Joelin (1.5v) tervehdys on "Hei-hei-moi!". Vieläpä selkeästi äännettynä. Hymyilyttää joka kerta kun Joel sanoo tuon :-) Muutoin sanavarasto on vasta n. sata sanaa, joista suurin osa epäselviä muille.
Onnistuisikohan tuon nauhoittaminen...

Absum has a map of finnish bloggers - Bloggaajakartta

Pekka Haavisto has an MMS Blog called Kuvia tien päältä. An image-only blog. With source code. Neat stuff. Took a while until the Nokia 7650 got into stores, but now stuff like this is finally real. I was hoping for usage like this for a while. That sms thing is so last year.
Pinseri found the link.

Cryptonomicon

I recently read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. A rather long book – over 900 pages... the side tracks were extremely long. But the characters had life, were smart and felt real.

Here are some quotes I liked.

The basic problem for Lawrence was that he was lazy. He had figured out that everything was much simpler if, like Superman with his X-ray vision, you just stared through the cosmetic distractions and saw the underlying mathematical skeleton. Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart's content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin. He saw it in the curve of the silver bars on his glockenspiel, saw it in the catenary arch of a bridge and in the capacitor-studded drum of Atanasoff and Berry's computing machine. Actually pounding on the glockenspiel, riveting the bridge together, or trying to figure out why the computing machine wasn't working were not as interesting to him.

I know exactly how he feels. I'm lazy like that myself.

"You can assume anything that pleases your fancy, Alan," Rudy responded, "but I am a mathematician and I do not assume anything."

I fall into the same reasoning myself quite often. It helps me professionally, but socially it can be quite irritating to the other party.

Randy could see where it was going. Kivistik had gone for the usual academician's ace in the hole: everything is relative, it's all just differing perspectives.

Again, I use this myself quite often…

Alan climbs back onto his bicycle and they ride into the woods for some distance without any more talking. Actually, they have not been talking so much as mentioning certain ideas and then leaving the other to work through the implications. This is a highly efficient way to communicate; it eliminates much of the redundancy that Alan was complaining about in the case of FDR and Churchill.

I just love it when this happens. Unfortunately only at work, but they are very enjoyable situations.

It is trite to observe that hackers don't like fancy clothes. Avi has learned that good clothes can actually be comfortable--the slacks that go with a business suit, for example, are really much more comfortable than blue jeans. And he has spent enough time with hackers to obtain the insight that is it not wearing suits that they object to, so much as getting them on. Which includes not only the donning process per se but also picking them out, maintaining them, and worrying whether they are still in style--this last being especially difficult for men who wear suits once every five years.

So true.

It seems that when you are a certain age, somewhere between about two and five years, your mind just gels. The part of it that's responsible for sex becomes set into a pattern that you'll carry with you for the rest of your life.

There’s even recent research to back this up. (Se this years Scientific American issues.)

Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances.

…I’m still learning…

An then the longest quote about a Business Plan template.

MISSION: At [name of company] it is our conviction that [to do the stuff we want to do] and to increase shareholder value are not merely complementary activities--they are inextricably linked.
PURPOSE: To increase shareholder value by [doing stuff]
EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING (printed on a separate page, in red letters on a yellow background): Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly-up and only returned her ninety-nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril--you are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony. Still reading? Great. Now that we've scared off the lightweights, let's get down to business.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: We will raise [some money], then [do some stuff] and increase shareholder value. Want details? Read on.
INTRODUCTION: [This trend], which everyone knows about, and [that trend], which is so incredibly arcane that you probably didn't know about it until just now, and [this other trend over here] which might seem, at first blush, to be completely unrelated, when all taken together, lead us to the (proprietary, secret, heavily patented, trademarked, and NDAed) insight that we could increase shareholder value by [doing stuff]. We will need $ [a large number] and after [not too long] we will be able to realize an increase in value to $ [an even larger number], unless [hell freezes over in midsummer].
DETAILS: Phase 1: After taking vows of celibacy and abstinence and forgoing all of our material possessions for homespun robes, we (viz, appended resumes) will move into a modest complex of scavenged refrigerator boxes in the central Gobi Desert, where real estate is so cheap that we are actually being paid to occupy it, thereby enhancing shareholder value even before we have actually done anything. On a daily ration consisting of a handful of uncooked rice and a ladleful of water, we will [begin to do stuff]. Phase 2, 3, 4, . . . , n-1: We will [do more stuff, steadily enhancing shareholder value in the process] unless [the earth is struck by an asteroid a thousand miles in diameter, in which case certain assumptions will have to be readjusted; refer to Spreadsheets 397-413]. Phase n: before the ink on our Nobel Prize certificates is dry, we will confiscate the property of our competitors, including anyone foolish enough to have invested in their pathetic companies. We will sell all of these people into slavery. All proceeds will be redistributed among our shareholders, who will hardly notice, since Spreadsheet 265 demonstrates that, by this time, the company will be larger than the British Empire at its zenith.
SPREADSHEETS: [Pages and pages of numbers in tiny print, conveniently summarized by graphs that all seem to be exponential curves screaming heavenward, albeit with enough pseudo-random noise in them to lend plausibility].
RESUMES: Just recall the opening reel of The Magnificent Seven and you won't have to bother with this part; you should crawl to us on hands and knees and beg us for the privilege of paying our salaries.

