Marshall Brain, the creater of the How Stuff Works website has written a piece discussing his belief that Humanoid Robots will take over the American Economy by 2050. His claim is that advances in robotics will produce humanoid robots that will increasingly replace humans at lower-income jobs due to their lower operating costs, producing millions of unemployed individuals.

I disagree for several reasons:

1. While greatly appealing to SciFi writers, humanoid robots seem to be less practical than the longstanding trend of building in specific features and intelligence into existing products (e.g. washing machings, vacuums, etc.)
2. The economy is not a zero-sum game. Massive structural changes tend to create shifts in labor, not persistant unemployment.
3. I think Marshall greatly underestimates the complexity of solving fundamental AI/sensory perception issues for robots. (similar to underestimation of the complexity of voice recognition software)

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I’ve been experimenting with Typepad, and it has led me to branch out into running my own Movabletype installation on a Dreamhost account. So far I appreciate the slickness of Typepad as a service, but it’s not finished yet. One of the greatest reatures of Movabletype seems to be its ability to be customized into doing just about anything, which typepad has not quite replicated in their service. The service is however, extremely promising, with a very nice interface, and some of the best photo management I’ve seen in any product.

Sesh’s CS336 (DBMS) Exam was a tough cookie. 104.5/146 as a high score is quite a steep curve, which I think reflected the mass feeling that there was too much material for most of class to get through in a 2 hour period. I was lucky enough to score a 100/146, but I think all of us could have done much better had we had more time to work out our queries.

Visit http://www.shao.org/gallery to view some of our wedding photos. Right now we have about 1/3 (80 photos) of our wedding photos scanned in, there will be more coming up soon.

I’ve moved this site off of TypePad onto my own server. Mostly I’ve done this because I want to become more familiar with the internals of the Movable Type program, and better understand how everything works.

Many librarians, historians, and others have become increasingly concerned at the ever-expanding reach of copyright (and patent law for that matter) both in bredth and length. The Eric Eldred is a movement to put in place an easy system to speed the transition of commercial works that authors are not recieving value from into the public domain. Continue Reading »

There’s been a lot of web discussion about the possibility of OSX 10.3 including support for piles. It sounds like an interesting feature, and Bruce Tognazzini talks about the original research regarding piles on his website Ask tog. He talks about piles being a context sensitive data structure.

I see 2 useful roles for piles: 1) To group together into one super-document multiple files from the same/different apps in an order dependent manner. 2) A clear way to seperate folders (actual file locations) from dynamic queries (search “views”) Continue Reading »

I finally saw Gangs of New York today. For all the hype, and the reviews that I had heard, I didn’t find it to be either particularly moving or powerful. The beginning was very slow moving in terms of developing the characters and plot, and while it has the trappings of being a serious historical piece and commentary, for much of the film, I felt as if the period and setting were more windowdressing for a story about street gangs. Continue Reading »

The death of the conjoined Iranian twins was a tragedy, however directing people’s natural sadness against the medical community that attempted the procedure is a mistake. Continue Reading »

Dave Hyatt, who is currently working at Apple Computer on their Safari browser has asked for users “Top Ten Problems With Safari’s Web Page Display.” My issues so far are: Continue Reading »