PROS

* Unusual Intensity, kind of like Altoids for your Eye.
* Makes your eyes very wet, relieves dryness quickly.

CONS

* Redness worsens at first, then fades away slowly.
* Some people will not like the Intense Feeling.

From the land of the rising sun comes relief to all typists who have been staring at an LCD for too long. Or maybe you're a trucker making that long haul from one side of the world to the other... Hell if you're reading this your eyes probably just need that refreshing minty feeling. A couple of quotes about this stuff:

gb:
"I can breathe through my eyes"
"It feels like my eyes just brushed their teeth"

Yup. It's eye care just like jesus intended... stingy.

--timball

Japanese Minty Eye Drops

CAP's '07 holiday party rocked the park at fourteenth. The club/restaurant wasn't yet open to the public so it was an intimate evening amongst friends, colleagues, significant others and general do-gooders.

Excellent vittles and fine spirits were enjoyed by all. Happy Holidays!

--timball

CAP x-mas '07

The 6.370 BattleCode programming competition is a unique challenge that combines battle strategy, software engineering and artificial intelligence. In short, the objective is to write the best player program for the computer game BattleCode.

BattleCode, developed for 6.370, is a real-time strategy game. Two teams of robots roam the screen managing resources and attacking each other with different kinds of weapons. However, in BattleCode each robot functions autonomously; under the hood it runs a Java virtual machine loaded up with its team's player program. Robots in the game communicate by radio and must work together to accomplish their goals.

Teams of one to four students enter 6.370 and are given the BattleCode software and a specification of the game rules in early January. During January, each team develops a player program, which will be run by each of their robots during BattleCode matches. Contestants must master artificial intelligence, pathfinding, distributed algorithms, and network communications to write their player. At the final tournament, the autonomous players are pitted against each other in a dramatic head-to-head tournament. The final rounds of the tournament are played out in front of a live audience, with the top teams receiving cash prizes.

This year we are holding two tournaments. One for MIT students only and one for anyone who wishes to participate. For more details on the two tournaments, see our tournaments page.

6.370 is a great opportunity to learn to program or hone your skills further. We provide lectures on relevant topics to the BattleCode competition. While we do not provide extensive resources on basic programming skills, we may be able to point you in the right direction as you supplement your learning with hands on experience in the competition.

Simulated robot destruction. Now w/ lasers!

--timball

BattleCode

We are collecting information about hardware interfaces of modern and obsolete hardware, including pinouts of ports, expansion slots, and other connectors of computers and different digital devices. This information is essential for everyone who wants to analyze insights of modern computer hardware, explore ways it s works, design devices with computer connection.

Our handbook includes more than 1000 documents :

* Pinouts of computer hardware components, internal connectors, buses and input/output ports i.e. PC Serial port pinout, PCI Bus .
* Pinouts and brief information about some common computer hardware interfaces such a RS232 interface, USB, ATA/IDE .
* Pinouts of audio/video connectors i.e. S-Video connector or VGA connector pinout
* Pinouts of cellular phones, consumer audio/video hardware and over devices i.e. Nokia Pop port pinout
* Schemes of computer peripherals and other devices cables and converters i.e. USB to RS232 serial converter schematic
* Layout and numbering scheme of common and device-specific connectors

All documents are free and available online in english and russian languages.

Ever need pin-outs for some wacky device? Unsure how to wire your particular flavor of "serial"? Wanna crunk together your own ipod dock? These russians got the right idea. As w/ all products of the sirius cybernetics corporation, "share and enjoy".

--timball

Handbook of hardware pinouts, cables schemes and connectors layouts @ pinouts.ru

Amsterdam apartments and cosy houseboats. We directly confirm reservations
and respond to your questions (by email) within a few hours. We've made also
a selection of Charming and Luxury Hotels in Amsterdam.

This is a neat sight. At some point I'm gonna go visit .nl and http://www.houseboathotel.nl is a way for me to rent a boat instead of a hotel. They don't have just boats, but rent looks reasonable and it's definitely a unique way to travel.

--timball

Speciality of Amsterdam - Houseboats - Amsterdam Apartments

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan names names in a caustic passage from a forthcoming memoir that accuses President Bush, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney of being "involved" in his giving the press false information about the CIA leak case.

McClellan’s publisher released three paragraphs from the book “WHAT HAPPENED: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington.”

