Sad Bear

I was wearing my sad bear shirt today. Actually it was Dillyn's but it just got me thinking about making t-shirts with kate again, i couldnt find a picture of the actually shirt that i am wearing but there are others over at Kateordie.com. She says i should do some more painting but i am a little scattered at the moment.

Baby Names

Since I am getting married i have been thinking more about baby names, not that Dillyn and I have any immediate plans(mom).  But Recently I have heard about Babynamewizard.com which uses census information, surveys, and other resources to tell you a very many things on names in a given year.  One of my favorite tools on the site is the name voyager which will graph the top 1000 names by popularity since about 1880.  Also they have articles analyzing some of the data that they have collected including one article that pointed out some very interesting things in the end of baby boy's names in the last 100 years here is the article by Laura Wattenberg, but the basic gist is that until 2006 boys names ended with a handfull of letters, the most popular ones being END and S.  However in 2006 the most popular boys end letter was by far N blowing all the other letters out of the water, check out the article its interesting.  Also if you want to avoid information overload, with the names there is always Wolfram|Alpha, which has a decent name search, just type in a given name into the input feild and you will be presented with some stats.

Tall People Live in the Past.

In an interview on npr David Eagleman explains how shorter people might actually live closer to the present than taller people.

He explains that your brain is constantly weaving a coherent environment for you based on many sources of information.  For example when someone yells to you, you see them yelling slightly before you hear them, light being faster than sound.  Then your brain will re sync the two different streams of information and make them seem to be happening at the same time.  Your brain will do this for signals that are up to 1/10th of a second mismatched. The human brain does this by essencially using a buffer,  and putting the faster signal on hold until the slower one gets there and then playing them at the same time.  Eagleman hypothosizes that the specific time delay for each person may be different based upon their height with taller people haveing a longer delay because it takes them longer to get information from their toes, than shorter people.

Google OS?

A google OS that is completely integrated with google's other services has been on my wish list for some time. Then Android came out and i was guardedly excited, now however some guys over at VentureBeat have installed Android on the Asus' eeepc 1000 They say it only took them about four hours and that they had everything working including graphics, wireless internet, and sound. They used linux drivers to get everything up and running, which was possible because Android runs on pretty much a linux kernel, although they do mention that due to the way android handles graphics, its graphics performance is not as good as it could be.
But this is great news! It is the first step to seeing Android as a real operating system, first netbooks then hopefully, laptop and desktop machines. Could this finally offer some real competition to windows? Whose current netbook solution is to run a modified version of their last generation Operating System(xp)? Its too soon to tell but hopefully this will push an open source operating system that people can rely on and trust thanks to the backing of the Google giant.

Wolfram Easter Eggs

i just found some wolfram easter eggs here, its such a cute little computational device.

Plants Vs Zombies

Plants Vs Zombies is a new popcap game that is extremely addicting, a simple castle defense game, with enough added to keep you entertained for hours, trying to get the next plant in your arsonal.  Me and Dillyn downloaded this game, about a week ago, and i swear with all the minigames and the replayable main game, Dillyn finally ripped me away from it last night, I have vowed never to play again, not because i dont want to but because i cannot stop myself from getting sucked into this great game.

  Download it here.

Wolfram|alpha: Google Killer?

So wolfram|alpha came out today, this is supposed to be the "google killer" search engine that will save the search giant from an anti trust lawsuit.  But Wolfram isnt even a search engine according to their faq section Wolfram|alpha is "... a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links. " So wolfram wont help you get information on that new movie coming out, or where the best slice of pizza in town is, but if you need to know the current population of NewYork state, thats not a problem (19.31 Million in 2006 according to a quick computation).   Wolfram displays a great amount of data for you very cleanly and without fuss, some fun things i looked up where my birthday, wolfram told me how many days old i was, and also i looked up my name, the mean age of a person named Kristopher is about 34.  However the engine is not very intuitive, i spent 10 minutes last night trying to look up Ashville North Carolina, and it wasnt until i google searched it that i realized i was actually looking for Asheville North Carolina.

In the end i can see people using wolfram for straight data unadultured by the opinions of the crowd, but right now wolfram is nothing more than at best a compliment to your google search and at worst, you'll never find an excuse to look anything up on it.

First Time

This is the first time i will be attempting to write an actual blog.  There is something over here http://www.kristopherbel.com/ that was kind of a blog but really is just a website to showcase my music and whatnot.  Here i think i will try to focus on my life and my personal interests.