July 2008

Bzzt. Cuil fails on a variety of simple searches that pull up plenty of good results in google. Try, e.g., [BB-67 Montana], a hypothetical superbattleship that I wrote a book about. There are lots of pages about this ship, but Cuil claims it can’t find anything.

Even  worse … try [Cuil].  Google brings up two relevant hits, Cuil brings up zero.

Wired News - AP News

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced “cool.” Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Very funny!

Blind Taste Test Shows XP Users Love Vista - Webmonkey

Microsoft took a play from beverage marketing this month with a blind taste taste of Windows Vista. Company researchers rounded up XP-loving Vista skeptics in San Francisco to try out what they claimed was a new operating system, which they code-named Mojave. After taking the OS for a spin, the guinea pigs were let in on the secret: they were drinking straight-off-the-shelf Windows Vista. The taste-testers were overwhelmingly positive.

Here’s a JPEG version of this insanely cool image, created by supercomputer.

Dinosaur supertree

What is the importance of this discovery?
Two things. We have made one of the biggest supertrees yet attempted - with 440 species. The more species you include, the more possible trees might exist - for 440, the number is huge, more than the number of atoms in the Universe. A year or two ago, this wouldn’t have been possible, but now, with ever-faster and larger computers, problems like this can be tackled. Second, we have used statistical approaches for the first time to determine the real pattern of dinosaurian evolution and to test for times of unusually high rates of diversification.

What is a supertree?
A supertree is a tree made up from many ’source’ trees, the original published trees. In this case, we tracked down 155 published trees, some of which covered only a family, others a larger group. These are then combined to produce the best fitting single solution. Of course, the source trees, published by dozens of palaeontologists around the world, include all sorts of conflicts and disagreements. So the supertree methods have to find ways to find the ‘majority’ or strongest verdict.

Tweeting from Wordpress …

in carrier warfare is to man the perimeter of the carrier battle group and absorb heavy losses. While it may not be true that you can never have enough surface combatants, 84 is only 7.5 escorts per 11 carrier groups. An aditional 25 combatants, or ten escorts per carrier, would be a good thing. Maybe at 12 or 15 escorts per carrier they start getting in each other’s way.

Ares Homepage

Collins and Senate colleagues had added $2.6 billion to the 2008 defense bill for the third DDG-1000, which was to have been built by her constituents at Bath Iron Works. She is now advocating for the construction of nine more DDG-51s at BIW, in order to maintain the shipyard’s employment level and turnover. This is apparently more important than any military need for the DDG-51s, which is not discussed in Collins’ release.

It is now time to revisit future Navy fleet requirements: here’s a link to some recommended reading from Bob Work at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, who has suggested ways of defining a new surface combatant

wfzimmerman's review: "Outstanding and definitive--it was sufficiently inspiring to get me to do a long-postponed optimization of my website. I love the way the author mixes quantified tidbits about reader behavior on the web with practical marketing. Must read if you do any of your own website optimization, or if you employ anyone to do it for you."
O'Reilly Media, Inc. (2008), Paperback, 394 pages
tags: computers, web, WWW

Nimble Books specializes in micropublishing timely, relevant information in slender paperback formats that are available via Amazon.com. If your Knol would make the core of a good 32 - 48 page “nimble” book, let us know!

Inside Google Book Search: Do you Knol the ledge?

A few months ago we announced on the Official Google Blog that we were testing a new product called Knol. Today, we’re making it available to everyone. In addition to our official announcement, we wanted to tell you about it here because we think that Knol could be a powerful tool for publishers and authors. Knols are articles about specific topics written by authoritative sources, so if you’re an author, writing a knol is a great way to raise the profile of a topic you care about.

Official Google Blog: Knol is open to everyone

A few months ago we announced that we were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we’re making Knol available to everyone.

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people’s heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.

This is a public domain publication. Why isn’t it available in full view in GBS?

CVAN-70 Aircraft Carrier: Joint … - Google Book Search

CVAN-70 Aircraft Carrier: Joint Hearings, Ninety-first Congress, Second …
By United States Congress. Joint Senate-House Armed Services Subcommittee on CVAN-70 Aircraft Carrier, United

Update: apparently this issue has been around for a couple of years. There is (justified) concern that there may be a (small) percentage of copyrighted material inside GPO publications. Bottom line: Lame-o!

Right on! One of my favorite things to do in a new city is to go for a long morning walk of exploration.

Google LatLong: Pound the pavement

Starting today, you can tell Google Maps that you want walking directions, and we’ll try to find you a route that’s direct, flat, and uses pedestrian pathways when we know about them. Just get directions as you normally would. If you’re going 10 km or less (some call this 6.2 miles), we’ll show you a link that you can click to get “Walking” directions: