Illusion -- you can't touch that piggy

I was going through unread entries in Mighty Optical Illusions tonight...

This holographic piggy struck a mighty cord -- I saw it with my dad several years ago in some tourist trap store.. Universal Studios most likely. The store demonstration used the same pink piggy as in the article photo -- so between ourselves we always refer to it as "the piggy that is not there illusion".

We were both so impressed that when I got home I wrote a little script to calculate the kind of mirror it would take to produce the effect. Believe it or not, my dad was going to build the actual mirrors to try it out based on the printout of that script.

So.. Turns out the script is still there and still works. I dusted it off a bit and converted to the platform my site is on now. Take a look if you're curious -- full source code is there as well.

This image is built on the fly:



The image URL is: http://ejelta.com/am/piggy.png

Several parameters are accepted: size=##, noaxis=1, norays=1, hzcheck=1.

Enjoy!

ISBNdb.com/Google Co-Op Integration

Following up on the recent Google Co-Op announcement ISBNdb.com now supports a set of custom queries in Google for those who opt-in.

The one I like the most is the simplest of queries we support -- in my Firefox I can simply do Ctrl+J, type "isbndb some title" and hit "Enter". That's all it takes to get a page with Google search results and a box linking directly to the same search for "some title" on ISBNdb.com -- sort of a search shortcut.

Links:

• ISBNdb.com Google Co-Op page


• Co-Op public profile

What do you think? Some other interesting ideas for Google Co-Op?

Mechanical Turk - the ultimate Turing test

Somehow I ended up today looking at long expected (only I expected Google to offer it first, what with GFS and such) Amazon S3 data storage web service and JungleDisk as a way to use it for files backup/transfer under Linux. Looks cool so far.

...but that's not the topic of this post. The topic is Amazon's Mechanical Turk -- in essense a system that allows to integrate humans and their brains into arbitrary software. It does not yet feed those humans, no Matrix for you, but it does pay them money.

What occured to me is that this could prove to be the ultimate platform for the Turing test.

We have some software that wants a human to do some task and pays that human for that. What would an entrepreneur do? I think the best way to make money on it is to design another program that would pretend to be human by performing that task. Right? We have the platform, we have demand, we have the economic stimulus -- an ideal situation for an interesting invention.

I can't wait to hear first rumors..

Unicode fix-ups on ISBNdb.com

Just a qiuck note that I ran ISBNdb.com's database through a series of filters fixing problems with older non-Unicode data (iso-8859-1 and marc-8 stored as broken or partially encoded utf-8). This affected roughly 1% of the data. The result is that practically all data we have now is in proper Unicode.

More interesting updates soon...