PUBLIC MARKS with search kicking

LostInTechnology is a blog that was started to share all of the information that we have gained over the years while cursing, kicking, screaming, and dealing with technology. We hope to provide you with the road map we never had. LostInTechnology is the first baby for Kyle and Kendra Judkins. If treated right and fed well, it will grow up to be big and strong.

What struck me was that locative media practitioners often refer back to the situationists as some kind of ancestors, as if they’re working in the same vein. …

But that, to me, seems to be where the similarities end. As alive-and-kicking situationist muse Jacqueline de Jong pointed out during the evening, the situationists wanted one thing above all else: to destroy and disrupt our cushy society. They were sick of it, vowing never to work a day in their lives. They probably would have laughed if they had seen that their ideas had been cherry-picked for ripe concepts. The derive, the detournement. All simple concepts that they purposefully packaged in complex and artistc jargon. And we fell for it.

:) Gauche caviar et Sofa Revolution

WebKit is kicking ass. It’s getting more use: First the iPhone, and now Android. More attention from the bloggers. Amazing downloadable font support. Futuristic HTML5 features: Clientside database storage, along with a slick query browser, as well as sophisticated media embedding and controlling.

Webkit promoting interop hell?

This is a look at trigonometry for practical use in flash actionscript. I am one of those people who could have cared less about trigonometry when it was taught to me in high school. Today I am kicking myself for not paying more attention in math class.

Show off your soccer skills by keeping the ball in the air by heading and kicking.

An Indiana judge fed up with teenage traffic violators is kicking them in the seat -- the driver's seat. Porter Superior Judge Julia Jent is sentencing the ticketed teens to the embarrassment of riding the school bus, if they are found guilty in her courtroom. The judge, said she knew she had reached the teen when the girl started crying outside her courtroom. With that, she figured she found the right punishment. "Oh my God, you would have thought I gave her and her mother the death penalty," Jent told the paper.

Wall art anybody? Step on the trendy bandwagon! ...allthough that shot of Becks kicking is kinda nice!

The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago. New blog creation continues to grow. Technorati currently tracks over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day - and 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. That's an increase both absolute and relative terms over just 3 months ago, when only 50.5% or 13.7 million blogs were active. In other words, even though there's a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging continues to grow as a habitual activity.

Rock Review | Depeche Mode Intimations of Betrayals Big and Small By LAURA SINAGRA Published: December 9, 2005 When the singer David Gahan raised his arms to the sky during "Personal Jesus," Depeche Mode's smash from 1989, it may have looked as if he was positing himself as a savior to his synth-pop flock. Of course, that song is actually a simple lament for the kind of everyday isolation that Depeche Mode has, over its 25-year career, magnified into arena-size catharsis. Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden, the crowd shouted along with its demand for connection, "Reach out and touch faith." Skip to next paragraph Forum: Popular Music While there's certainly a genius to the band's fusion of new wave ache and Euro-disco throb, the key to Depeche Mode's longevity lies in the directness of its sentiments. You could choose to read the dark, vigorously performed hits "Policy of Truth" and "Never Let Me Down Again" as indictments - not just of inconstant love but also of larger, more dire betrayals. Depeche Mode has always appealed to the mainstream by never fully throwing in with quirky new romantics, isolationist goths or insouciant purveyors of industrial dance music. Even when the multi-instrumentalist songwriter Martin Gore wears feathers or chains - at this show, he sported a plumed, centurion-style helmet, leather kilt and black wings - he still seems like a regular guy, as does the teacherly keyboardist Andrew Fletcher. On the retrofuturistic stage set, though, the band looked like regular guys trapped in an Ed Wood movie. Three flying saucerlike keyboard banks emitted light flashes from circular holes as large silver orbs displayed song-appropriate words like "absolution" and "scapegoat." The band was obviously energized by its best new material since the 1990 album "Violator." The new album, "Playing the Angel," fueled by Mr. Gore's divorce trauma and Mr. Gahan's recent songwriting involvement, recaptures a bygone muscular gloom. Kicking off the show, the new "A Pain That I'm Used To" made a back-to-basics statement, dispelling any fears fans might have had of sonic experimentation along the lines of 2001's "Exciter," Depeche Mode's atmospheric jaunt with the Bjork producer Mark Bell. New songs dominated the concert's first half; the standouts were the INXS-like dance-rocker "John the Revelator" and the breakup ode "Precious." Early in the set, the strutting and twirling Mr. Gahan cast aside his gray blazer to reveal a leather vest, later stripping that off as well. Mr. Gore played forceful guitar, periodically manning his synth spaceship. He also handled vocals on the 1984 Wertherian chestnut "Somebody," and warbled "Home," from 1997's "Ultra." Mr. Gore's ballads, which suggested David Bowie on truth serum, garnered applause from the supportive faithful. Mr. Gahan let the crowd sing most of "Enjoy the Silence," the band's lovely, jittery ode to wordless chemistry. If the band kept the provocative "Blasphemous Rumor," with its speculation on God's sadism, and "Stripped," with its plea, "Let me hear you make decisions/Without your television," safely in the vault, you could still find contemporary critique in "Everything Counts," with its sing-along coda: "Grabbing hands grab what they can/Everything counts in large amounts." So simple, and sadly, in matters of love and war, so timelessly true.

