New Renault Mégane

A journalist named Bruno Thomas was jailed in France for publishing some photos of the future Renault Mégane (Auto Plus magazine). In Beijing and Paris, they have their ways with press and Internet freedom. Anyhow, it's too late, now. The damage is done. Industrial espionage. A big German carmaker is said to have started a new design department called FBG Projekt. The Fat Bottom Girls Project.

Sarkozy's new video: France 3 off-air footage

This time I'm not posting the video. Off means off.


“One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat him at politeness.”
(Josh Billings)

UP-Robots: the birth of useful personal robotics

According to Forbes, robots are going to be the next tech bubble. There's nothing really new going around the net these days, just fights over taking control of the next big thing, which is probably going to be old after a couple of months. Facebook is already going down, with lesser new subscriptions every day.

A bubble is something that, by definition, is supposed to burst, sooner or later. The trick is to ride it while it's still full (of air), and to put your money in it while it's still taking shape. Robots are going to happen, sooner or later. They are going to take over a lot more of tasks around our houses, our places of work, our cities, our fields, our factories, even in our nice little battlefields abroad...

Of course this is already happening, what's new is that it's going to happen right before our noses. Technology is getting cheaper, and something is going to hit big time our supermarket shelves and start a new trend, simplifying something that we do everyday. It's not going to be a gadget. Gadgets are expensive for what they do and boring after a short time. This is something that we are going to buy and hold on to for no less then five years, like a TV set or a laundering machine. Everybody is going to have one. It's going to interact with us and with our houses, it's not going to kill our cat or molest our children and it will talk and walk and do something really cleaver.

During the next 2 to 5 years Auchan is going to start selling it.

If you know what it is, put your money in it.

Quote of the day, from the same Forbes' article:
"Will Microsoft merge with Yahoo! in the same way that a shark merges with a surfer?"

(A deleted scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)

Old news

"The technology behind Google's great results

As a Google user, you're familiar with the speed and accuracy of a Google search. How exactly does Google manage to find the right results for every query as quickly as it does? The heart of Google's search technology is PigeonRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

Building upon the breakthrough work of B. F. Skinner, Page and Brin reasoned that low cost pigeon clusters (PCs) could be used to compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms. And while Google has dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of our service on a daily basis, PigeonRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools."

"Why Google's patented PigeonRank™ works so well

PigeonRank's success relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and its unique capacity to recognize objects regardless of spatial orientation. The common gray pigeon can easily distinguish among items displaying only the minutest differences, an ability that enables it to select relevant web sites from among thousands of similar pages.
By collecting flocks of pigeons in dense clusters, Google is able to process search queries at speeds superior to traditional search engines, which typically rely on birds of prey, brooding hens or slow-moving waterfowl to do their relevance rankings.

When a search query is submitted to Google, it is routed to a data coop where monitors flash result pages at blazing speeds. When a relevant result is observed by one of the pigeons in the cluster, it strikes a rubber-coated steel bar with its beak, which assigns the page a PigeonRank value of one. For each peck, the PigeonRank increases. Those pages receiving the most pecks, are returned at the top of the user's results page with the other results displayed in pecking order."

"Where does Google get its pigeons? Some special breeding lab?

Google uses only low-cost, off-the-street pigeons for its clusters. Gathered from city parks and plazas by Google's pack of more than 50 Phds (Pigeon-harvesting dogs), the pigeons are given a quick orientation on web site relevance and assigned to an appropriate data coop.
Isn't it cruel to keep pigeons penned up in tiny data coops?
Google exceeds all international standards for the ethical treatment of its pigeon personnel. Not only are they given free range of the coop and its window ledges, special break rooms have been set up for their convenience. These rooms are stocked with an assortment of delectable seeds and grains and feature the finest in European statuary for roosting.

Note: This page was posted for April Fool's Day - 2002." (the whole story here)

"How easy is it to crack Luxembourg?" or First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin, and then Luxembourg

Amazing. Two podcasters hit iTunes Top20 by spending one day in Luxembourg (the whole story here and here).

See the stars * II

From a comment to my previous post:
"Even if it's surley nice to have it built into Google Earth, there are 2 good programs for star-watching:

Celestia: http://www.shatters.net/celestia/

and Stellarium: http://www.stellarium.org/ ".

Thanks, Fireball!

If we can't buy it, let's copy it!

We all know Wikipedia. We all know Google. And we all know the probability of getting a Wikipedia page on top of a simple search in Google is very high. Well, that means money, a lot of money from advertisement, so Google (which is not a non-profit, free, community web service, like Wikipedia, altought there is same discussion about keeping this "clean" status: http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2007/01/02/wikipedia-advertising/) decided to try to collect some of those potential dollars that are wasted every time someone clicks an ad-free Wikipedia link. Knol is born (beta and invitation-only, by now).
From Wikipedia, about Knol: "Some describe knol as a rival to encyclopedia sites such as Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, About.com and Helium.com. Others state that its differences complement Wikipedia; Wikipedia articles are written collectively and should adhere to the "neutral point of view" policy, while Knols highlight personal expertise by emphasizing authorship and can contain the personal opinions of the author."

See the stars

In addition to browsing the Earth, Google Earth now allows you to view heavenly objects, including stars, constellations, galaxies, planets and the Earth's moon. (http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html)