Localoaf

Somewhat interesting if you haven’t seen it before. The FACTory is a trivia game, and also an apparently trivial implementation of a fact-checker for Cyc.

As the How to Play page explains, Cyc will draw random facts from its knowledgebase and pose it as a True/False question to you, for a total of ten questions. You are scored based on how well your answer correlates with others’ answers; if your answer is in the majority, you get more points. Each answer will also correspondingly increase or decrease Cyc’s confidence in the truth of that particular fact or inference. Once it obtains some threshold of answers for a particular question, Cyc considers the fact either confirmed or rejected, and a new question is placed into the pool. If your answer happens to push it across the threshold and convince Cyc of a fact, then you get an extra bonus to your score.

At the end of each round, the global high scores list is displayed, much like in arcades of yore. And as in the aforementioned arcades…some people have absurdly high scores.
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I’m supposed to be analyzing a Harvard Business School fable (er, case study) for class tomorrow. But instead, in the last hour:

• I notified a friend that I’ll be working near her this summer, implying we should have lunch, ohhhhh, about 4 months from now.
• I made plans to see an informative talk in 3 weeks.
• I looked at a friend’s photos from his trip to India.
• I ate some eggs and toast.
• I passed word around that Ozzfest is free this year.
• I found out that someone I met this weekend does modelling, and looked up some photos, just for kicks. (HA! no links for you!)
• I referred a friend to a great article about happiness (sorry if you don’t subscribe to the Economist, shortened version here).
• I watched a music video.
• I saw the one thing I missed by skipping the Super Bowl.
• I re-read a part of a book totally unrelated to school.
• I pondered what I could put in a letter to my Congresswoman, but didn’t actually do it.
• And finally, I came upon a clock for procrastinators.
• Well, then I spent 20, well, more like 45, minutes blogging.

So right about here, I was gonna ask some pointed questions about procrastination, but, y’know, maybe later.

OK OK, just one: CAN ANYONE STOP ME FROM PROCRASTINATING!?

I will let that go without qualification. However, this I cannot: it is awesome!

Thanks, Sarah!

Hello Localoaf Community,

Thanks to you all for your contributions, comments, encouragement and
readership! We’re excited that so many people find the site engaging.

So, we’re having a Localoaf Loaf Party!

What is that?

We’d like to bring together the readers, ‘riters and ‘rithmatickers and enjoy a casual pot luck dinner and conversation. Drinks are on us, but any culinary contribution(especially creative loaves) are appreciated. n8agrin has enticed us with promises of a “mean meat loaf.”

If you’d like to join us for a fun evening of loafing, let us know. you can either leave a comment on this post, or you can email localoaf at jeemale dot com (non-spamming humans, please correct spelling). either way, we’ll contact you with specifics about the gathering.

Thanks,
A buncha wild localoaves (or is it localoafs?)

The National Geographic web site has a very cool gallery of strange Hawaiian worms up from their current print issue. Here’s how they describe this one:

The intricate parchment worm, this one about five inches (13 centimeters) long, is typically well-hidden in a U-shaped tube in the sand—through which it pumps water using paddles at the center of the body. Edible bits are caught and balled up in sticky mucus bags that form below the rectangular head. When disturbed, this remarkable animal can expel bioluminescent mucus.

Via the LiveJournal Invertebrates Community

What is wrong with the title to this article? I’ll tell you; it’s part of a larger press release from Turner Broadcasting, parent of The Cartoon Network who recently ended up in hot water for a gorilla marketing scheme where they employed two individuals (maybe more?) to place 38 blinking Lite-Brite-like (try one here) signs of a character from one of their popular TV shows (Aqua Teen Hunger Force) around the city in various locations.

Apparently this really, really upset the city officials and some residents. From a CNN.com article:

But public safety officials, as well as a large segment of Boston’s older generation, condemned the publicity campaign as unthinkable in today’s post-9/11 world.

Unthinkable in today’s post-9/11 world? I’ll go out on a limb here and say that only the most idiotic, and oblivious terrorist is going to post blinking, obvious, lit up signs around a city for some larger diabolical scheme. Perhaps terrorists have adopted the methods of Professor Chaos. (I can see it now… ‘My plan is to place blinking lights around the city, confusing the citizens into mass chaos at which point I will rob every bank downtown, destroying the financial backbone of society, BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! SIMPSONS DID IT!!) Seriously, has it come to this? Now every nonsensical intrusion into your life is yet another ‘terrorist’ attempting to do harm.

We are a society living in perpetual terror.

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Pathway is an OS X app that visualizes the path you take through Wikipedia pages as a graph. The effect is similar to the Memex, except you can’t add arbitrary nodes or annotations. You can save and revisit your paths, though. Fun, but I’m not sure it’s useful yet.

Via Density