So I was turned on to the “Will it Blend” phenomenon a while back when an Apple iPhone was blended. “Will it Blend” is a video podcast of sorts featuring a mad scientist type guy blending random objects that probably shouldn’t be blended.
Objects range from the aforementioned iPhone to Tiki Torches to (my personal favorite) Halloween glow sticks. The episodes take a pretty formulaic approach. The scientist guy talks about what he’s going to blend, picks a mode (like smoothie) and blends the item. The camera shows the item being blended initially, then pans out to show the dude in an awkward position, blending the object.
Once blending has commenced, the scientist dude opens the blender top. Then the phrase “_____ smoke, don’t breath this” will occur. And the verdict? Yes, it blends! How could we for even one second doubt the blending power of Blendtec blenders!?
Of course, reason that everything blends is probably due to the fact that Blendtec produces the show as well as the blenders. Still, it’s pretty damn entertaining for a random video podcast. Plus when they do change up the format, it’s awesome. Sort of like if you were watching Scooby-Doo and it turned out that the ghosts were real, or Scooby was actually a ghost, or if Velma and Daphne started making out like they did in the movie!
So before I got on a plane to fly from NM to RH, I prepared myself for boredom. One of the things I did was encode some of the Google Developer Day videos on Youtube for my Sony PSP. I think it was one of three times I’ve actually used my PSP!
Anyway, most of the videos were pretty fluffy and didn’t hold my interest, but the talk by Peter Norvig about statistical analysis was pretty darn interesting. Funny sidenote: when I went to Google for an interview, Peter Norvig was the special speaker dude. He had a pretty cool Hawaiian shirt on then too, as I recall.
Anyway, the talk brings up some pretty interesting things, like how if you feed enough statistics to a computer, the actual algorithm matters less and less. I’ve been interested in AI and machine learning, but I never really took any formal classes.
The stuff in the talk has sort of stuck in my head now. So I’m tending to see a lot of problems as being solvable by statistical analysis/classification. Like that Spock Challenge thing I blogged about earlier. Anyway, I’ve got an idea for a wacky application of Naive Bayesian Classification, but I won’t mention it yet (in case it’s an actual good idea, or in case I decide to bail after I don’t want to figure out the probability math).
It’s been snowing a hella lot these past few days in New Mexico. On the worst day, we got like, more than 10 inches of snow! My brother was at work and couldn’t get his Miata out of the snow, so we had to go rescue him.
I recently got a Macbook as a graduation gift, so I decided to take some video and make a movie. I present to you, NM Snow Rescue!
I got a new camera: the Casio Exilim EX-Z70. It was only $150 at Best Buy, which was a pretty good bargain. Since I was over at UNM yesterday, I decided to take a few test shots. They’re mostly okay, but somewhat grainy when seen at full resolution. This should probably be a 6 megapixel camera, not a 7.2…
Anyway, the video quality is fairly good. Better than my old Canon S50, at least.
Youtube video quality kinda sucks, so here it is in lower compression:
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