jyonkov
Neven Boyanov
Bertrand
Daniel Radev
Stefan Stefanov
Apostol Apostolov
ihayes2000
Jean
Google goes quantic
Google Research presented at NIPS some of the toying they have been doing with qubits from D-Wave.
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Jean
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jyonkov
Solar in Las Vegas
I was in Las Vegas for a while and decided to upload some pictures of my
home renovation solar experiments. This is a 500 feet black hose that is connected to an old water heater. The hot water should circulate using D5 Solar circulation pump. My goal eventually is to concentrate solar energy with computer controlled mirrors or by pointing an old C-Band satellite towards the sun.It would be cool if one can find funding for organizing green development camps. For example a group of enthusiasts can get together once a year and dedicate 7 days to get their ideas into a working prototype. A demo session at the end should show the final result. The funding is necessary for materials, travel and accommodation. Videos and pictures can be published so that the joy is shared
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Neven Boyanov
I think that it will be more efficient if the sun reaches the water directly, through a glass or transparent pipes. Rubber is not very good temperature conductor, it is actually very good isolator. Hristo (from Kozarevec), who has some experience, is using combination of sun heated water with gas burner or just regular wood-fire heater.
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jyonkov
It would be cool if Hristo can share his prototypes on the blog… Unfortunately we are blocked by the language barrier and until we get this blog to be multilingual. Its quite challenging to get oneself to write in its own language already… About the solar prototypes, i think CSP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrating_solar_power looks very promising.
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Neven Boyanov
I like the idea about the camps!
It will be really cool. Somewhere in the mountins or even in Hroisto’s backyard, about noon everyone is already drunk and generates hundreds of new ideas.
PS: Don’t bring any females though, they will spoil it all.
PPS: So, may be in the cold mountins is better idea, women don’t like to go there anyways, so no need to convince them.
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jyonkov
I’m glad you like the camps… I think Bertrand is also exited about it. We may even be able to raise funds for it, assuming there are projects themes, goals and people willing to share their thoughts ahead of time in order to do some preparations. Lets go for it.
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jyonkov
Software in Flash
A friend of mine – Bertrand, showed me a nice collaborative whiteboard/canvas software in flash.
Collaborative mind-map for google-wave, anyone ?While on the subject here are some other interesting flash-based apps & libs:
- Use nodes to build http://sourcebinder.org/
- Diagrams, UML http://www.gliffy.com/
- 3D libs papervision, away, sandy, alternativa (paid,russian), jiglibflash (physics)
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Stefan Stefanov
Collaborative mind-map for google-wave – definitely yes, thumbs up! I’m really intrigued by the possibility to develop wave widgets/robots in general. However, I’m total newbie on that subject. Or I should better say – I’m a pre-newbie.
What I can say for sure is this is one of those applications google wave is created for.
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jyonkov
It’s very exiting that you’re interested in collaborative visualization and and modeling, Diagrams can go long way… Here is a process that my friend Ian showed me a while ago. Professionally I’ve been using Graphviz for a while now to visualize models, conceptual graphs, RDF sub-graphs etc. Here is a google wave that i used to transfer a brain-map from my IPhone. All, feel free to link your visual thoughts to mine !
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Neven Boyanov
Did you invite Bertrand to that blog?
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jyonkov
Yes, I’ve invited Bertrand a while ago… One more reason for us to get our act together and get a plugin to contribute translations…I’ll put a poll together about different Blog/CMS systems we can use.
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Bertrand
Yea guys, i put my first article today ;o)
Sorry for being so long, but i had a child 1 month ago so.
A little question about the idiagram.com schema. I love that kind of diagram!
Do you think that there is a way of making a usable schema for politic purpose?
Because, when i check the tv news since few month, it looks that human being are definitively not able to succeed by itself. It’s Rome again now. I know that it’s look like very stupid question but what if we could let a AI take decisions independently of human decision? Not by thinking deeply but just by taking the smartest decision for the community and not for 1 or 2 guys.
