An Embarrassing Find

I'm moving this weekend to a larger place. While I was cleaning the new bedroom, I started vacuuming the top shelf of the closet, which is about 7 feet up. I knocked a DVD off of it, and thought, "Wow, someone left a DVD here!" Then I looked at it: Porn. I told my fiancee and friends and they got a kick out of it. I'm sure someone would be embarrassed if they knew they left it behind. It was in a fairly out of the way place, so it could have been the last tenant or even the one before, not that I care if I know. Anyway, I've sanitized the images somewhat so I don't have slap a restricted content message on my blog.

Wolfram|Alpha Is Online

I've actually not been following the crazy hype around last months release of Wolfram Alpha, the "answer engine" of crazy and uncanny data. So, it wasn't until yesterday that I actually sat down and tried some stuff after a coworker showed it too me. It does some fun and crazy stuff. The way it selects and lays out data is pretty cool.

Anyway, after a few minutes, impressed, we decided that this thing must be evil, or at the very least dangerous. So I suggested we ask it if it was Skynet. It actually answered!
It "claims" not to be Skynet, citing the date of Skynet's activation (from Terminator 2) as the date of it's destruction and also saying how it, "enjoys interacting with humans." I'm sure. HAL 9000 enjoyed human interaction too! See what happened! Also, Wolfram conveniently ignores the fact that in the "new reality" of post-T2 events, Skynet turns out to be a distributed internet AI death program, so you be the judge.

Anyway, I started thinking about things and figured that we couldn't be the first ones to discover Wolfram's suspiciously Skynet intelligence, and as it turns out, we aren't.

EDIT: More funny stuff from Wolfram courtesy of Gizmodo.

Know Your Place

Stumbled Upon this from GraphJam:
Oh ya! Go Pink!

Creepy or No?

Seen while driving around Toronto today:
Creepy or no? Pedophile anyone?

EDIT: Though as a friend pointed out 18 is legal, but this is still creepy.

Ubuntu CPU Scaling Annoyance

I have a dual boot Windows XP/Ubuntu 9.04 thing going on. I mostly sit in windows, for a variety of reasons I won't get into, but every so often will drop into Ubuntu. I started this in school where all of our assignments were compiled and run on linux and so it was just safer (and easier) for me to use linux when working from home.

Now, Ubuntu has a nice CPU scaler, allowing you to set your CPU to different speeds to save power and such. The only problem for me is that whenever I reboot into Windows, whatever the CPU was scaled to at Ubuntu shutdown sticks. I sometimes boot into Windows and fine myself with only a 1 Ghz processor because I forgot to crank it up before shutdown. The is made worse by the fact that "Ondemand" appears to be default scale setting.

So, I decided to try and change the default. A tad annoying since most references I found were to changing the gconf "apps->gnome-power-manager->cpufreq" setting, a setting which apparently no longer exists. So I spent a fair bit of time on this problem, getting a little annoyed. Surely someone else dual boots and has this happen? I eventually hit upon someone who wrote a script he ran at startup to change it:

echo performance > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

I was about ready to do this, even though I thought it was ridiculous that I had to, until I decided that something had to be setting it to ondemand at startup and scanned through the files in "/etc/init.d". Sure enough I find one call "ondemand" which contained this:

for CPUFREQ in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
do
[ -f $CPUFREQ ] || continue
echo -n ondemand > $CPUFREQ
done

Finally! Getting rid of this file fixed the problem. So, if any one else is as stuck and confused as I was, there it is.

Our Best Testing Indicates

My fiancee recently sent me a few choice selections of English responses handed in by her students. The first:

Reasons why fast food shouldn't be banned from being near school as written by a young ESL learner.

1. In order for the children to eat fast food because from is in order to eat a school lunch.

2. The map which will be to the place where the plague fast food store is dangerous in if is in order not to know.

3. Plague fast food the children make eat plentifully and is because making become.

I think this one must be a result of an automated online translator. I really can't fathom how else it could be quite this mangled. My one co-workers response: "I hope she gave him an A, because that just blew my mind. Way to go young learner!"

And next:

Q: What might happen if all of the forest are cut down? How might this change our planet?

A: Maybe in 2050 we can live in Mars. So we plan trees and flowers. We live in there. Government make don't cut trees rule in Mars. And we are not spend school supplier.

Awesome. Mars? Wow, where did that come from? I like though that the English, while not correct, is understandable...till the end at least. I think my friend Alex said it best:

Hah! I actually really like that. It shows a level of thinking ahead and depth of thought which you might not expect :p

The school supplier part has me stumped though.

As amusing as this is, the best though is this post a Korean ESL teacher forum wherein a native English speaking ESL teacher complains that his Korean teacher "incorrectly" corrected him in front of the class:

but she said this sentence is wrong....
"The most fast land animal is the cheetah."

Nice. This sparked off a rather ridiculous thread, that's probably not worth reading, but I will post the first response only because I still can't tell if the poster is serious or sarcastic:

Well, in academic English, which is the dialect of English that we are teaching, it is wrong. Poor form to correct your co-teacher in front of class, however.

Come on, that has to be sarcastic, right? The "Academic English" dialect? Poor form to correct a teacher in front of the class? I feel like this needs to be sarcasm, but sadly I don't think it is.