Marie and I have recently gotten into watching this show called
"Good Eats" on the Food Network. The host, Alton Brown, offers a
lot of interesting recipes on a geek tip. For example, in one
episode he asks some materials people at GaTech about the
properties of various casserole dishes.

A recent episode called "The Pouch Principle" offered a dish that
is easy to make, takes about 30 minutes total to prepare, and
offers a great deal of potential variety. Anything from asian noodle
dishes to hearty meat and potatoes stuff. It sounds perfect for
preparing food after work when you're tired but you want something
good.

Good Eats Pouches

] A Danish biotech company has developed a genetically
] modified flower that could help detect land mines and it
] hopes to have a prototype ready for use within a few
] years.

Yahoo! News - Flower-Power Could Help Clear Land mines

] LOS ANGELES -- A federal judge has declared
] unconstitutional a portion of the USA Patriot Act that
] bars giving expert advice or assistance to groups
] designated foreign terrorist organizations.

Federal Judge Rules Part of Patriot Act Unconstitutional (washingtonpost.com)

] They enroll in institutions of higher education seeking
] wisdom, intellectual stimulation, and a degree that they
] hope will be their passport to self-reliance in the "real
] world." But in universities across the country, thousands
] of graduate and undergraduate students find themselves
] performing tasks that are on the ethical borderline of
] what is expected of them as students, research assistants
] and fellows.
]
]
] With a growing number of universities facing budget cuts
] and under increasing pressure to find new ways of making
] profits, student labor is grinding the wheels of
] America's academic machinery. They man phones,
] photocopiers, teach undergrad courses, grade papers,
] conduct research, analyze data

ABCNEWS.com : Are Students Slaves for Their Professors?

] This collection of web pages documents Brad's activity on
] the system and the people who's lives he effected, from
] the first day he logged on MemeStreams to the day he
] passed on.

Brad

Rattle's comments:

For several months now, work has been underway building the next version of MemeStreams. It has been necessary to recode most of the site from scratch, so its taking awhile. At any given time the trials of life, lack of funding, bad timing, hardware failure, and general bad luck is screwing up the works. However, we _are_ making progress.

Just before the new year, I hit the point in the development process where new capabilities of mining and graphing social network data were becoming available. I decided to go off on a little tangent, embrace the milestone, and do something to show our technology's progress. The result is the Year in Graphs 2003. Over the course of putting this together I've wound up fixing all kinds of problems with our database conversion code and wrote much of what will become the new graphing engine. I even had a really good "eureka" moment in relation to some of our network theory.. Its been time usefully spent.

That being said, this is all very kludgy. I did not spend that much time crossing I's and dotting T's.. The fonts in the nodes are hard to read, some of the graphs look "squished", its missing the "Show Links" feature the current Social Network portion of the sites has, etc.. There is much room for improvement with our graphing. I look forward to additional feedback.. :)

While these graphs may be fun to look at, the data they are built with is what's really exciting.. The same thing that allowed me to make these graphs is what's going to lead to improvements in the capabilities of the Reputation Agent.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy browsing through this review of the past year!

MemeStreams - The Year in Graphs 2003

] Once prion diseases infect a body, the proteins change
] shape and, with a kiss of death, turn their neighbors
] into clones of themselves. Clumps of misshapen proteins
] form, overwhelming neurons and poking holes in the brain.
] Death is inevitable.

Wired News: Prions: When Proteins Attack

] RIP Brad. Hopefully you are sharing your sence of humour
] with some good spirits, on the other side.

Another site that CrankyMessiah used pays it's respects. There is a link here to a picture for those who wanted to know what he looked like.

FAZED - Slorum - CrankyMessiah Thread

New Life Lodge
Alumni Association
P.O. Box 430
Burns, TN 37029

To Whom It May Concern,

Please accept this donation offered in memory of our friend Brad Blines. Brad was a part of our online community, called MemeStreams. One of the features of this community is that it tracks the popularity of the posts members make to it. Out of some 800 members, there are only three people in the community who have a higher popularity score then Brad, and they are the people who created the software the community runs on. This fact should illustrate the significant impact that Brad has had on our lives. We owe many smiles and laughs to his posts and comments over the past year. His presence will be missed by all of us.

Sincerely,
Tom & Marie Cross

For CrankyMessiah...

] "We can easily distort memories for the details of an
] event that you did experience," says Loftus. "And we
] can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories
] - we call them rich false memories because they are so
] detailed and so big."

I read the book that was coauthored by Elizabeth Loftus "The Myth of Repressed Memory" in my Science vrs Pseudoscience philosophy class that I took in college. I must say, it was a pretty interesting, as well as disturbing book to read. While reading it, you begin to wonder if your memories are really correct or not - and I recommend the book if you are interested in the subject, although the focus is on people "remembering" sexual abuse.

Guardian Unlimited | Life | 'We can implant entirely false memories'