The Null Device
2004/4/23
An interesting item cribbed from Jim: WordsEye is an experimental system that takes sentences in English (such as "The marmalade sky. The zebra skin ground is red. The sun is large. The hippo is next to the horse.") and renders them as images (such as this one). There's a wealth of example images here. It can represent abstract ideas (such as "John believes the cat is not blue", and automatically infer how to symbolise that something happened at a certain time, and map adjectives to textures. Of course, sometimes it gets amusing results, such as its rendering of "John looks at the cat on the skateboard", or, indeed, "the devil is in the details".
Two trains laden with fuel crash in North Korea; some 3,000 rumoured dead. North Korea cuts off international phone links to prevent news of the blast from emerging. Suspiciously enough, the blast happened shortly after North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is said to have passed by rail through the station, returning from a visit to China, and not that long after a similar blast took place in fellow Axis of Evil member Iran. Coincidence? (via trayce@LJ)