YGingras^.net

There are many strange and unexpected things in Hawaii. There are no mosquitoes, McDonald restaurants serve rice and homeless people are shaped like body builders. I guess there is no way around it when you surf all day. Usually, you can explain the unexpected by the remoteness of the young islands. But I still don't get why there is so much Spam.

Hawaiians love Spam. Grocery stores hold industrial quantities of it, and they have a comprehensive selection too. Spam is even served in restaurants. Almost all plate lunches come with a complimentary slice of Spam. Only the fish plates are free of it.

Who am I to complain? If they like it, good for them. I'm not a cultural fundamentalist either, far from it. I even eat poutine with chop sticks. But it gets too far when they replace salmon with Spam in maki sushi.

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The idea behind bioinformatics, at least for some people, is that since the information encoded into DNA is sequential, you can parse it more or less the same way that you parse an English text. You can apply a regex to DNA and you can search DNA just as you can search text. But how far can you push it?

The part of information processing science formerly known as AI developed a whole range of "machine learning" techniques. Most never made it into the real world but once in a while, a new idea is ripe and you see it spread like a storm. Most techniques that tried to model how the brain works are miserable failures, but it happens that someone understands how people use information and apply really simple pasterns turn worthless data into the most valuable repository of knowledge.

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If someone typed something like date +"%Y" at his terminal, assuming that he used the Gregorian calendar, he would probably see something like 2005. If the same person was to read RFC196, he would probably see July 20, 1971 near the beginning. Only 13 years after the discovery of the Bessemer process we had the first transcontinental railroad, after more that 30 years of email, all email clients suck.

Anyone who uses email for something else than remote backups knows what I'm talking about. If you need to read your emails from more than one location you can probably forget all the nice "native" clients. But webmails requires heavy usage of the mouse, lacks many important features like a usable spell-checker and incremental search. All the webmail service provider have EULA that requires your first born and a pint of fresh blood a month. Namespace pollution is another problem, I don't want my email to be y._kk_gingras234252_asd@example.com, I want ygingras@ygingras.net. So called native clients have pretty UI but when some important feature is needed we feel that they don't want to mess too much with that UI so the feature get postponed. Spam is a plague but a great thinker found a solution a few years ago already.

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