Monthly Archives: May 2007

No math, no gain

More research is leading me to more funny moments while reading papers. In a paper that seeks to explain an optimization technique called the Conjugate Gradient Method, there is a page that is blank except for a brief listing of keywords associated with the paper’s topics:

Keywords: conjugate gradient method, preconditioning, convergence analysis, agonizing pain

Here is the paper, should you desire to torture yourself.

Dinner for astronauts?

While doing research for the final paper for my Artificial Intelligence course, I came across this citation in a paper I am studying:

In several applications, Tang and Fishwich [22] … and many other researchers have shown that ANNs perform better than
ARIMA models, specifically, for more irregular series and for multiple-period-ahead forecasting.

[22] Z. Tang and P. A. Fishwich, “Backpropagation neural nets as models for time series forecasting,” ORSA Journal on
Computing, vol. 5, no. 4, pp 374-385, 1993.

Tang and Fishwich. What an awesome name that would be for a new Adult Swim cartoon.

The art of unnecessary censorship

You’ve heard that Iggy Pop song, “Lust for Life”, right?

Well, the new Yahoo Lyrics service thinks that your poor little impressionable mind is not ready to be exposed to such deviancy:

I think we can all tell Yahoo Lyrics to **** off.

Zodiac web toy updated

Many thanks to Jeff Hudson for emailing me about some errors that I had in the Zodiac cipher web toy. I’ve made the corrections, and I’ve also posted a few more interesting decodings that I found recently. These decodings are almost certainly gibberish, but they are still kind of fun to find.

Jeff says:

I’ve only just started trying to decode the 340, but the other day i found “crush them into ground up bits” in a single string of characters. I naturally got really excited as this phrase emerged – but unfortunately everything else in the code was complete gibberish 🙁 so i guess it’s back to the drawing board lol.

Click here for the updated Zodiac cipher web toy.