Mike Lopez Blogs
A Roxboro woman has filed a formal complaint with a local school board after her son was disciplined by a lunch program monitor at Ecole Lalande for eating in what she says is a customary Filipino manner.
Luc Cagadoc’s table behaviour is traditionally Filipino; he fills his spoon by pushing the food on his plate with a fork, his mother, Maria Theresa Gallardo, says.
Filipino table etiquette punished at local school
As a high-school student in the 1950s, John Koza yearned for a personal computer. That was a tall order back then, as mass-produced data processors such as the IBM 704 were mainframes several times the size of his bedroom. So the cocksure young man went rummaging for broken jukeboxes and pinball machines, repurposing relays and switches and lightbulbs to make a computer of his own design.
Within certain parameters, his computer was a success, flawlessly reckoning the day of the week whenever he dialed in a calendar date, but the hardwiring made it useless for anything else. Koza’s first invention was not about to supplant IBM, but the mothballed gizmo remains in his basement to this day, a reminder to himself that the intelligence of a machine is a matter of adaptability as much as accuracy.
Over the past several decades, Koza has internalized that lesson as deeply as any computer scientist alive and, arguably, made more of the insight than any coder in history. Now 62 and an adjunct professor at Stanford University, Koza is the inventor of genetic programming, a revolutionary approach to artificial intelligence (AI) capable of solving complex engineering problems with virtually no human guidance. Koza’s 1,000 networked computers don’t just follow a preordained routine. They create, growing new and unexpected designs out of the most basic code. They are computers that innovate, that find solutions not only equal to but better than the best work of expert humans. His “invention machine,†as he likes to call it, has even earned a U.S. patent for developing a system to make factories more efficient, one of the first intellectual-property protections ever granted to a nonhuman designer.
Yet as impressive as these creations may be, none are half as significant as the machine’s method: Darwinian evolution, the process of natural selection. Over and over, bits of computer code are, essentially, procreating. And over the course of hundreds or thousands of generations, that code evolves into offspring so well-adapted for its designated job that it is demonstrably superior to anything we can imagine. The age of creative machines has arrived. And its prophet is John Koza.
Playing the Lottery
Computer science was still a brand-new discipline in the early 1960s, when Koza went to the University of Michigan. He was the second person anywhere to earn a bachelor’s degree in the field. “I was interested in computers, so I studied computer science,†he explains with characteristic bluntness. “Why do other people go into medicine or become policemen?†He earned his Ph.D. in December 1972, six months away from an academic job opportunity.
Industry, on the other hand, was eager for computer-science expertise. While in school, Koza had worked part-time for a supermarket rub-off game manufacturer called J&H International, calculating probabilities to keep game layouts unpredictable. A full-time position there was as good as certain. But the week of his graduation, the company shut its doors permanently.
Like many successful innovators, Koza combines unusual competence in his work with supreme confidence in himself. Rather than taking the bankruptcy as a sign that rub-off games were dead, he decided that scratch cards were the future of yet another moribund business: state lotteries. At the time, lotteries were weekly raffles, typically with six-digit tickets. A state might sell $1 million worth of tickets a week. Koza believed that, with a more interesting game, especially one offering instant gratification, he could sell more. He opened his own business with another former J&H employee and took a one-year gamble. By the end of 1974, they landed a contract with the state of Massachusetts for 25 million rub-off games.
The success of the instant-win lottery was, in a word, instantaneous—$2.7 million worth of tickets sold in the first week. “Our basic business was tripling lottery sales,†Koza says. By 1982, dozens of states that didn’t have a lottery had adopted one, and his company, Scientific Games, was diligently supplying most of them. Koza had invented a machine for printing money. He sold the company to Bally Manufacturing and ran the business under contract until 1987. At which point he found himself very rich but, for the second time in his life, jobless.
John Koza Has Built an Invention Machine - Popular Science
Aha! I finally got My GooglePage. Now what to do with it??????
For now all I can say is that it’s pretty slow and pretty limited. But I’ll find uses for it.
Ok. I admit it. I’ve recently been hit by the blogging flu. It’s just that I can’t stop my fingers either from typing stuff, reading other people’s blogs, or enhancing my current blogs. Good thing I managed to grab a hold on things (or did I?) that I am now trying to focus on finishing my goals for the month.
For those who doesn’t know, I maintain a web hosting business called transinnova. The website is still being finished so that’s one goal. Another goal is to finish two other client websites - www.accucode.net (new website) and www.cuervo.com.ph which is for renovation. Then I also have to finish renovating another webiste - www.alaysabansa.org which has been in my pending list for so long now.
Those are just for my personal business. Now, let’s move on to my ‘employed stuff’. Again for those who doesn’t know, I am also employed as a programmer at Distributed Website Corporation and at the moment I have 10 items in to-do things with them. All of these are bugs to fix from one of their products (no, I didn’t introduce the bugs).
Then lastly, back to my blogs. As you can see, all of my blogs listed on the right hand side of this page under “My Blogs” all use the same template. So I guess I have to create new templates for each just to let people that “Hey, you’re on another blog!”
Are those all? Far from over but my other goals are either minimal or top secret at the moment. Geez, I’m one busy person. So help me God!
Just want to tell you all that I started a new blog which can be found at http://money.mikelopez.info/. As the URL obviously states, in this new blog, I will be talking about my very own road to millions.
Ok, today I spent about 3 hours burning all of my blogs’ feeds into FeedBurner and customizing each of them. Geez, how I love FeedBurner. Here’s a quick rundown of all my feeds:
Now, this clearly shows how diverse a person can be - imagine all those topics. 
Eekkkiiiiieeee, yucckkkkiiieeeee, and tons of FUN!!!
If you have a photo of a booger (kulangot in tagalog) or if you know someone who does, then I would suggest that you submit it to BoOoGerz.COM. Check them out! Now, I have one more reason not to clean my nose (ok, just kidding).
Finally after much work, I found enough time to post my recent iBlog2 experience. Actually, the entire experience can be expressed in two words - Totally Incredible!
I don’t have photos from the event but here are the topics that got my attention most.
Of course the other topics were also good but these happens to be my favorites
Best of all, I got to meet new friends. It’s so refreshing to find out that the people in the world of blogging actually breathe oxygen.
Kudos to you guys and see on iBlog3 if there will be one.
Finally after much work, I found enough time to post my recent iBlog2 experience. Actually, the entire experience can be expressed in two words - Totally Incredible!
I don’t have photos from the event but here are the topics that got my attention most.
Of course the other topics were also good but these happens to be my favorites
Best of all, I got to meet new friends. It’s so refreshing to find out that the people in the world of blogging actually breathe oxygen.
Kudos to you guys and see on iBlog3 if there will be one.
Do you hate e-mail spam? So do I. Good thing we have SpamAssassin - my favorite spam filter appliance. It filters about 80% of spam sent to my inbox. If your web host provider runs on Cpanel, then you’re lucky as it is pretty easy to turn SpamAssassin via Cpanel. Here’s how:
That’s about it! SpamAssassin - my favor spam filter appliance!!! And it’s free!!!
Recent Posts from the Mike Lopez Blogs