Politic, Economie, Law are getting more and more complex and no-one is coming to understand what going on anymore. Maybe use an AI model to regulate or control some crucial point could be really nice for humanity! Our fucking history prove us so many times that we just can’t manage each other alone.-
Neven Boyanov
Hey Bertrand, congratulations for the baby!
About the politics, I think you’re right – any sort of sophisticated enough A.I. system will do better than they do – most of them are just idiots in the uniform of the public office.
This world will definitely change, but it will take time, and based on our history it may take a while, could be another 2000 years. That’s more like a fraction of a second in the scale of the entire human history (if anyone can tell how what’s the length of the human history) but this is our time and may we should use A.I. to replace those not-that-smart decision makers.
Let’s make an experiment:
Choose a AI/Expert system and feed it with enough information so it could make some sort of decision. Regularly choose important problems that occur in our society, those that and international and will be judged and made decision about by all (or most) governments. See what decision our system will make and later compare it with theirs.It may prove that the A.I. is better, equal or worse that them, on all cases it will be interesting, and a lot of fun of course.
PS: I thought that this forum here is more for creating things, not a chatter, so here it is – a challenge.
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Bertrand
We could also take the problem from the other side and ask an AI to rewrite our law and politic system !
Few month ago, i was in court and i was chatting with my lawyer about laws system (waiting our turn). He explained me that law is just another economy. As i already explain in another post about software, economy has a great problem, it made people made stupid and crazy stuff for made more money rather than take care of people’s needs. So, even if someone tomorrow find a couple a fundamental awesome laws that could handle any problems, no-one will listen to him because it will kill this economy. So the only point of making laws more and more complex is for increase this economy. And the point of letting lawyers write laws is to let this system get more profitable.
Also, the actual political and law system is from century and is based on very old world behaviors. Maybe the idea to find a global system from actual knowledge and composed with simple rules may be very interesting to help people choose good direction.
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jyonkov
I agree. Trying to make this economy model work might not be enough and the best thing for humanity… Talking about economy models it would be great if we collaboratively build one that would allow us to allocate funds (if we manage to get any) per project and contribution without the subjectivity of a particular person. Initially this can be all virtual… like a game.
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Bertrand
Economical game
)This remind me something.
I think we should avoid to consider the economy part of the structure. Only people’s side should be think. Redo a political model, this is the point. Maybe we could find something without laws and economy! Or something new.For the fund part, we could try to sell an economic prediction algorithm like the one for the weather. Setup huge supercomputer to try to predict few bullshit and then work on something greater in parallel!
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Daniel Radev
Hi guys,
The idea of AI making decisions instead of us (mankind) terrifies me. Yes, most politics are idiots and yes, people tend to make wrong choices (depending on ones point of view).
However mankind history shows unambiguously that mankind moves ahead and learns from it’s mistakes (unfortunately sometimes through tragedies).
Furthermore how the “right” decision is defined – the one that benefits majority or the one that benefits minority?The idea of economy model that allows allocating funds is something very interesting and worth discussing…
Also let’s decide what we can discuss here and is it better to discuss things somewhere else, google wave for example.
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Bertrand
Agree for Waves. Blog is very good begining for turning around ideas but google tools could be really better for organize the work around ideas !
So from where to begin? Any ideas?
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Daniel Radev
Well, if anyone of you guys don’t have Wave account I have a lot of invitations to give away.
We can create private Waves on specific topics and invite people there (also it’s probably worth it to research how we can embed a wave on this site)…-
Bertrand
beber.lempereur at gmail dot com
What’s yours?
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jyonkov
There are many tools for collaboration, thats why I’ve posted the CMS/Blog poll. It’s important before we decide to use one or another to think about what are we trying to do, what we have achieved so far and whats missing. There are many ways that google wave (as is now) is inferior to other tools… The whole google tool set is another matter. I think that it might be useful for us to have ability to create content like projects pages, organize content and navigation, use current assets for fund raising even trough adds and much more… I think that the tool of preference will be determined by the people willing to contribute within our community. By contribution i don’t mean only ideas but also by developing and improving these tools. I’ll continue this discussion in the CMS/Blog poll thread…
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Daniel Radev
eyewriter.org open source initiative.