[skipping to the juicy bits]

“I had unknowingly passed along false information,” McClellan wrote.

“And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself."

Fmr aide McCellan feels like he got a raw deal. With his new publisher and these firebombs I'm sure he'll get a different deal. Book comes out April 21st.

--timball

McClellan points finger at Bush, Rove - Mike Allen and Michael Calderone - Politico.com

Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) plans to resign his seat by year's end, a senior Republican official told Politico.

The announcement took Capitol Hill by surprise because Lott, the former majority leader, seemed to be relishing his job as minority whip, the second-ranking GOP leadership job. He had regained a post in leadership after he resigned following racially insensitive remarks at a birthday party for the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.).

Something doesn't smell right. Sen Lott (R-MS) was *ultra* unhappy when he got ousted from the senate leadership and took him four years to get back to where he was in 2002. Not just that but he *JUST* got re-elected in '06. There's some idle speculation about he fact that if he retires *this* year he can start lobbying the senate members in one year instead of two, but that's no reason to leave the senate early. Especially after 34 years of service.

Anyways Gov Barbour (R) gets to appoint someone to fill out the seat till '08 and then there's a runoff for a seat that ends on 2012.

UPDATE: From an old new yorker article I read in a dentist's office:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact_lemann?currentPage=4

I asked Rove if it was true that he had engineered the demise of Trent Lott, of Mississippi, as Senate Majority Leader, and Lott’s replacement by the more Bush-friendly Bill Frist, of Tennessee—it would be hard to find anyone in Washington who believed he hadn’t. (In 1990, Lott publicly criticized President George H. W. Bush for raising taxes, and the Bushes have long memories.) “No,” Rove said, flatly. Then he mentioned, in what I thought was a less than entirely sombre tone, that on the day the Lott affair reached its dramatic peak, when Lott was scheduled to appear on Black Entertainment Television to defend himself, Rove had got a call from his friend Bill Frist: “Monday morning, Frist calls me and says, ‘You know, on Friday we’re supposed to take our boys and go hunting in South Texas together—you think we ought to go?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, let me think about it. Can I call you tomorrow?’ And the next day”—after Lott’s performance on BET, which came across as abjectly liberal, and failed to save him—“I call Frist and say, ‘I don’t think it’s going to be good for you or for me to be seen in South Texas, hunting with our boys.’ I think the world of Bill, but I don’t take credit.” That certainly settles that!

--timball

Top official: Lott to resign - Politico.com

Abstract: In this paper, based on a weighted object network, we propose a recommendation algorithm, which is sensitive to the configuration of initial resource distribution. Even under the simplest case with binary resource, the current algorithm has remarkably higher accuracy than the widely applied global ranking method and collaborative filtering. Furthermore, we introduce a free parameter $\beta$ to regulate the initial configuration of resource. The numerical results indicate that decreasing the initial resource located on popular objects can further improve the algorithmic accuracy. More significantly, we argue that a better algorithm should simultaneously have higher accuracy and be more personal. According to a newly proposed measure about the degree of personalization, we demonstrate that a degree-dependent initial configuration can outperform the uniform case for both accuracy and personalization strength.

I "personally recommend" this paper for reading.

--timball

[0711.2506] Effect of initial configuration on network-based recommendation

Gina Elise is on a quest to raise funds for hospitalized vets. She's doing it w/ a calendar. She was at blogworld and she's increadibly hot.

Go pick-up your jaw and buy a calendar.

--timball

Pin Up Calendars for Vets - Benefit Calendar for Veterans Hospitals

What is Bikely?

Put very simply, Bikely helps cyclists share knowledge of good bicycle routes.

It can be quite tricky traversing a car dominated city by bicycle, particularly when you need to travel an unknown route to a new destination.

But the chances are, someone has cycled that way before you. Bikely makes it easy for him or her to show you the best way.
Bikely needs you!

Bikely is young and growing fast. But it still needs more people like you to submit your favorite bike paths.

As we collect more and more routes, Bikely can become an incredibly useful resource for the cycling community!

Membership is free, fast and easy. So join now »

Or if motorbikes are more your thing, check out our motorcycle routes on MotoWhere.

User submitted and built bicycle paths and trail/road notes for all your commuting/recreational needs. I'm gonna start posting my routes w/ all the places to eat on the way.

--timball

Bike Trails, Paths & Routes From Over 40 Countries at Bikely.com