Dame Folle

Friday, July 21, 2006

Dogs and Spoons

Some time ago, Nicole's uncle Andy decided to teach her the phrase, "That dog don't hunt" to be used after any sentence that had a lie or tall tale included in it. Nicole used it quite often at first and even would ask me to make up some untrue statement just so she could respond with, "That dog don't hunt!". Having a three year old armed with this phrase and knowing when to use it was a great ice breaker and/or party trick. The phrase eventually wore out of it newness and was not used. Recently, Nicole and I were visiting my friend, Sonia and her family when out of the blue, Sonia made a random nonsensical comment and Nicole responded with, "That spoon don't scoop, Sonia!" My jaw dropped and I had to ask her, "Where did you learn that, Nic?" and she responded, "I made it up!" Either she is pretty darn smart or a pretty darn good liar...That dog don't hunt, Nicole!

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Pink



Just a cute photo of Nic 'in the pink'.

Saturday, July 01, 2006

Singularity

I randomly found this post while skipping thru blogger.com and it just kinda stuck with me:

"As these things happen sometimes, the last three books I've been reading have dealt with "The Singularity." Two are fiction and one that I've mentioned earlier, Radical Evolution by Garreau, is non-fiction. The Singularity seems to have become a meme these days.

As simply as I can describe my own understanding, The Singularity is the point (date, year) when the accelerating curve of technology, which asymptotically approaches vertical, becomes vertical or close enough that no individual or organization or computer system can keep up with it. More knowledge has been added to the world in the last ten years than in all the rest of human history. Think about that.

What I find more interesting is that in all three books the authors have suggested that rather than a singularity what we really will have is a discontinuity. Obviously time must continue. The question is how does time continue after knowledge or computing power or human/machine ability becomes close to god-like? The math answer is that the X-axis doesn't stop there, but another curve (not sharing a point on the X scale with the first curve) picks up from Y-value zero and now asymptotically approaches some Y value that describes some fixed limit (or geometric increase) to knowledge, computing power or human capability. Visualize a hyperbolic curve where X and Y (or something close like Y= 0.01X) are the normal tangents to the curve.

So life will go on after everyone says "What the hell?" and some guy will climb into the technological equivalent of a '53 DeSoto and wonder how to make it faster as he drives off to his job calculating actuarial tables using a slide rule."

Talk amongst yourselves...

Cousins

Coming from a large family (my mom and dad had 8 children together, i have one aunt who had 10 children, a great aunt who had 10 children, you get the picture) it isn't difficult to find cousins or siblings from my family hanging out together on a daily basis. It is a common joke that if you throw a dart at a map, we probably have at least one relative within a very small radius of that dart. One neat phenomenon occured just a little over 4 years ago...Alexa, Nicole and Kali were born within 6 weeks of one another to myself and my sister-in-law, Stacey, and my sister Erica. The girls don't get to spend a whole lot of time together, but we did have a sleepover at our house and so I was able to get them to finally relax after their bath to snap this photo. I hope this friendship will continue for a long time to come no matter what distance comes between them.