So Alexis Madrigal talks to his iPhone 4S, the latest launched this weekend to a 4 million unit (in 2 days) success.

I hope it works that well.  The voice recognition on my Motorola Droid X certainly isn’t that smart. I try it, but it doesn’t recognize particularly well, and the interface to use it is awkward.

Siri came out of Nuance Communications which spun out of SRI back in the early 90’s.  I was in the speech recognition game back then and we all had high hopes that speech recognition would take off as something used by most people.  That hasn’t happened yet.

Perhaps Siri hearkens an age when it will. I’d love to just tell my phone to remember something – and have it work. 

BTW: Mashable likes it but says… “work in progress”.

The Daily Mail has more…

Glad I don’t live in a dry dusty desert town… oops!

My son and I took home 1st (me) and 3rd place (Brian) at the United States Practical Shooting Area 1 2011 Championship.   This is in the B Division (sort of like a handicapping system).   I did very well, finishing 12th of 90 shooters and beating a bunch of Master, A, and even a Grand Master.   Brian did well as well and would have handily beat me except for pistol problems on two stages.

Next stop…. Nationals!

P.S. I like this better than Little League, cause I get to play too!

Disney for heavy equipment…

The 10-employee park has five pieces of machinery, including a pair of Caterpillar D5 track-type bulldozers and three Caterpillar 315CL hydraulic excavators. Dig This sells three-hour packages that consist of a 30-minute safety and operation orientation followed by two hours of maneuvering either a bulldozer or excavator.

$400 is a bit steep.  That model may work in Vegas where people seem to enjoy blowing money, but I doubt their franchise plans will work to other more frugal (read sane) places.

Filming the intro crawl to The Empire Strikes Back.   They don’t do it that way anymore…

More backstage shots at http://www.angusrshamal.com/best-of-bts-2/

Here is a thumbnail… it’s high but skinny.

http://imgur.com/Oujbl

http://ardrone.parrot.com/parrot-ar-drone/usa/how-does-it-work

The perpetual drinking bird, explained:

Among the laws it exhibits are the combined gas law, the ideal gas law and Maxwell-Bolztmann distribution, which is perhaps the most interesting.  It shows that molecules in a given space can vary in energy level and so can exist in more than one phase at a single temperature – in other words that they can be liquid or gas at the same temperature.

Turns out… it is a heat engine. And is not perpetual.

But this really ices the cake!

At a minimum I think my wife should dump our HBO and other premium channels. Not gonna need them…

Q:  This species, formerly dominant on Earth, was not algorithm based.

The last two nights, Jeopardy has featured two humans and a computer from IBM named Watson. 

Watson finished the first game of a two-game match with $35,734 in winnings, far ahead of runner-up Brad Rutter, who earned $10,400. Ken Jennings trailed with $4,800.

Watson uses natural language analysis, custom algorithms built for the Jeopardy competition,  terabytes of storage, 90 servers, and thousands of POWER 7 computing cores to attack problems in parallel.   On a single core it could take 2 hours to generate an answer, but by dividing the problem among thousands of processors it answers essentially instantly.

Impressive. But… somebody brought it to the stage, and will take it home. So perhaps not that impressive.

If I were Jeopardy producers, I’d be looking very hard at questions with multiple attributes in their answers, to give the humans a chance.

For instance, the Final Jeopardy question, which Watson missed, required knowing what a “large” airport was.

We had an odd event last night…

My son’s doctor called around 9:30PM to check and make sure my son was doing okay.

He had gone to the doctor that afternoon with non-stop vomiting, an aching back, and a low-grade fever.   They treated him for food poisoning, but also took some blood and urine to check for kidney infection.

He was doing much better at 9:30, which we le the doc know.

But we thought it was a useful, considerate and rare (these days) touch that our doctor had done.

Thanks doc!

A friendly blue shirted Apple guy helped me pick a case out. He then swiped my CC on the spot and e-mailed me a receipt. Slick.  No line. Just choose, buy, done.

This intrigued me, and it turns out,I can do this on an Android phone too.  This ROAMpay, which actually uses audio signals to communicate with any mobile device that has a microphone jack seems a very clever and usable solution: