I love those new smart cars. They’re so cute and tiny.

PLUS they are the brainchild (don’t you hate that word?) of that 80’s phenom company, Swatch. Oh, AND another little company, Mercedes Benz. Their pocket-size is a novelty, for sure, but the really smart feature – the really brilliant feature – is the gas mileage. They get FORTY MILES PER GALLON! Now that’s smart – or is it gifted?

I was in bloomington the other day and saw this ultra-hip/metal-clad dealership surrounded by smart cars. Last time I checked (and I DID check) it was a Rocky Rococo Pan Style Pizzeria. Sure, they had delicious pizza but you can’t drive a pizza.That’s a fact. I did some research and of course this new smart car dealership was designed by Tanek. Leave it to Tanek (and you should) to have the vision to turn a suburban pizza place into a mini-revolution.

That isn’t a euphemism for anything – my three cockatiels are plotting something. I don’t know what it is but they are hard at work on whatever -it- is. This has been on my mind for the past few days. I don’t have any idea what they are up to but I know they are all up to something! They get this guilty look on their face when I look up from the computer to them and quickly scurry away. Their mohawks go up and they get this big grin on their face. I go over and inspect their cages and I don’t see anything amiss. I get confused. I sit back down. Once they think the coast is clear, they are back to work.

I don’t think they are plotting escape – as they chirp innocently back and forth to each other. They don’t like leaving their cages. When I open the doors for them to come out, they just sit inside. They are very happy to be just where they are. The birds sing all the time.

My dad called and I mentioned that the birds were plotting something to him. He didn’t seem concerned. He said they do the same thing with him too. I told him they must be plotting something. World Domination, maybe? I wouldn’t put it past our three cockatiels.

I haven’t blogged in a gazillion years.

And I love blogging…but I got so busy, I just didn’t have time. I think I put too much pressure on myself to be witty. Or well-thought out. Or give some ground-breaking insight that will spark thought and inspire a world of change. But from now on, I think I’ll leave that to the real writers and write about the stuff I know…country music, web design, life with dachshunds, disastrous dates, retail therapy, fruity martinis, bizarre accounts of life in NYC, and my ultimate goal: World Domination.

I’m tired of Christmas. I spent the holiday in WV, and the day I arrived we were pummeled with a hideous snow storm that knocked out electricity for 6 days. My father, being the wise man he is, prepared for just such an adventure and already had a generator and some gas heaters in place, so we didn’t starve nor freeze. Still, from 4:30pm when it got dark we had to wander around the house with flashlights in hand. We had to shower only when Dad said we could, and conserve water in case we lost that, too. I slept a lot…because there was no TV, no internet, no cell phone.

Check out this hat someone got my dad for Christmas — it’s a camo ballcap with a light in the front. The perfect accessory for snowy winter nights without electricity. I don’t know who bought it, but I’ve stolen it, and will be taking it to NYC for late night dog walking excursions.

That was all well and good, except that my most unstable relative, my mother’s brother, came to stay with us. He brought with him his arsenal of weapons (so looters wouldn’t steal them), his long underwear and limitless cans of Skoal. His nervous pacing and vulgar language nearly drove me mad until I realized loaning him my iPod would shut him up and calm him down. Thank you, Apple.

Tomorrow I head back to NYC, and I’m looking forward to the New Year with great enthusiasm. I’m excited to be singing with a few other bands, and am looking forward to writing more original music and getting reacquainted with my old friend, the piano. I’m excited to be building some new websites (did you know I’m a web designer? Visit me at http://www.shannon-brown.com) and possibly starting a new micro business that could be a hit (more on that later!). I’m going to drop 20 pounds. Take my vitamins. Increase my focus. Adjust my work/life balance. Sing my butt off.

But before that, I’m going to eat this one last piece of fudge. Happy Holidays!

Sitting here reading a post by Tynan while watching Bernie Mac I was thinking, so what if Tynan ends up with a billion dollars and a submarine (I’m sure he will), if he doesn’t become as famous as Bernie Mac. But then I realized that Tynan and fellow internet awesome-doers (cewebrities?) Chris Guillebeau, Charlie Hoehn, and Ramit Sethi are famous with an entirely new and rapidly growing crowd of their own, and none of them would want to live in Bernie Mac’s huge house anyway (Tynan chose a Winnebago Rialta). The culture-that-be isn’t going anywhere soon, but this new cultural wave of the upwardly-awesome and ingenious is going to end up on top one day, and I for one am down.

Crystal slammed her netbook shut and flung it on the bed. ‘Now he’s defriended me on Facebook!’ she whined into her mobile.

