With all the bad news lately, I decided it was time to put together an upbeat punk-pop-rock station on Pandora so at least something sounded kind of happy, if not peppy-mad. The thing is, I could think of a few bands I wanted to seed this one with, among them, The Ting Tings and Metric—both good at being mad with an upbeat sound; rebels all. But there was this other band… swedish, I think. I hadn’t listened to them in years and just couldn’t think of the name, even though I knew it was really simple. Well, three songs into listening to my new station who comes up but the Sounds! Wow. The very band I couldn’t recall. Pandora borders on psychic when it does stuff like this. By far the best music web site out there, folks. Tune into my new station and check it out for yourself!

Despite the fact that “Semantic Web” has been trending down (at least in Google searches), it seems like more web sites devoted to it are popping up these days. I’ve been messing around with Twine for a fews weeks now and it seems pretty useful, although it definitely can’t accomplish what they claim. [^1] A new one that I stumbled into, via KurzweilAI.net is Powerset. My 30 second review is that I tried searches on two pretty obscure subjects that I’ve been reading about lately, the St. Petersburg factor[^2] and kriegsspiel. Basically, I got the same search results at wikipedia, powerset and google—no immediately discernible differences.

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I took a long sojourn into the history of interactive fiction (IF) with my launching pad being the stunning revelations unearthed by Andy Balo over at waxy in regards to the never-completed Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure sequel. But after reading that, and poking around the archives and playing a few great examples of IF, I started wondering why more hasn’t been done to advance the interface of these games? Why not incoporate more AI? Read more…