meehawl

So, spurred on by the revelations that ex-Hitler Speech connoisseur Tom Costello from my old college TCD has got himself a new search engine that apparently returns more targetted gay porn results than Google, I did some googling searching to see what was going on with that web of people from the early 90s, with whom I apparently share 2 or 3 degrees of separation according to stalker vanity sites such as LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc. Sarah Carey is, of course, doing some PR for Costello’s lamentably spelled Cuil, and churning out the usual Naif-in-Hy-Brasil copy that a certain class of Irish readers favour as a framing device for the rather more complex entity known as “America”. But what really tickled me was clicking on a link, and then another, and then another, to find a rather late review of TrinCon 400, a science fiction drinking contest me and some friends did in the early 90s. The review nails it - we had no idea what was going on, but we had bags of cash to spend because of TCD’s 400th anniversary, and we knew what we wanted (mainly no nerds with pointy ears). So we got most of it together, despite my late attempt to sabotage everything by pissing off Trinity College’s establishment after printing up a flyer calling them a bunch of “old knobs” just before the gig (Harry Harrison managed to piss them off with more style). Anyway, it’s nice to know someone else enjoyed it.

Anyway, regarding Cuil, it’s impressive that they grabbed a small VC investment to launch a Google competitor without bothering to incestuously link to any Web 2, FOSS, or social buzzy tech popular right now (a major sin for the Valley’s hype machine, and a major constraint for any of the Google-driven AdSense-addicted blogs considering writing about them going forward). They apparently also forgot to plan for it to scale, to devise a page ranking algorithm that does not suck, and that the bucketing of search results was being done before Google arrived, has been repeatedly reinvented by companies since then and dabbled in by Ask or even Google (see, for instance, the 90s-era HotBot and today’s Clusty), and that when best realised tends to asymptotically converge on either an ontological index or a yellow pages directory, depending on how you crowd source. Cuil is an obvious attempt to flip some Google “insider” tech and a bunch of résumés and captive H1-Bs to one of the search giants for a quick sale.

They also pulled an Apple and claimed to have the Largest Index Ever (”120 billion!”), mere days after the Google Blog announced it had surpassed a trillion URLs. That’s some fine index work, Cuil.

Tags: Cuil, Google, Hitler, Sarah Carey, TCD, Tom Costello, TrinCon 400, Trinity College Dublin, Uncategorized, science fiction by mike
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No updates for a while. I have been rather busy working in a lab investigating the molecular basis of schizophrenia and aging using oxidative mechanisms (mainly by bothering mice dosed up on ketamine and then sucking out their brains). I have also been getting Scuba certified, which is surprisingly taxing, and catching up on my summer reading before beginning Medical School Year 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Tags: Scuba, Uncategorized, aging, ketamine, medical school, mice, oxidation, schizophrenia by mike
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Hans Reiser is a geek who helped develop an early journalling file system for the Linux operating system. In 1999 he ordered a Russian mail-order bride. A Russian-educated obstetrician and gynecologist, she began divorce proceedings against him in 2004. Their relationship deteriorated and, claiming physical abuse, she obtained restraining orders against him. In 2006, Nina Reiser disappeared. During forensic investigation, police found blood spatter in Hans Reiser’s house and car, one of the front seats of his car had been removed, neighbours said they’d seen him the day of the disappearance hosing down his car, and he bought several books on homicide and forensics in the days following the disappearance. There was tons of stuff like this. Despite this, among a certain set of anally retentive, emotionally retarded geeks, Reiser’s “Not Guilty” defence and plea became something of a cause célèbre. His trial lawyers’ main strategy seemed to be to evoke reasonable doubt and to paint his missing wife as a bit of a slapper, possibly a criminal or an associate of mobbed-up criminals, and Reiser as a misunderstood but lovable geek whose creepy and endless self-aggrandisement and lack of affect was not due to incipient sociopathy but simply an affectation common among a certain subgroup. Among basically everyone except this subgroup (and Wikipedia rules lawyers), the Guilty verdict seemed certain. A jury agreed and found him guilty of murder last week.

Despite this confirmation of self-evident truth, I was impressed to find a chapter of the Flat Earth Society alive and well and posting in the “Talk” page for Hans Reiser on Wikipedia. It’s the massive online role playing game-disguised-as-encyclopedia at its best. There’s the pure Reiser Defenders there, arguing for several years that he was innocent and throwing out all manner of conspiracy theories as to why he was being set up by the “neurotypicals” and non-self-diagnosed Assburgers of the world. Your basic narcissistic autodidact delusionals. The comments section of the SFGate liveblog entries about the trial is a hotbed of these kooks.

And then there was the alliance or collaboration with the Wikipedia Rules Lawyers, who excel in splitting hairs. There is, for instance, an enlightening debate on the difference between “convicted murderer” and “proven murderer”. The former was acceptable to the OCD sufferers, the latter, apparently, was not (even after the decision of a jury).

One would think that Reiser’s post-conviction plea bargain deal in which he led police to the body dump site where they retrieved a decomposed corpse that had been buried in a ravine within a bag would dissuade his defenders. However, I then read someone on the Talk page arguing that because had not been “proven” that the human corpse located by Reiser was the body of Nina Reiser, it was not absolutely certain that he had murdered her. Later, using dental records, police confirmed that it was her body. I am waiting to see how the Geek Defenders weasel their way past that one.

Tags: Hans Reiser, Linux, anoraks, geeks, homicide, murder, nerds by mike
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