tinkering the machine, righteously so I might add. In the past, one of the main trade secrets was Coca-Cola formula, now among the secrets hides also the Google one.

December 17, 2007 Double-Slit Experiment…

…is something that wasn’t taught on my physics lessons. It’s one of the most interesting and mysterious phenomena, and as yet unexplained by scientists.

Put simply, the experiment goes like this: shoot photons through a plate which has two slits on it, to a photographic film. An interference pattern appears on the film – even if you shoot the photons one by one, during a period of time.

Double-slit experiment

Here’s a movie of the experiment.

The question is: from where the interference pattern emerges, how do the photons know where to land on the film to create this pattern? There’s only one photon “on the air” at a time so with what it is having an interaction?

More info on Wikipedia.

October 12, 2007 W3C – Let’s Extend The A HREF Tag To Convey More Information

Sig’s posts on Thingamy and RDF triples inspired me to “put the verb” back to this interlinked mass of documents we call the Web. In a simplified way. 

Here’s the official W3C recommendation and specification of links: 

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html

If you go through it, you perhaps end up in the same conclusion with me: There’s no simple way to define a semantic relationship between web resources.

I propose that we extend the A HREF tag so that it carries more meaning with it. Let’s borrow the PREDICATE concept from RDF and add that to A HREF tag. 

Here’s an example. On nokia.com, there could be a link like this: 

<A HREF=”www.nseries.com” PRED=”produces, sells, markets”>Nseries</A>

So, what would we achieve with this? It would be a way to provide more precise information, more knowledge for the search engines, etc… We would be closer to the Internet Singularity. 

May 30, 2007 Jumped From Sculpt 3D to Blender – I’m Hooked

In the late 80s, most of the neighbourhood bitboys had an Amiga 1000 or 500. Some of us were interested in 3D rendering with Sculpt 3D or Imagine software.

Raytracing took a long time with a CPU running at 7.1 MHz and 1 MB of memory. So, I left the Amiga run its raytracing overnight – in the morning I would check how the picture turned out to be. Heh, I did not even have a hard disk, so I must have been a patient guy.

Now, I’m amazed about the quality of the open source Blender software. I added YafRay renderer, and I’m hooked. Check out those galleries…

January 28, 2007 Semantic Web – Have You Seen It?

Some of you have already heard about W3C’s Semantic Web framework. Tim-Berners Lee, the inventor of the Web,  presented roadmap for Semantic Web in 1998.

The framework can be summarized as:

“The Semantic Web is a web of data.”

“The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects.”

Web today is about sharing documents, Semantic Web is about sharing and reusing data. If it gets the momentum, it will break the boundaries between applications, free the data from their silos. W3C provides a concrete example: my calendar application could – if I wanted – display my bank transactions from this week, and also the photos I’ve taken, day by day.

Some of the tools that the Semantic Web will be powered by are RDF, a knowledge modeling language, and SPARQL, a query language for RDF.

RDF is a method of describing data and resources formally so that they become accessible and understandable for software. Here‘s a primer for it. Berners-Lee’s view is that the future lies in “programming at the RDF level”.  

Below is an example of a SPARQL query. It displays title and price for books that are priced below 30.5. 

PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>
PREFIX ns: <http://example.org/ns#>
SELECT ?title ?price
WHERE { ?x ns:price ?price .
  FILTER (?price < 30.5) .
  ?x dc:title ?title . }

On IBM’s developerWorks interview (28.7.2006), Berners-Lee gives his view on the status of Semantic Web:

“I hope the Semantic Web will take off so that the data basically all the data which is out there which you have access to, to the Web pages, will now be available as data so you can treat it as data. There will be lots of very exciting applications built on that.  And we’re starting to see that now, but it really is, you know, we’re seriously into the exponential growth of the Semantic Web right now, and that’s very exciting.”

Some questions arise in my mind:

Is the original Web – this Web here you’re using now – non-semantic?

Where’s the boundary between data and a document? If Semantic Web uses RDF documents, will it eventually fall to the same “trap” with the original Web?    

Considering the massive amount of data in the Web today, could it be somehow utilized and reused in building the Semantic Web?   

Is there a demo somewhere showing the power of Semantic Web?

Do we really need another query language with its own syntax – why not expand SQL or use English? Could this query be enough:

book title, book price, book price < 30.5

January 19, 2007 Internet Singularity

Gary Flake runs Microsoft Live Labs, MS Research unit which is concentrated solely to the Internet.

His one-year-old presentation “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imminent Internet Singularity” indicates the Road Ahead for Microsoft’s Internet strategy. 

When I hear the word “singularity”, it brings an image to my mind of all things united to one place, then Boom!!! – and a silence that lasts forever…

IMO Microsoft has been quite silent about Artificial Intelligence in the past. But now it seems that they are really starting to focus on that, utilizing the massive amount of data in the web and its feedback mechanisms.

January 1, 2007 A Dedicated Blog For Feedback Opened: Break This Theory

As an experiment I decided to open a dedicated blog for gathering feedback and comments for “On How The Brain Functions” article. So, take a deep breath and jump to here.

I wish You a Marvellous New Year 2007!

December 29, 2006 On How The Brain Functions – Scientific Paper Published

I hereby publish my scientific paper: “On How The Brain Functions”. 

The paper presents my view and theory on how the brain functions, intelligence and learning. It provides a possible and comprehensive solution taking several different disciplines into account. In my view, the science community will benefit from the article. It will inspire, challenge and fuel conversation.

“To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.”

Albert Einstein

You can get the article in PDF format here.

December 15, 2006 Playing with Google Sets

Google Sets can be found from Google Labs – it is in an idea phase, not a final product.

Enter a list of words to it and it expands the set with its own suggestions. Simple sets like [1, 2, 3] and [BMW, Mercedes, Volvo] are easy food for its algorithms.

It is interesting to test its boundaries. Just tried this one: [fly, walk, run, swim]

And damn it would have been wonderful if it had expanded that list with items like: go, crawl, glide, etc. Furthermore, if its algorithms had concluded that set from the massive amount of data gathered by Google Bots and without human data manipulation, then it would have clearly displayed a tiny glimpse of artificial intelligence.

Google scientists and coders, I’m waiting.