Why would the same not be true of your mental map? Integrating an exocortex into your mind may be easier than you think.

Read all about it here. Oh, and you can read their book here too.

Go watch it now! You get to see me wearing glasses. And drinking water. It’s hot. Me, not the water. Why would I be drinking hot water? That’s weird.

If you hate it, you can tell all your friends, and they can hate it too.

It worked for Cuil. “Hey, we don’t even have a working search engine yet, but we’re a Google killer.” And when they went live, it turned out that Cuil wasn’t so cool after all.

It’s working for Wolfram Alpha. “Hey, we don’t even have a working search engine yet, but one expert suggested that we could be ‘as important as Google’.” (Subtext: Google Killer!!!)

Snape kills Google! I can haz Google killer? OMG WTF Google Killer!!!11one. Why doesn’t someone just register www.googlekiller.com and get it over with?

So now that you’re older, why not use the OpenCourseWare materials at MIT? They have a complete Artificial Intelligence course online. Not only that, but they also have an online tutor that’s available for anyone to use.

That means you. Go! Go forth and learn some mad science! Muahahahaha!

English, and most other western languages are written from left to right. But let’s say I want to add 14235 and 31322. I have to start at the left side, at the smallest units. I can’t just write 45557. I have to calculate the seven first, and either remember it, or write it down somewhere else.

However, if we were to write numbers the other way around, things become much simpler. Let’s say I put a chevron in front of reversed numbers. It is placed in a way that indicates that smaller units come first.

Let’s try adding <53241 and <22313. The result is obviously <75554. I didn’t have to remember the smallest unit! I just typed it as I calculated it. The most I have to remember is to carry a one.

Why does our number system exist in this weird state? Probably because western merchants got it from the Arabs. They invented the number zero, which really simplified arithmetic for the merchants. And Arabic is written from right to left.

Will we ever fix this deplorable problem in the way western civilisation does arithmetic? Probably not. After all, in electricity we’re still using conventional current flow, as opposed to electron current flow.

Rotten tomatoes and criticism to /dev/null.

I agreed, and in January I spent a week in Amsterdam. It was… interesting.

My first impression of Amsterdam was that it’s cold! It was a transition from 35°C to -5°C. And it was overcast and rainy too. The heavy coat I got from the army surplus store immediately became my favorite garment.

Amsterdam is very vertical. My flat was on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator. In fact, I don’t recall any elevators, anywhere. My bedroom was basically a large bunk-bed. When I went to report myself to the Aliens Police (Live Long And Prosper!), the only thing they had in their entrance hall was a set of stairs. No ground floor.

The architecture did remind me strongly of Stellenbosch, which makes a strange kind of sense. There seems to be very little redevelopment in Amsterdam. Everything is converted from old buildings, which were largely around before Simon van der Stell was even born. The wooden stairs even had the same construction.

Their transport system was a revelation. A single ticket strip can be used to transverse the city by bus, tram or train. The trams are electric, and the power cables simply don’t get stolen. In fact, they haven’t had any power outages or glitches for the last 25-odd years. Their office servers are not even connected to UPSs.

Despite the extensive public transport system, many people get around by bicycle. All the bicycles are ancient black models (with no gears!), since any obviously new bike gets stolen. Even new bikes are made to look like old bikes. I have seen some interesting innovations, like wheelbarrow bikes, and I once saw a guy pulling along an unmanned cycle next to him.

Everybody was thin. All the stairs, the walking, the low temperatures, and the diet all seem to contribute to a higher metabolism and a healthier lifestyle. Through no special effort, I lost a kilo in the week I was there, and I never had so much energy. It must be my European heritage. My body seems adapted for those conditions.

The people are not only beautiful, but friendly as well. They did all assume that I could speak Dutch, but everybody I met was fluent in English as well. I did get the most terrible headaches from trying to watch English and American TV-shows. All of them were subtitled in Dutch, and I couldn’t stop myself from reading the subtitles. You try to watch an English show while being forced to read subtitles in a language that you understand about 75%, but with more complex grammar and a not quite foreign vocabulary.

There seemed to be no large billboards, no beggers, no violent crime, and no supermarkets. Yes, no supermarkets, at least not like we know them over here. I also saw only one bookshop that had any English books at all - the “American Bookshop”. Book prices were comparable to book prices here, but almost all other goods are at least twice as expensive.

Speaking of other goods, nothing had labels in English! I had to puzzle out whether I was buying cheese, soap, or head cheese (aka. braaaaains) using my broken Dutch, and even more broken German. Of course, there was usually an attractive young lass around to ask for help.

And no, I didn’t smoke dope at a “coffee” shop, and I didn’t visit the redlight district (although my host made us walk a long way through many twisty little streets until it was unavoidable that we had to take a “shortcut” through A redlight disctrict.)

Spectator sport seems to be an oxymoron there. Everybody that I met had at least one sport that they do, but not any that they watch. Even mind sports are revered. In Amsterdam alone, there are not less than five Go clubs, some of which meet more than once per week. I even spent one evening in a mind-sport cafe, where people were playing chess, bridge, Go and various other board and card games.

I did play against someone who used to be a 3-dan Go player, and he was gracious enough to let me lose by only 2 points before educating me on many interesting and subtle points of the game.

In the end, I did not accept the job offer. Amsterdam isn’t nearly as foreign as I thought it would be, but it just doesn’t feel like home.

They don’t even know what milk stout is. Screw that.

I wanted the drive to be in FAT32 format so that I can both read AND write it from Linux and Windows. NTFS is usually only readable from Linux. The large clusters are inefficient for such a large drive, but I’m willing to give up that space for a more versatile storage device.

Windows XP won’t let me format such a large drive as FAT32, insisting instead on NTFS. It’s a good thing that mkdosfs has been ported to Windows, because this utility allowed me to format a drive larger than 32GB as FAT32. Once again, the twin powers of GNU/Linux and Open Source have triumphed!

I named it Gamera.