Thursday 28 July 2011

Olympic Tickets Fail

So today marks a year before the start of the London 2012 Olympics,  lots of documentaries on TV about the building of the site and preparations.  All very interesting and I love a bit of Olympics me  but, all this is just serving to wind me up....why?  well because I didn't manage to get any blinking tickets.  Come to think of it, out of all the people that I know that applied for tickets I only know 1 person who managed to get any (even then only for beach volley ball). 

This bugs me,  I mean whilst I didn't think I would get tickets for either the opening or closing ceremonies,  I had hoped for tickets to the stadium for one of the minor track and field days  and was really crossing my fingers that I'd get some velodrome tickets.

Sigh.....

I hope its like when buying concert tickets when they have sold out but all of a sudden closer to the event more become available.

At the very least I hope they have an area near the Olympic village where they will show the games.  I know I can watch at home but I want to get some of the atmosphere.


I can take some solace in the fact that I can at least stand by the road for the road cycling / time trial events.

Monday 18 July 2011

Google Brain - A potential future product?

I love my Google products and the whole creativity that seems to surround the company I really admire. The 80/20% rule where their employees spend 20% of their time working on personal projects and new ideas is a great idea and its fruit can be seen by looking at Labs. 
I heavily use GMail and Google Reader which are both labs graduates.  The product I am waiting for which I think would be right up Googles alleyway is Google Brain.

Let me elaborate.....

As part of my BSc (Hons) Computer Science at Portsmouth Uni I undertook modules in AI,Intelligent Systems and Theoretical Computer Science  a topic that cropped up in these courses is the whole notion of AI, Heuristics, Mind and Machine.  One little annecdote I remember from one of those lessons is the idea that "the essential problem with the human brain is not one of storage but the lack of a good index".  You see as humans go we are very good an knowing what we know  but, not knowing it.

Think about it...... how many times have you struggled to remember something ...."oh its on the tip of my tongue" or perhaps when your out and about you see something that triggers a nugget o knowledge you learnt at school or maybe your on holiday and a bit of your school lesson French springs to mind.

Given Googles prime business of searching and how well it can search the web, shops, text in books, images etc...  now expand that a little.....  what about searching that massive depth of knowledge that you have with a search engine?

We can scan brain activity now  so its down to determining the APIs.
So how long do we reckon?  Lets be generous...20 years?

As I said on Twitter the other day...given sufficient renumeration I'd happily help out?