‘Chill, babe.’ Rachael advised, ‘He’s just, like, being a guy. What are you gonna do?’ Rach sounded distracted, because she was – she was working a double shift as Santa’s Little Helper and wasn’t supposed to tuck a Blutooth earpiece under her jaunty striped cap. ‘Now hop up on Santa’s lap… no, don’t cry! I know he’s a bit stinky but he’s not scary…’

Crystal paced her room, kicking discarded outfits around until laundry flew,  like snowflakes would had it been Christmas in the Northern hemisphere. Since she lived in Brissie, the scanties clung stickily to humid surfaces.

‘Sorry, Crys. Locked and loaded. You’re far too fabulous to waste the summer holidays worrying about why some jerk is being a jerk. It’s Dave’s party tonight, focus on that. Oh fuck, that whining kiddy just hurled. There’s chunks all over freaking Rudolph. Gotta scoot.’

Crystal’s phone followed the netbook onto the doona, but her bestie had given her an idea…

This is awesome. The UK rocks.

Although I would have gone with Guerilla Radio.

Cats are natrualy talented when it comes to evil plans.

iz in our blood.

Picture by: dunno source Caption by: mattbru77 via Advanced Lol Builder

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Here is Andrew Ng from Stanford giving a series of lectures on machine learning. If you would like to have a good introduction to the field this series is great.

Hey Guys, waz up?

Well, last night my family celebrated our early Christmas and opened all our gifts, ate too much food and sang, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”…it was the most chaotic party ever and really fun/memorable.

Anyway, after my family left, my father’s friends – a Chinese couple from our University came over to visit. They are so cute!!! [awkward silence]

The husband and wife were then bombarded with my dad bragging about his children’s exploits…do your parents do this to you? When, I chimed in, how Asians would never do this and actually try not to praise their children in public, since it is usually rude. The couple laughed. I rest my case.

Then my dad, my poor dad, went on to interview me and asked me questions about Asia/Japan and why I wanted to go into Asian Studies. I said,

“Any smart person would do that, because China will take over the world someday.”

I was met with cheers from the opposite couch…Asians are so awesome!

After a few mores lines on the awesomeness of Asia/China, we went on to roleplay a little, by accident of course…we don’t actually invite people over to roleplay with…because that would be weird.

My dad suggested that his friend, the husband, should become the “great leader” of China. I said I would “vote” for him, basically supply armies to help with his take-over…if I could have Africa and Hawaii afterwards. The Asian couple got a kick out of this.

Our friends are university students, with the husband getting his Doctorate in sociology…pretty cool huh? I guess he likes to hang out with my dad to study human behavior. Of course, I must remind him that studying my dad isn’t really helpful long term, because he is the only male in America that actually believes the husband is the head of the household. [I told the Asian couple this, and they found that hysterical.]

We exchanged a few gifts with them, played music for them/sang, talked some more and planned our next get-together. We also decided that, when I start studying Chinese, me and the wife should be language partners…I like this idea because…she is so cute! [Okay, that's not the only reason, she is also very intelligent and funny.]

I also was reminded that I am not the only person in the world, besides my mother, who wants to learn about other cultures and to experience different places…because this couple is so excited to be here in the USA and to be spending time with American families, the excitement is amazingly contagious and after spending one night with them I am already thinking of things we can share with each other about our homes.

The one thing in this life that I regret is not being Asian, I know that sounds superbly stupid, but it’s true. I said this to the group last night and then we ended our small party with the Chinese wife saying, as she twisted her hair into two braids,“I always thought I looked like a Native American, don’t I?”

I guess we are related in the end. *happy feelings*

Okay, dear readers, I am off on another journey then. This time, I am visiting family back home, my birth place, Indiana. Pray that I don’t die from snow exposure.

A classic Norwegian Death Metal interview.

For about two years now we have been investigating the use of volunteer-based large scale distributed computing for performing design and simulation tasks. The system and code being used is now fairly stable, and it has become an important tool for us. The system uses BOINC to manage the distribution of tasks among volunteer computers. The home page for our project is at AQUA@home.

The AQUA community currently represents a significant chunk of computing power, comprising about 5,000 cores and 10 teraflop/s sustained. As the viability of distributed automated design tools increases systems like AQUA can start playing a bigger role in experimental design and analysis and ultimately help our hardware and algorithms people design better systems.

Most basic science depends on three complementary areas: theory, simulation and experiment. I would like to try to expand the role of simulation at D-Wave.

In order to do this we need to expand the volunteer base on AQUA. I think the concept of having the world’s largest distributed supercomputer working on designing quantum computers is fascinating, and I’d like to aim for this objective. If you’re intrigued by this, you can check out the AQUA site and talk to the current community. They can answer any questions you may have. Joining is really easy and the code runs at low priority in the background. I have never found it to interfere with anything else I’m doing.

