New from Google: Gmail Paper! Good Google entry into the April Fool’s shenanigans. You need to be signed out of Gmail to view this page. Also, make sure to check out the companion page. I especially liked the bit on soybean sputum.

For my brackets this year, I decided to hack together some MATLAB scripts from my computational intelligence course at K-State to pick games. I figure that, at the very least, I can use team statistics from the regular season plugged into a neural network to pick games with the same success I normally achieve picking games on paper.

I meticulously downloaded stats for each team from the NCAA website (which was annoying, by the way), and chose 11 statistical categories for comparison. Mike D. hooked me up with regular season statistics for every game played, and I pared the 5000 some-odd games down to only include games in which a tournament team met another tournament team (approximately 240 games). I used two-thirds of those games to train the neural network and a third of the games to test the results. The mean square error (MSE) of the training data was about 0.1 while the MSE of the test data was slightly higher (like .11). To be fair, my methods aren’t exactly sound and neither is my reporting of the numbers (see the graph below). Hopefully, my results will justify the lack of a sound methodology.

Notice that the training data is more successfully modeled by the NN.

The results of putting tournament games into my neural network were not always to my liking (for instance, KU lost every simulated round) so I flip game results occasionally (probably eight games).

Below, I present a training plot for the original school project. Notice the much smoother curve: probably the result of having a quarter of a semester to fine tune to the system.

Kotaku pointed to a blog that has an interview with Gamespy PR peoples about the Wii’s multiplayer support. If this is true, Nintendo really just doesn’t get it. I am really only familiar with X-box Live, but after using the 360’s dashboard and hooking up with friends for games, I don’t understand why Nintendo won’t just copy Microsoft’s service. Nintendo has not presented a compelling reason why the DS, and apparently the Wii, do not have full backends for multiplayer services. Virtual Console is great and I think the Opera browser will eventually be great, but the built in wireless features of the Wii aren’t worth very much if I can’t easily connect with friends to play games.

(via Kotaku)

One thing I have always wanted to do with the Start menu in Windows is to select multiple items at once. The current behavior is for the Start menu to close when an item is selected; I don’t want the menu to close. I know this can be done in the “Programs” listing by shift clicking, but for some reason this behavior isn’t duplicated in the base Start menu. A lot of times when I start one program on my computer, I want to start others:

1. When I am editing lots of photos, I use Photoshop, Nikon PictureProject (for importing), and I occasionally open up explorer to get at files directly (instead of using Bridge)
2. When I sign on to the internet (bah…dial-up), I need to launch the connection dialog, Firefox, iTunes, and AIM.

I can think of some other examples, but these two should illustrated my problem. Yes, there are other ways of opening these programs all at once (multiple selection of desktop shortcuts), but I really want this way to work.

The way I see it, this control behavior would be the same as it is within the “Programs” listing: a user can hold down shift and select as many programs to launch as desired. Selected programs can be indicated by a lighter color of the current selection color. (See demonstrative animation at the end of the post.)

I also think that this shift-behavior would come in useful with the “open recent…” popout menu in most document editors (Word, Photoshop). A lot of times in Photoshop, I want to open multiple psd files at once, this shift clicking control would perhaps increase efficiency by a miniscule amount.

Note: Maybe I’m missing a setting somewhere, but I really don’t think I am. I’ve only checked for this behavior in Windows XP SP2; perhaps Vista has this feature.

Over the course of the last month I have been watching the first two seasons of HBO’s The Wire. This show is incredibly good, and I really think the critical accolades for this show are spot on. The story execution is great, and the pacing and mood remind me of my favorite crime novels (primarily John Harvey’s Charlie Reznick series). My friend Greg pointed me towards this show (after years of my ignoring the ads that aired after The Sopranos); he pointed out how each show isn’t geared towards getting viewers watch the next episode (LOST being the exemplar). Rather than rely on gimmicks, the show retains viewership because the depiction of the gritty world of crime in Baltimore is so good. The DVD presentation is as good as any other HBO show: each episode has its own menu allowing the viewer to see “previously on”, “next on”, etc. I think the show was filmed in 4:3 so the lack of widescreen wasn’t too bothersome. My only complaint about the boxed set is the box, literally. After messing me with the genius Rome packaging, the boxes for The Wire leave a lot to be desired.

Speaking of crime, I also finally saw The Departed. I didn’t get a chance to see this movie in theaters (big mistake), but I still really enjoyed the DVD. Unlike the borderline-0bsessive attention detail of The Wire, The Departed presents a more sweeping view of organized crime in Boston. (Sweeping compared to The Wire, not compared to other Scorsese films) . The two-disc DVD package has decent extras and the movie looks great. I look forward to having access to a high def player so I can watch this movie in 1080P.

I rented Stranger Than Fiction yesterday and found the movie to be enjoyable. This movie probably falls into the quirky-romance genre that has been popular lately (e.g., Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and I have no complaints: Weird characters are always enjoyable. The only portion of the movie that bothered me was the white line / text overlay: it didn’t make me like the movie any less, I just don’t know if it made the movie any better. The Spoon-heavy soundtrack is very enjoyable.

Highly Recommended: The Wire, The Departed
Recommended: Stranger Than Fiction

I’m not a fan of either (MS Paint or the PSP), but I might give paint some more credit after seeing this.

(via Kotaku.)