From the Wikipedia page for Ashen light:
“Ashen light is a subtle glow that is seen from the night side of the planet Venus.”

“Before the development of more powerful telescopes, early astronomer Franz von Gruithuisen [March 19, 1774 – June 21, 1852] believed that Ashen light was from the fires from celebration of a new Venusian emperor, and later believed that it was the inhabitants burning vegetation to make room for farmland.”

Nice theories, don’t you think? It was likely the best speculation of its time, but just consider how human culture centric those thoughts really were.

1. “fires from celebration of a new Venusian emperor” = Venus has an emperor – implying a hierarchical society – celebrations are conducted on a primitive fashion through the lighting of massive planet-wide fires.
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Back in late June, I was discussing algorithmic trading and HFT (high-frequency trading) with some friends. A sudden realization hit me, and I realized exactly why I’ve had this nagging idea that wide-spread HFT usage is fundamentally a bad idea due to the weird market behaviour it most likely leads to.

Here’s a cleaned up mail I sent, with some links added. What do you think?
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My friend came to me about a great new idea he had. I shall paraphrase our discussion:

-”Yo. Why is reality so hard?”, he asked.
-”I’ve no idea. Why is reality so hard?”, I replied.
-”It’s because there’s too many things to keep track of. I have a solution: micro-feng shui.”
-”Micro-feng shui? But isn’t micro less?”
-”Everything micro is good. For example: microchips. Very good.”
-”OK, so how does it work?”
-”Step 1: reduce spatial complexity. From now on, view the world as a planar space and ignore all height differences. That’s 30% less complexity. Then, step 2: happiness.”

Considering what’s published nowadays in various self-help books, packaging this idea into a 400-page book would probably reach New York Times bestseller list very fast. Not to mention the creation of some sort of a pseudo-religious movement, enabling my friend to be showered in non-Zimbabwean paper currency.

Nowadays a lot of music is in digital format. One of the most popular digital encoding methods is MPEG-1 Audio Layer III, aka. “MP3“. Typically an MP3 file takes around 1/10 the size of the uncompressed original (depending on quality), thereby saving storage space.

MP3 uses a form of lossy compression. This means that the original sound can not be perfectly recovered. What is recovered (sound you hear) is some kind of approximation of the original.

MP3 does this lossy compression by removing the sounds which a human ear cannot distinguish, using so-called “perceptual coding“. The sounds which are removed are specified by a psychoacoustic model, which is created using human input, for example listening tests.

In other words, this means that many people are all the time listening to music with “something missing”. But what is this something, what does this something sound like?
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Recently I read the Freakonomics book. Do read it, unless you already haven’t – it’s very entertaining and thought-provoking.

Then, in a similar vein, I ran into this BBC article, which states: “Analysis of notes from a selection of Spain’s major cities showed that each one carried an average of 25.18 micrograms of cocaine.”

In other words, people snort so much of the illicit substance through rolled-up notes that the notes in circulation will have measurable amounts of cocaine in them. It’s unbelievable, but true.

Since people dig huge holes to the ground to get out minerals worth less, would this resource be somehow commercially exploitable?

Let’s do the math!
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After consuming vast amounts of the spice melange and taking inspiration from Nostradamus, Gartner presents their view of the Top 10 Disruptive Technologies for 2008-2012. It’s an interesting list, in many ways, although I think it’s lacking some very big things.
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Regular CAPTCHAs work pretty much with single values (single words). Finding out the single values using a computer is often not a big problem, therefore many CAPTCHAs are cracked and don’t serve their purpose really well. But what if one were to up the level of complexity by introducing multiple partially overlapping values?
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I could not find this functionality in WordPress, so I rolled my own. It’s like the simplest WordPress plugin in the world. With it you can hide (password) protected pages from being displayed. The plugin lives here.

Some years ago, I thought about the Drake equation, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), the Fermi Paradox, the connections between them and the SETI track record so far. Eventually, I realized that there is a plausible conclusion for the Fermi Paradox which I think is, while simple, also quite deep in its philosophical implications.
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A CAPTCHA is an automated test which is used to separate computers from humans. It is created in such a way that for humans it is easy, but for computers as difficult as possible. For example, given an image with distorted text, a human can easily read the presented word, but computers will have difficulties (the amount of difficulties depends on how the image is distorted).

One use for CAPTCHAs is to prevent spamming with the idea that anything automated (such as mass-spamming computers) won’t pass the puzzle, and therefore will not be able to inject their trash-messages into a service. However, CAPTCHAs don’t work so well in practice anymore.
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