Wolfram Alpha – Cooler Than Google?

[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 15, 2009 by admin in Technology

The new search engine and technology Wolfram Alpha launches today. Watch out Google.

We made reference to Wolfram Alpha as a “Google Killer” last week, which is something the developers apparently don’t like. It sets people up for the kind of disappointment everyone experienced when the last “Google Killer” Cuil was launched. Well, they’re webcasting the launch of Wolfram Alpha live tonight. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a new search tool that computes answers rather than simply culling links from a database like Google. Stephen Wolfram’s explanation sums it up nicely, if that’s still not making sense to you: “Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things … and that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question and have it compute the answer, but it didn’t work out that way … I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realised that I was finally in a position to try and do it.” Having grown up on Star Trek, this has always been one of my biggest frustrations with technology. I honestly can’t wait to try it.

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You’d Freak Out A Lot Less If You Weren’t So Perfect

[ 4 Comments ]Posted on May 14, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Some ideas for getting back on track when work has you paralyzed with anxiety or feeling like screaming in terror. Any ideas of your own?


This was me about a week ago.

Under ordinary circumstances, I’m someone that most people would refer to as very organized. I mean, I actually ENJOY books like Getting Things Done, I’m easily fascinated by reading about the Noguchi Filing System, and I actually get weak knees in certain aisles of the office supply store. Unfortunately, the same reasonably healthy compulsions that make me so orderly can suddenly turn on me and make me a paralyzed, unproductive twit. Ninety percent of the time, I am the go-to guy, a motivator, a social connector. But when that other ten percent shows up, avoid me. I have horrible skills for dealing with my own failures and shortcomings. But I’m working on it, and I’ll get to that in a minute. It’s actually simple stuff. Especially with the recent economic situation, many of us are facing some unexpected events in relation to our livelihood. Many are facing the loss of their jobs, or pay cuts. Those of us who are self-employed may be more used to adapting to a shifting workscape, but may still find ourselves hitting a new kind of wall. When you find yourself so paralyzed by anxiety that you find it difficult to focus on the work you do have, what can you do? Well, you could panic. But as Seth Godin points out in that brief piece, that’s usually not especially productive. We could alternately spend a lot of time exploring planning and time management tools, but the irony there is obvious. What we’re usually dealing with at times like these is a form of fear. Krishnamurti described fear as the state between the familiar and the unfamiliar, and that is actually a very comforting description; it allows room for the knowledge that the new thing will become familiar, and some level of comfort will Read the rest of this entry »

Stripped Down Pop: Matt And Kim, Make The Girl Dance (Naked)

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on May 13, 2009 by admin in Music, Popular Media

Why is Kim Schifino always smiling? Because she knows she’s going to be famous! Matt and Kim and Make The Girl Dance get naked for their music.

It seems the latest thing in pop song promotion is to GET NAKED. For the record, Matt & Kim did it first, stripping down as they walked through the streets of New York to their song Lessons Learned, from their 2009 release Grand. Following suit (well, they take the suit off), we have the French band Make The Girl Dance (also a duo, but two guys) with their song “Baby, Baby, Baby”. Matt & Kim stick to the fashionably gritty do-it-yourself ethic, while Make The Girl Dance do it in a more Parisian style, hiring beautiful models. Models who frankly look like they “need a sammich”, in my opinion. Matt & Kim’s fun “let’s just do it” vibe is nowhere more evident than in this “unplugged” version of Yeah Yeah, performed live in a park on Roosevelt Island. I think I have a crush on the drummer, Kim Schifino; she’s ALWAYS smiling, probably because she knows they’re going to be famous! Both videos are below, with links to the full-size clips.


Matt and Kim – Lessons Learned
Make The Girl Dance – Baby, Baby, Baby

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I’m Not A Democrat, But I Play One In The Voting Booth

[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 12, 2009 by admin in Politics

White House Press Correspondents Dinners Haven’t Been This Much Fun Since Stephen Colbert Greeted His Paisan Justice Scalia With The Fangul

In spite of having some liberal mamby-pamby attitudes here on Dissociated Press, we hardly go easily on President Obama. In fact the last few posts about him expressed a lot of doubt about the job he’s doing. Well, being typical Americans, in only takes one good media event to sway our opinion. If you haven’t seen clips from the White House Correspondents Dinner last Saturday, take some time to watch (left). This event hasn’t been this much fun since Stephen Colbert stunned the audience into appalled, squirming silence back in 2006, adorning his performance with flourishes like giving Justic Scalia the Fangul and wrapping things up with the infamous Helen Thomas Chase Scene. It’s refreshing to see the POTUS’ intelligence and ability to laugh equalling that of the stand-ups and the press. In fact, his performance was probably better-pitched than Wanda Sykes’. Gobama!

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Simple But Non-Trivial Pursuit

[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 11, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Trivial Pursuit is for sissies. This week’s Monday morning time-killers explore whether or not you can handle a NON trivial pursuit. If you can, maybe you can also tell us what the heck it actually means.

Out of over a trillion pages in Google’s index, you had to end up here. Our apologies. Odds are that with that many web pages in existence, a huge number of them will be a banal waste of your time. And that, in fact, is the objective of our Monday Demotivators. This week we’re going to explore simplicity and triviality, which is what you’re probably engaged in if you’re at work right now anyway. The difference is, we don’t pay you! But we’re wasting time. Let’s get rolling. On wasting more of it. The “Eight Queens Puzzle” is a classic example of a “simple but non-trivial” problem. Try arranging 8 queens on a chessboard in such a way that no two queens would be able to attack each other. There are 4,426,165,368 possible arrangements of eight queens on the board, but only 92 solutions. The image at left gets you 3/8 of the way there. Good luck. 3D Logic, a cube-based color pattern puzzle also appears rather simple at first. Things get a little hairy at level 6. Let us know if you get to the level where it tranforms into a 4-dimensional hypercube. We don’t know that it actually does that, but it sounds cool, doesn’t it? If you like your non-trivial simplicity in the form of word puzzles, try this: “A young woman goes to the funeral of her mother. There she meets a man whom she has never met before. She identifies him as the man of her dreams and immediately falls in love. Two days later she kills her sister. Why?” (We’ll post the answer in the comments if anyone asks.) And lastly, if you prefer trivial simplicity, we have some stick people for you. Sure, they’re simple. But when given the choice of killing them or saving their lives, do they still seem trivial? You decide. Hope you have a simple, non-trivial Monday!

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