There's just something deeply pleasing about walking around the tools section of a hardware store. It's a kind of ancient, evolutionary joy of seeing beautifully crafted Tools that perform some function. Especially the simple tools make you appreciate the achievements of mankind. Just look at a screwdriver, hammer, drill, saw, boomerang... amazing stuff. If you ever wondered about what's so interesting about a tool... that's why. Evolutionary joy.

John Hiler wrote an article titled "The Microcontent News Blogging Software Roundup - Part One".

Remember the quote from The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape- descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

We have clearly moved on. The new version should read:

...they still think mobile phones are a pretty neat idea.

Either that or the internet. But I do believe that the end of the 90s will be remembered as the age of mobile phones.
And yes - I DO think mobile phones are a neat idea :-)

Pinserin Suomen Blogilista. Näemmä pääsin mukaan ihan automaagisesti :). Kiva.

I've been reading the special edition of Scientific American titled "The Hidden Mind" (2002). It has some great articles about consciousness, the brain, sleep, emotions, etc. Here are some thoughts I'd like to share.

Movie-in-the-brain deals with the concept of consciousness and awareness. (The movie being the composite of sensory input and "self" being the ability to make sense of that input.). The evolutionary edge is or course the ability and incentive to react to alarm signals. "Evolution of self rewards awareness, which is clearly a survival advantage.". But what is the relation of the movie and "self":

Self-awareness is actually part of the movie and thus creates, within the same frame, the "seen" and the "seer", the "thought" and the "thinker". There is no separate spectator for the movie-in-the-brain.
SciAm: The Hidden Mind, pg 9

So our self-awareness is an illusion... But fear not, it only means that our self is coded as information, which should be considered just as "real" as our surroundings... which - based on quantum theory - is "only" information too (quantum bits).
Helsingin sanomat had a small article about this too, referring to the work of Daniel C. Dennett. (Thanks for the link, hoito.org.)

Dreams. Great article about the history of dream research of the current understanding of their meaning.

...dreams reflect an individual's strategy for survival. The subjects of dreams are broad-ranging and complex, incorporating self-image, fears, insecurities, strengths, grandiose ideas, sexual orietation, desire, jealousy and love.
SciAm: The Hidden Mind, pg 60

The unconscious (~= dreaming) works during REM sleep and is an old evolutionary feature. It's like an automated strategy planner dealing with any issues that are related to survival, including sosiological strategies.
Tightly related to this is the processing of memory, which is of course needed for strategy planning. RAM sleep also strenghtens the memory images stored during the day. I suppose sleep focuses on survival memories, but for humans "survival" includes day-to-day life issues. (What kind of a mobile phone to buy?)

I still have a few articles to read... I'll be back.

Hehee. Pinseri löysi hauskan jutun klassisesta huijauskirjeestä, jossa Afrikkalainen hemmo yritää siirtää rahaa tilille. Jutussa yritetään naruttaa huijaria oikein olan takaa.
Lisää huijareiden narutuksia.

Part 3a of Matt's Particle Physics Column. Great stuff.

In this part we'll discuss the history of the electroweak interaction, from Chadwick's discovery of the neutron to the unified electroweak force as it stood in the pivotal year of 1968. The second part will deal with developments since 1968, the discovery of the W and Z bosons, and the era of precision electroweak physics at the Large Electron Positron Collider.

Amazon Light. Love it.

Pretty neat that Neil Gaiman has a Weblog. I like his stuff. Sandman series is just great stuff and his stories/novels reflect a great joy of storytelling. I heard great things about his latest Coraline, which I'll be buying next.

Scary stuff about the process of evaluating school books in California - 38 years ago: Judging Books by Their Covers. Written by Richard Feynman. (Yes, THAT Feynman). And it would seem the same thing is still going on (in the U.S.). I sure hope the books here in Finland are reviewed more reliably. The books I read since the 7th grade were - if I remember correctly - pretty decent, but I can't remember the books before that.

Pinseri kertoo Villeistä Kirjoista. Eli pistetään kirja jonnekin esille, josta sen voi löytää, lukea, ja jättää jonnekin muualle. Bookcrossing kirjoille, Eurobilltracker seteleille ja Cameo valokuville.

Ensimmäinen MMS-kuva, jonka olen (tavallaan) nähnyt. Nokialaisesta Erkkiin. MMS on kova juttu, JOS hinta on halpa. SMS on melko sopivan hintainen, eikä MMS saa kovin montaa prosenttia kalliimpi olla.