AJAX v.s. Flash

The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago. New blog creation continues to grow. We currently track over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day - and 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. In other words, even though there's a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging is growing as a habitual activity. In October of 2005, when Technorati was only tracking 19 million blogs, about 10.4 million bloggers were still posting 3 months after the creation of their blogs.

15. Karl Rove: A greasy pig whose only distinction in life is his total lack of decency. Rove is decidedly not a genius; he is simply missing the part of his soul that prevents the rest of us from kicking elderly women in the face

Black and White 2 AI I played Black and White 2 for many hours yesterday. The computer player and I were in a stalemate. The computer kept sending armies against me and I kept defeating them. I had built my town with walls around it, and then put archers on top of the walls. I was building up my strength while defending myself, in preparation for a big attack. I felt pretty safe. After around 40 attacks, I realized that they weren't all the same. The computer wasn't using the same attackers each time. It tried the creature, archers, swordsmen, and catapults. It tried combinations of them. Sometimes it would come through my main entrance, and sometimes it would come around the back entrance to the city. The computer player also destroyed major sections of the city using the “earthquake” power, but I recovered from these too. After a while the enemy creature figured out that he should kick my wall in. His archers and swordsmen stayed back, out of range, while the creature came up and destroyed my wall, including the archers on it. After it breached the wall, the army swarmed into my town and killed half my people. I rebuilt my wall and started to recover, but the computer's newly discovered strategy worked well. It tried several variants but kept going back to the same approach: kick down the wall, then swarm the town. This forced me to try some new strategies. Although being on the wall has advantages, it leaves the archers vulnerable when the enemy creature attacks the wall. So I moved them behind the wall. I've also learned to open my gate, wait for the enemy army to get close, then close the gate and set their army on fire. I have no good strategy for the creature knocking down my wall though, and I'm constantly losing townspeople and then rebuilding. After a long stalemate, the computer AI learned how to attack more effectively, and now I'm having trouble keeping my city safe. I'm very impressed by the AI. I'm not sure how it's programmed, but it tried out many different things and learned which ones work the best. From the game AI techniques I've learned (genetic algorithms, neural networks, fuzzy logic, state machines, etc.), the AI in Black and White 2 seems to match most closely with what I know about reinforcement learning. It's a technique that uses online learning (observing results as the game is played) instead of training (from examples constructed ahead of time), allows both exploration (trying new things in order to learn) and exploitation (taking advantage of what you've learned), and associates rewards (like whether the attack was successful) with actions (like kicking down the wall and keeping the army away from my archers). I recommend Sutton and Barto's book if you want to learn more. It's entirely possible though that the game uses something much simpler that just happens to look impressive, but my guess is that it's using reinforcement learning. — Amit — Monday, December 12, 2005 Comments: Post a Comment Links to this post:

site that combines flickr pics and tags and google maps to bring together descriptive photos and landscape.

"The U.S. Library of Congress is kicking off a campaign on Tuesday to work with other nation's libraries to build a World Digital Library, starting with a $3 million donation from Google Inc.".

Place your flickr photo on a map and geotag them