Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity

New comment on your post #505 “Gaggle new services”
Author :
Comment:
hi, thanks for the link to “Avril Lavigne Girlfriend” video!

chill

hi, thanks for the link to “Avril Lavigne Girlfriend” video!

chill

Personally, I feel happy with Gaggle search engine new service of “manging and viewing your web history”, but I have a “friend” that is freaking out because he just realized that Gaggle has all his search history ready to make money for Gaggle without consideration to his own privacy. Of course, I am not worried – indeed, all my searches are legal. Or at least they were all legal in Afghanistan, in the period of chaos just before the Taliban took over. Anyway, lets not change the topic, the really important thing is that Gaggle is coming out with even more exciting and innovative services just for you:

1. **GIQ** (Gaggle IQ) – It is easy to judge a person intelligence by the questions they ask, and even easier by their searches. Gaggle plan to use your search history to compute your IQ. Ultimately, this is going to replace SAT. Remember, searching for “Avril Lavigne Girlfriend” will reduce your assigned Gaggle IQ by one (and thus might cost you your place in MIT [but they might hire you as their dean of admission, so not all is lost]), and searching for evolution would increase it by one unit (but only for the first three times, after that you should already realize that it is just a scientific theory and such it should be ignored by all really intelligent people). Since Gaggle is going to use GIQ as their only measure in deciding if or not to hire you, you could ask them to recompute it by submitting your accredited GPA from your kindergarten and preschool. Since your grades (in this critical age) are more important than, say, your intelligence, creativity, track record or abilities when deciding if you are good enough to work for Gaggle or not.

So, remember, keep these searches intelligent and smart. If you really have to search for something stupid, use Microsoft search – it will return you stupid results, anyway, independent of what you search for.

2. **Gaggle Sister** – this is the perfect combination of a recommendation system (like TiVo), your search history, and Gaggle Pay & Play service (i.e., you pay, Gaggle plays). The idea is simple – your search history can reveals your personal preferences in all categories. It is now an easy task to create your own recommendation list. For example, if you search for “digg.com”, then clearly, you are white & nerdy, but then clearly you need the bible for moral support (since only god will have mercy on your pathetic and useless soul). Now, in the old, tedious and unfriendly system you had to click at least once to get your recommendations delivered, but with Gaggle Sister ™, the system would spontaneously decide when you need something, order it for you, charge your account, and get it delivered to your home. In the above hypothetical case, the bible would appear on your doorsteps 72 hours after your searched for “digg”.

This service is so good, you will start believing that you have a big sister that takes care of you!

The big difference between “big brother” and “Gaggle Sister”, is that in 1984 you had to believe in the “big brother”, but “Gaggle Sister” just believes in your bank account – a better deal for everybody involved.

(Another name that was considered was “big mama“, but it was realized that it was already in use in Korea [although I still don't understand why his eye is on the sparrow - when he can just kill the damn bird thirty seconds into the song and save himself from four more minutes of suffering].)

3. **Gaggle Bliter** – lets face the harsh truth – blogs are boring and repetitious. Millions of teenagers (or older people) being excited by the same latest stupid thing and just have to blog about it is not original or interesting – it is boring. And predictable. And boring. Most of these people, on second thought all of these people, should leave writing to somebody that writes better than them (like Bush’s speech writers – “Axis of Evil” – what an expression of pure genius). And this is exactly where Gaggle Bliter comes in – using your latest searches, identifying people that write similar blog entries to you, etc, Gaggle Bliter (Blog+Writer) will write your blog entries for you. Releasing you from the tedious needs of writing and posting (or even reading!) your own boring boring boring entries on your blog.

(Of course, the amount of information involved that is needed to be stored is gobsmacking – luckily one can used compressed sensing techniques here to compress the date into much smaller size, so that perfect recovery is still possible [of course, nobody with any common sense would like to recover any of this data, but that is a different issue].)

Of course, there is already an explosion in mindboggling boring blog entries. Fortunately, Gaggle already have the tool of choice to fight this phenomena – “Gaggle Reader” can read all these boring entries for you – no need for you to waste your time. This way you can do something more productive with it (like search for more Avril Lavigne songs on microsoft search).

4. **Gaggle Paranoid** – analyzing your latest searches it would detect when you start to being suspicious about Gaggle. At this point, it would pass your name to the authorities. You would be immediately arrested and sent to Guantanamo for reeducation.
5. **Gaggle Monk** – just like an electric monk with the difference that it would use your Gaggle search history to guide its spiritual search for enlightenment.

**Update:** I really like it here in Guantanamo – the “doctors” are treating me quite well. They repeatedly asked me if I am a member of The Left Wing Conspiracy, but I told them I never heard of this rock group.

New comment on your post #504 “Korea 4 – My name it is nothing”
Author : Sariel Har-Peled
Comment:
Well, hopefully you are not Korean…

But really, every “letter” is made out of (up to) three characters, so the alphabet is in fact reasonably easy to learn.

Well, hopefully you are not Korean…

But really, every “letter” is made out of (up to) three characters, so the alphabet is in fact reasonably easy to learn.

New comment on your post #504 “Korea 4 – My name it is nothing”
Author : Yajun
Comment:
All Hangul looks similar to me…:(

All Hangul looks similar to me…:(

My name written in Hangul (Korean)…
!Sariel Har-Peled

A rather interesting alphabet…

The meshing problem asks how to partition a region (in two or three dimensions) into a small number of nice looking pieces. This is a fundamental problem in engineering used in almost any physical simulation performed on a computer.

The most basic version of this problem is where you are given a point set in the plane (say inside the unit square), and you would like to add (few) points to the point set and compute the best possible triangulation. Best can differ, but a standard measure is that the minimum angle in the triangulation is maximized. Of course, you would like to have a triangulation with as few triangles as possible.

This problem is relatively easy to state, but it is notoriously hard to make progress on it. And unlike other hard theoretical problems making progress on this problem has impact on the real world applications. The standard solutions includes quadtree refinement (see this nice paper by Bern, Eppstein and Gilbert) – which is useless in practice (constants) but theoretically optimal. Another standard technique which is widely used in practice is Delaunay refinement.

In recent years,
">
">new paper][4] up with similar (additional) improvement. The idea is to insert locally the best possible point. As a hack one can add a simple and local (and thus cheap) “smoothing” step which also improves the results. (See paper for more relevant refs, etc.)

For a week I went to Gyeongju (where SoCG 2007 is going to take place) with Otfried & Jonha. Here is the the resulting local guide written by Otfried: food and
sightseeing.

So, did you register yet?

I would link to my pictures once I organize them a bit…