Planetside Screenshots

Wow, it is just fascinating reviewing the referrals that come to my website. As I previously noted, the majority of the hits here are coming from keyword searches; most of them from image requests.

Here is the number one photograph that causes people to come to my site. The name of the image is 'ball3.jpg'. Were people searching on pornography to find it!? It is a photograph I took of a disco ball suspended from my pontoon boat at sunset while floating peacefully on Lake Saint Louis. I can only imagine that as these people were scanning some image search or another this brilliant image sticks out. Now, all of the links that used to go to my photographs are dead so it will take a while for them to migrate to the new server.

Some searches were clearly trolling for porn, with keywords like 'girlfriend blog' and such. However, what induced me to post a message tonight was an interesting search entry. Someone had typed my name 'John Ratcliff' with the word 'Ageia'. Now, my name (last I checked) is 'John Ratcliff'. I remain smugly proud that the number one hit on the Internet for my name is my personal blog. I know, for a fact, that many people alive today, and even throughout history, have been named John Ratcliff (there are four John Ratcliff's in my immediate family alone). So, you can just imagine what it does to inflate my ego to know that I have a higher hit count than my long dead Grandfather, my Uncle, and my own son.

However, for someone to consciously type my name plus the word 'Ageia' into a search engine says something. What is says is they know me, and they want to know what I have been saying about the company I work for. Other than occasionaly bitching about my commute, I'm pretty certain I have said little to nothing about my current employer on this blog or anywhere else.

Who is it that thinks I have loose lips? Who thinks I am divulging corporate secrets? Or, what headhunter is trying to find out more about me?

They spy on me, I spy on them. It's all so devious. Being public on the internet is a little bit freaky. At one level you are 'putting yourself out there', for your friends and casual observers. On the other hand, you are trolled by all manner of internet beasties.

When I followed the results of the previous Google search I got a rather queasy feeling. I came to realize that we are getting very close to the age of Internet artificial intelligences. I can smell that today it is only just the weak, lame, beginnings, but soon enough this shit is going to get serious. Really serious. Human beings are pattern matching experts. Computers can, are, and will be programmed to do the same. My friend John Oberschelp and I came up with a pattern matching algorithm a long time ago that we published in Dr. Dobbs Journal called 'Gestalt'. It wasn't much of anything, but the thing is that it really worked. It was an algorithm that solved the problem the same way a human mind sees the core essence of a pattern even if it is quite scrambled in bits and pieces.

People are, and will be, writing software that trolls the entire internet, searching for patterns and clues. These spiders are already out there, going beyond just creating keyword searches and are now building knowledge databases and even entire websites based on the inferences they find.

It's one thing to wonder about the random websurfer who passes by here at random and quite another to think about targeted artificial intelligences trying to cogitate the meaning of my random thoughts. Hal, dude, you are creeping me out!

To get caught up here...

Last weekend I attended the trivia night fundraiser at the local Catholic church with our friends. Early on, when I first created this blog, I made a lengthy post about trivia fund raisers. They are a lot of fun. The worst thing that can happen at a trivia night is to actually do well, because you suddenly think...hey..I'm doing really good..I better not screw up! Of course, 10 other tables are thinking the same thing and the last round reshuffles things quite dramatically. We were in 4th place going into the last round which turned out to be a set of true-false-maybe questions that were tantamount to a coin toss. Fortunately, I drank a lot of beer and I didn't really care whether we came in 4th or 15th. A good time was had by all.

On Saturday I made copies of a bunch of content for the New Masonic Temple. My goal is to create a power-point presentation about the history of the building to present at lodges in the area as an educational lecture. However, I did not own a laptop computer since my last one got hit by lightening. So, on Sunday, I broke down and bought a new laptop computer at 'Best Buy' for my wife and I to share. Today she used it for a presentation at school using our InFocus DLP350 projector, and she was quite pleased with the system.

This week has been very busy with work but, then again, I don't talk about work now do I? I did purchase credits on 'Skype' which is a voice over IP and chat system. It works more or less ok. It should be helpful the next time I travel to Europe and want to call home.

I was so pleased with my success at memorizing some Masonic ritual that I decided to tackle something more signifcant. On Sunday I practed the Junior Deacon station at School of Instruction and on Wednesday I actually got to sit in that chair in lodge. I did 'ok' for it being my first time. I did all of my lines ok, but messed up on some floorwork. I decided to try to learn a longer piece of more substantial ritual called the 'Entered Apprentice Charge'. It's just two pages long and comprises a single part I might perform at an initation ceremony. I memorized the first two paragraphs on the way to work on my commute and I was feeling quite proud of myself. However, when I came home from work I couldn't remember a single word!? This really kind of freaked me out. I could still remember the other stuff I had memorized before, but not the two paragraphs I went over that day. When I woke up the next morning, however, I could remember it word for word. What's up with that!? Is there something that happens in the human brain that, during sleep, it organizes memory into a more permanent pattern? I plan to memorize one extra paragraph each day I commute to and from work and see if it can 'stay in there' without falling out. This particular piece of ritual is remarkably convoluted. The language is almost doctor Suess in flavor. Even though it doesn't rhyme it is such a strange and inolved pattern of words that it feels like something must be 'happening' to my brain so to wire it into such an exact sequence. Is this just me putting romantic notions onto the situation or is there really something going on here? I can't say for sure. However, I was so pleased with myself that I could remember a few bits of ritual I would be sorely dissapoined at this point were I to lose any of that momentum.

When I started Freemasonry and heard Brother Chris Neubold deliver a lecture that lasted upwards of fifteen minutes I was awe-struck and hoped no one would ever expect me to do such a thing. Now, I can only hope I might duplicate the performance as it really seems to tickle something in the back of the brain were I to wire it in such a way. I wonder, do dramatic actors feel a similar benefit when they perform memory work as well?

The last item of the day is this. My twenty year old son, John Ratcliff, moved down to Florida after graduating from High School. He went to live with his Aunt and attened a semester of college. He just found out that his Aunt has to move because of her job and he will be moving back home to live with us again. On February 17th I will be driving down to Florida to bring him back home. This is certainly going to be a big life change for him and for our whole family as well. I hope he returns home to great success and a better future.