Rik's Ramblings

Sunday, June 29, 2014

Lake Tahoe: Bike Trail

Found a nice bike trail from the campground up to Tahoe city. Well, when I say "found", I don't think it was actually"lost", but you know what I mean.

Trail runs from Sugar Pine point, to Tahoe city, then on to Squaw.






View in a larger map

Lake Tahoe: SCUBA at DL Bliss State Park

Video from Ben and Me, when we were at Lake Tahoe.




Nice work Facebook

Scientists at Facebook have published a paper showing that they manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to determine whether this would affect their emotional state. The paper, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” was published in The Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences. It shows how Facebook data scientists tweaked the algorithm that determines which posts appear on users’ news feeds—specifically, researchers skewed the number of positive or negative terms seen by randomly selected users. Facebook then analyzed the future postings of those users over the course of a week to see if people responded with increased positivity or negativity of their own, thus answering the question of whether emotional states can be transmitted across a social network. Result: They can! Which is great news for Facebook data scientists hoping to prove a point about modern psychology. It’s less great for the people having their emotions secretly manipulated.

Monday, June 16, 2014

Hair Dressers

If i were to open a hair dressers, I would call it "Beau Locks".

I thinks it's a great name, but the wife disagrees.

I could have the catch phrase:

 When you think hair care, think "Beaulocks".

What's not to like!?


Tuesday, June 03, 2014

Come Try My New Programming Language

I've been developing it in secret, with no feedback from the general community.

I control all the language features, the platform, the development tools and the documentation, and it doesn't work on any third party devices.

Oh, you can only develop with it on computers that I make, which cost over $1000.  Plus you can only deploy it to devices I make, which typically cost you more than $500 each too.

For the privilege of installing any apps you make, with my new proprietary language, onto any of the devices you buy (from me) you must additionally pay me $100/year.  And of course, if you want to share your application with anybody else, you have to pay me a little bit more for that luxury too.


And the Apple Developer Community seems to be ecstatic about this!

Can you tell I'm not an Apple fanboy!