Currently I believe that the largest distributed supercomputer is running Folding@home, and is at or around the 10 petaflop/s sustained level. In order for AQUA to reach this, we’d need about one thousand times more cores than we currently have. This is an ambitious objective but given the compelling nature of the project, it might be achievable.

If you or someone you know might be interested in being part of this, please sign up and try it out!

Those old pics had me searching through my old vinyl. Found this gem I hadn’t listened to for a while.

i’m never gonna last
unless i live until
dying is a thing of the past

Pretty good article about the recent progress we’ve made on building binary classifiers.

I’m surprised at myself that I managed to keep this – not so secret anyways – diaries going. I don’t even try to read back what I write and just type it out when it comes to me, but it works quite therapeutic to get it off my chest. And it’s comforting to know there are some of you that are going through or have been through the same experiences.

As any woman would say, it’s complicated. Maybe we make it complicated ourselves, for the sake of others’ feelings, for the sake of love, for the sake of holding on to hope. I’ve mentioned my comfort zone a couple of times, I’ve mentioned trying to hold on to what we had. Do relationships come with expiration dates? Can relationships be saved, fixed and renewed, at all times?

When I look out my window, from what I feel is my glass house, I see the world pass by. Seasons change, so do people. And so do feelings.

Thoughts I once had, are coming back to me. I failed miserably at my plans of going to college, but succeeded succesfully in my work experience. But the thought about travelling the world, are becoming more vivid in my mind again with each day. Sure I have family in far away places, which we try to visit every other year, but I wanna see more… It can’t be too late to visit the places I see on Flickr, do the things people tweet about or meet people the way Facebook connects networks. To have the world in the palm of my hand.

My stomache turns into a knot, thinking of how I got where I am today. A ghost of who I was, a faint reminder of the woman I wanted to transform in to.

That can’t be good.

It starts to rain against my window, clouds turn grey and pack up high in the sky. Until I realise, it’s my soul that’s crying from the inside.

Sometimes I try to do things like build intelligent machines but it just doesn’t work out the way I want it to, and I get real frustrated and then like I try hard to do it, and I like, take my time but it just doesn’t work out the way I want it to. Its like, I concentrate on it real hard, but it just doesn’t work out. And everything I do and everything I try, it never turns out. Its like, I need time to figure these things out, but theres always someone there going “hey geordie, you know we’ve been noticing you’ve been having a lot of problems with that theory of intelligence lately, you know? You need to maybe get away. And like, maybe you should talk about it, you’ll feel a lot better.” And I’m all like “oh, nah, its ok, you know. I’ll figure it out. Just leave me alone, I’ll figure it out, you know? I’m just working on it by myself.” And they go “well, you know, if you wanna talk about it, I’ll be here, you know? And you’ll probably feel a lot better if you talk about it. So why don’t you talk about it?” I go “no, I don’t want to! I’m ok. I’ll figure it out myself!” But they just keep bugging me, they just keep bugging me, and it builds up inside, builds up inside.

I’ve never been to India and air travel is just so 1999. Right?

I’d way rather go to Om.

What’s Om?? WHAT’S OM?? I can only blame myself for the ignorance – had I been here 6 months ago, you all would be soaking up the opulent Indian vibe and sucking down the Kamasutra. I SAID, sucking down the Kamasutra. It’s a drink. A drink for grown-ups.

Remember Nate’s? That place where guys went to get sport jackets and, say, a nice pair of slacks? In the Warehouse District… You know… across from the army surplus store where you went to get all your Y2K supplies?? Ohhh, THAT Nate’s!

Okay, so that place is gone – and let me just say that the whole “adaptively reused” thing is Stunning. You heard me. Tanek took a washed up old hag of a building and made it shine like a two-story chandelier.

LIKE A TWO-STORY CHANDELIER.

Watch this:

Here is Steve’s post. And yes that is the world’s biggest table in case you were wondering. It probably is also the table with the most potential energy in the world as it is on the 45th floor and probably weighs about 100 tons.

That’s Hartmut on the left… not quite The Simpsons yet…

Here is a link to a Google research blog post describing the use of D-Wave technology to build a binary classifier. A summary:

Today, at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NIPS 2009), we show the progress we have made. We demonstrate a detector that has learned to spot cars by looking at example pictures. It was trained with adiabatic quantum optimization using a D-Wave C4 Chimera chip. There are still many open questions but in our experiments we observed that this detector performs better than those we had trained using classical solvers running on the computers we have in our data centers today. Besides progress in engineering synthetic intelligence we hope that improved mastery of quantum computing will also increase our appreciation for the structure of reality as described by the laws of quantum physics.

firstly, it’s going straight to hell.that’s the directions it’s been for many centuries now.

then,
wtf is this shit? my blog top searches is www.shemale.com.my ????

