News You Can Bruise for 2006 October 16

Sumana's weblog is down, so I have given her this space to show you a link.

Hi all! Wife here. The folks competing for the Netflix prizes are having machine-learning fun with a big ol' dataset. There's Customer 305344, who rated more than 17,000 movies. There's constant wishing and jibing about getting a lower root mean squared error. And there's the question: why is Miss Congeniality the most-rated movie on Netflix?

The answer lies at the end of a lovely little essay by benjismith, which includes the SQL command ORDER BY hatred. As it turns out, Miss Congeniality shares something with Fahrenheit 9/11, The Passion of the Christ, and Con Air.

Niklaus Wirth's "Good Ideas -- Through The Looking Glass" is a really interesting survey of computer science ideas that didn't pan out, either by consensus or by Wirth fiat. I thought it would only be kind of interesting, but I got sucked in.

Early history of Atari:

In case anyone is mistaken in thinking Grand Theft Auto was the first videogame to have players willingly commit a felony, Watergate Caper tempted gamers to “Break Into Watergate Yourself” 30 years prior.

Here's a Watergate Caper flyer.