Poked.net

Ironically George Bush and John Kerry are actually related: granted they are 9th cousins twice removed, but it is still interesting.

I have an interesting question to ponder. Not too far past, cell phones were a terrible rarity. They are now quite prevalent in most developed nations. The issue then is, what happens to toll-phones. These used to be money makers for phone companies. Charge 50c for a 2 minute call, thats a huge profit margin. Now, the volume is so low, I don't imagine that it is still cost effective to install, or even to maintain toll-phones. On the other hand, one can argue from a community perspective that toll-phones are still beneficial, albeit less so than earlier. Going forward, should we attempt to maintain a network of toll-phones, or should we just begin to rely exclusively on cellular connections for remote location? If we do decide to maintain toll-phones, is there some way to continue to make them commercially viable, or should they government subsidied - a small price we all must pay.

Its not a terribly important question, but I think it is an interesting one.

Visited an old high school friend, Andy, over at Clemson yesterday.

Back in high school, a physics teacher of ours said that hypothetically if one wanted to, one could crush a beer can using an induced magnetic force within a coil of wire. Just as a hypothetical example, of course. The required energy would be way too high to realistically do something like that.

Of course, high school students have selective hearing. Andy and I (eventually mostly andy) plotted on how to accomplish this feat. The trick was storing and releasing enough energy in one quick shot. To this end, one needs a capacitor. A big one. Our initial plan was to get a few hundred flash bulb capacitors from disposable cameras. These were free for the taking at local drug stores and other such places. Took alot of work, but many shocks later, we had a capacitor array. Only it didn't work well enough.

Ultimately, Andy continued the quest - buying a capacitor and acquiring the transformer required to step up the voltage. Yesterday, he showed me the fruit of the hard work. A can crusher for the not-so-masses. It takes about 2 minutes to charge up, and requires earplugs for the firer. Nevertheless, the resulting can is pretty cool looking:



Also, a close up shot.

This is pretty cool. Google now has a semi-searchable photo gallery for MY russia photos:
http://images.google.com/images?q=site%3Awww.poked.net+russia

From the count, it shows that google is missing only about 2 photos out of 579.

So there it is folks: my personal googlified photo gallery

My Google Search

So, the story goes - Yahoo created this individualized search engine thing that blocks websites. I decided to show off and do a one up on them with a google feed - over the course of one evening.

Well, I actually had this project in the back of my mind for a LONG time. And by back, I mean way back. Back as in hidden behind the spiderwebs in the shed in the far corner of your yard. That yard which happens to be in your summer house in sweden. That far back. But it has been there for awhile, and the Yahoo thing reminded me, so I all of the sudden decided to create it. The Signal-To-Noise metric is a pretty new addition to my concept of the project though. I had in mind something even more simplistic - but the SNR works exceptionally well.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, go to the site above.

My next thought is not that you should classify samples yourself but rather the system should get more results (say 100) and make refinement suggestions by self-organizing the pages into similar groups and finding refining words for each of those groups. I think I need to move away from PHP to do this though as it really is asking for a multi-threaded approach to perform the Google queries fast enough.

Ok, enough techno-rambling. I think it is a pretty good project for one evenings work.