FML time i think.

then
i realised, google really overtook microsoft and of course, google actually rules the earth cos, gmail works like this right? started out with a few people getting invites. also like wave. then they give them limited invites to invite other people.basically if you use google account as some sort of spam mail, eventually they’re going to catch up with you because it’s not a sign up email. it’s a 6 degree separation type of concept – send the invites out to friends and friends of a friends and then it just goes on….lol
best you stick to yahoo and hotmail but i think yahoo requires you to give in your address but alas, they are not foolproof. i dislike hotmail for a lot of reasons and even more i hate my domain or isp provided email. so i only ever use uni or work email these days…

alas, google actually rules the world. bwahahahah.

i’ve hold back on buying windows 7 since so many ppl complaining it’s a FML thing. i don’t need anymore FML stuff.

then the last thing i need to be reminded of is umm…i sorta forgot..crap..it was important!

i will update later when i remember. it was important!!!!! oh yeah i remember. so there is no such thing as a honest man/woman famous anymore cos i mean, the last good squeaky clean image man on earth who’s famous, ala tiger woods, has now a notorious reputation for being a philanderer, adulterer and keeps mistresses by the hoard and also, sex addict. lol hooray man….. his wife is way prettier than his mistresses…don’t fucking know what is wrong with wood’s eyes…like his dad say..career over when he gets married…….guess the dad knew he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and eventually, that dark little secret would be outa the closet….came out to a nice bang to end 2009. but i’d stay with him if he’d give me 80million USD…heck i’ll smile and even play nice wife just as long as you keep the millions rolling. pwnage.

the last decent family man on earth’s image is shattered so there’s always a minor percentage, they’re gonna cheat…

which leaves barrack obama as the last decent men…hopefully no scandal..but i think he dare not scandal also cos i reckon michelle obama owns his ballz and if he strays, she’ll really make him regret for life….that’s the woman i want on my side in a bar brawl…she alone has the gaze to scare the crap of 236745632 guys 23645765 times my puny size.

so ladies,
i guess you gotta really train your man….and be blatantly honest to each other. no point trying to impress if you have to spend your whole life trying to impress and not be the person you are…cos once you drop your guard and relax and show your true colors, he’ll be outa that door faster than you can say hunnnnnn……

sigh
good night. : )

like they say
all the good men are either taken or gay.
i’m just talking bout some men, not all men ok?

Since Christmas is all about us, we thought we would share what we want for Christmas.  This also serves as recommendations of what every doll should ask her owner for, because anything that reminds you of us is GREAT!!

1.  Kit-Kat stickers from Michaels.  They’re big and pictures of us!  What more could you want?

2.  Kit-Kat Just for Fun.  Because we do a lot of hard work (we run our own multibillion dollar business, are psychiatrists, and are Presidents of the United States) we need to take some time off and play some games.  That are all about us.

The real version includes me, right?!?!?!?! HMMPH!! -Kat

3.  A triplet.  The more of us the better!  Also we could use some secretarial help!

Another version of us... what could be better?!?!?!

Please contribute to the Kit-Kat Fund by supporting your Kit-Kat look-a-like dolls with these choice presents for them.  Or anything else that would further their our world domination.

Training a Large Scale Classifier with the Quantum Adiabatic Algorithm

Hartmut Neven, Vasil S. Denchev, Geordie Rose, William G. Macready

Abstract: In a previous publication we proposed discrete global optimization as a method to train a strong binary classifier constructed as a thresholded sum over weak classifiers. Our motivation was to cast the training of a classifier into a format amenable to solution by the quantum adiabatic algorithm. Applying adiabatic quantum computing (AQC) promises to yield solutions that are superior to those which can be achieved with classical heuristic solvers. Interestingly we found that by using heuristic solvers to obtain approximate solutions we could already gain an advantage over the standard method AdaBoost. In this communication we generalize the baseline method to large scale classifier training. By large scale we mean that either the cardinality of the dictionary of candidate weak classifiers or the number of weak learners used in the strong classifier exceed the number of variables that can be handled effectively in a single global optimization. For such situations we propose an iterative and piecewise approach in which a subset of weak classifiers is selected in each iteration via global optimization. The strong classifier is then constructed by concatenating the subsets of weak classifiers. We show in numerical studies that the generalized method again successfully competes with AdaBoost. We also provide theoretical arguments as to why the proposed optimization method, which does not only minimize the empirical loss but also adds L0-norm regularization, is superior to versions of boosting that only minimize the empirical loss. By conducting a Quantum Monte Carlo simulation we gather evidence that the quantum adiabatic algorithm is able to handle a generic training problem efficiently.

[soon to be arxiv:0912.0779]

Here is a CNBC piece featuring my friend Hartmut Neven and the work his team are doing with Google.

Google searches for mobile computing edge

Software giant bets big on Android apps like ‘Google Goggles’

Here is a video clip of Hartmut explaining it.