Someone passed along a link to a site that has graphed the movie ratings from the IMDB by genre. Highest rated genres: Short, Film-Noir, Documentary, Animation. Lowest rated genres: Thriller, Action, Sci-Fi, and Horror. So what does this mean exactly? As the site summarizes, film festival type movies have higher ratings on average than movies which tend to focus on entertainment. Is it more difficult to make a quality entertaining movie than an intellectual movie? Perhaps laughter gets less universal appreciation than reason.

Hooray for satire! I found this comment on Slashdot and found it quite entertaining yet disturbing. It points out just how ludicrous Monsanto’s case is. Where do you draw the line?

I came across an interesting article on using Bayesian networks to filter out spam messages. The probability that each message might be spam is calculated based on the frequency of words found in previous messages. It was an interesting read for me after taking a number of AI classes at the University of Michigan. After reading this article, somebody implemented a qmail filter in Perl using the algorithms outlined in the article. I wonder if the junk mail filters that hotmail and the Apple Mail tool use take advantage of Bayesian networks.I’ve also heard about a package called SpamAssassin that is supposedly very good at filtering out spam. Among other methods, it uses Vipul’s Razor, a package that compares hashes of the mail of all of its users to determine mass mailings.

I just came across the following article [free registration may be required] on the New York Times web site discussing how food nutritionalists are facing the realization that “low-fat” diets are not necessary very healthy diets, a message that has been preached for nearly 30 years. The Atkins diet, which has become increasing popular as of late, was described as early as the late 1960’s, and in which the types of foods were described as an ideal diet as early as 1825 by the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Continue reading →

Want to travel the US but no look like a tourist the next time you order your Diet Pepsi? This site shows where the of various terms for “soft drink” (“pop”, “soda”, “Coke”, or another term) are used across the US based on submissions from Internet users. The usage areas seem to be divided up into the East Coast/California/some Midwest (“soda”), the Midwest/Northwest (“pop”), and the South (“Coke”). I personally used to use the term “pop” while living in Michigan but have since switched to “soda” since moving to California. I’ll never understand why folks in the southern states use the term “Coke”. I guess it’s along the same lines as calling a tissue a Kleenex or a bandage a Band Aid even though there are other companies that make similar products with different names. It’s amazing how deep a brand can penetrate the human psyche.