The EyeWriter project is an ongoing collaborative research effort to empower people who are suffering from ALS with creative technologies.
Absolutely stunning
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nkolev
The new version of the P2 theme is much better and finally has post titles!
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Neven Boyanov
Yes, the P2 is (much) better now, it’s like real blog.
No need to change the theme anymore.
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Daniel Radev
Universal Translators Are All Around Us
Since machine translations is one of the topics here is an interesting article plus some video demos
http://singularityhub.com/2009/11/23/universal-translators-are-all-around-us-video
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Neven Boyanov
Sakhr are good, we partnered with them in 2007/2008 for the English/Arabic. Although, I’ve never had the chance to evaluate their ASR technology.
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ihayes2000
Cheap 3D Solar Cells Are 6x More Efficient, Work Underground
Aesthetically speaking, I’m tired of seeing “energy efficient” structures designed around large, ugly solar panels. So this technology definitely solves that problem.
Plus, if we’re to believe numerous sci-fi movies (Matrix, Terminator, etc.) the human race will end up living underground in the future, so these cells will come in handy
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jyonkov
I was thinking again that it would be cool to motivate people to translate the blog so when someone posts something interesting there is a greater chance that it will be translated to other languages. I’m positive that we can find support for Bulgarian, French and Japanese so I’ve asked Yuka to translate some posts to Japanese. While doing so initially we used Google spreadsheets and ImportFeed and GoogleTranslate functions, than i thought that it would be nice if we use WPML plug-in so i found a free PHP hosting http://www.justfree.com and installed WPMU but failed to install WPML. Has anyone had better luck with multilingual WP ?
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Neven Boyanov
Yes, it should be something like that. But could that plug-in be added to our WP.com hosting. Nikolay, do you know?
PS: We may write an add-on that will plug Interlecta translation into that WPML to achieve (much) better results.
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Nikolay
No, you can’t even add JavaScript to WP.com.
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Nikolay
I don’t have problems hosting it for free. As I explained earlier though, WPML really messes WordPress up. I tried to use it on my blog and I had to uninstall it. The same with http://www.bulgarica.com/ – it periodically messes up tags, categories, etc. and we removed it. I found WPML long ago, it’s still the best translation plugin, but not good enough for production use – and I was dealing with a bi-lingual blogs only, so, be careful. WPML is really complicated and hooks up to major functions and that’s why it’s having problems constantly. There are simpler plugins that allow you to pick source language and then they use Google Translate (or Interlecta?) to show the entire blog in the target language. There are also plugins that via some special markup allows you to put multiple translations of the same post and display only posts that have certain source language.
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Daniel Radev
Guys, what do you think about this http://golang.org/ ?
I’m really excited and installing it right now…It could be the death of Java (and .NET in the long run) I think…-
jyonkov
I’ve watched the video introduction at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKnDgT73v8s . I personally like the language but i don’t think that it would be the death to other languages yet, because like Java originally it needs to find its niche… it took Java about 5 years before it became the language for the server. It may take a while until this happens to GO.
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Neven Boyanov
There’s nothing wrong with developing new programming languages, but that one is definitely not the killer lang. This is not the first time when a large company attempts to propose a replacement language but it is the community that will say yay or nay.
I agree with Yonkov that it will take time until it becomes
The ideas are good, not new though.
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jyonkov
The Ascent of Money
An interesting documentary on the history of banking part 1, part 2 ,on PBS and as a playlist on youtube
jyonkov is discussing. 
jyonkov 11:38 am on December 21, 2009 Permalink |
This is quite interesting and its happening in Vancouver! I’ve watched few videos (one even with a PHD student with Bulgarian origin – Vasil S Denchev
. When i have time I’d like to watch all http://www.dwavesys.com/index.php?page=multimedia