to collect in a mass01/25/2010
James Petterson Inc
Since 2006, one out of every 17 novels bought in the United States was written by James Patterson.
This article covers how Patterson has profited from challenging many of his publisher’s assumptions about how to advertise and release novels and being intimately involved with the production of his books. More stats to go with the one above:
“He is listed in the latest edition of “Guinness World Records,” published last fall, as the author with the most New York Times best sellers, 45, but that number is already out of date: he now has 51 — 35 of which went to No. 1.”
“In addition to his two editors, Patterson has three full-time Hachette [his publisher] employees (plus assistants) devoted exclusively to him.”
“According to Nielsen BookScan, [John] Grisham’s, [Stephen] King’s and [Dan] Brown’s combined U.S. sales in recent years still don’t match Patterson’s.”
“ACCORDING TO FORBES magazine, Patterson earned Hachette about $500 million over the last two years,” which his publisher denies but won’t correct.
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01/05/2010
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Link posted at 15:20
01/03/2010
Info-graphic comparing countries’ health care spending per person to average life expectancy at birth.
Photo posted at 22:59
12/28/2009
Link posted at 22:11
John Graham-Cumming: Tonight, I’m going to write myself an Aston Martin
Software that detects copy-and-move photo edits and produces images like this to show where the copy came from and went.
Photo posted at 21:24
Link posted at 17:31
12/21/2009
Really interesting, albeit long (1.5 hours), video on the biochemistry and physiology behind what our body does with glucose, sucrose, and fructose and how fructose is a chronic toxin that is essentially beer without the buzz and possibly the cause of the hyper tension and obesity epidemics the world is facing.
Video posted at 23:41
11/21/2009
Lin-Manuel Miranda performs an incredible rap about Alexander Hamilton to Obama at the White House Poetry Jam
Video posted at 21:51
Face-Off With a Deadly Predator
Pretty interesting!
Video posted at 21:50
11/02/2009
Link posted at 22:04
05/03/2008
Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo in SF talking about, among other things, the “cognitive surplus” we are only beginning to make use of.
He had a great response to a TV producer that heard a story about Wikipedians dealing with Pluto’s loss of “planet status” a couple years ago and who wondered where they “find the time” (that story starts at 03:45):
“No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
Some interesting statistics he states:
- The Internet-connected population watches 1 trillion hours of TV a year
- In the US, we watch 200 billion hours of TV a year
- Wikipedia represents roughly 100 million hours of work
- In the US, we watch 100 million hours of advertisements every weekend
Video posted at 17:02
05/01/2008
I built a couple Tumblr-related tools using AppEngine a couple weeks ago, but alas, the “several second” timeout they’ve imposed made them not so useful, though the bulk upload feature might make one of them work, though in a less-than-ideal state. They also appear to be having issues with query response times, as this Google employee discovered.
After coming across this post (via katrina, I think), I thought it would be kind of neat to make an app that profiled Tumblr users. This is a screenshot of it via the Google SDK on my local machine, where there is no time limit. It works on appspot for Tumblr users with not a lot of posts, but once you get beyond a certain point, all the necessary calls to the Tumblr API can’t be made before Google’s imposed time limit is hit. At that point, a python traceback is displayed, which I can’t seem to stop, so I’m not sure I want to share the link yet. I’m hoping the time limit will be removed as the service matures. In preparation for that day, are there any other stats that you’d want to see about a user? Top 10 most-linked-to domains is one I’ve seen before. Of course, it would be much more efficient for Tumblr to provide all this information, so this is just temporary until they get around to it =)
Photo posted at 22:03
04/25/2008
» Retired NY cops are able to connect murder to dozens around country
This is insane.
Crazy. The detectives make the case that there is a nation-wide criminal enterprise that’s been responsible for at least 40 college student deaths in 25 cities across 11 states over the last 11 years. They go as far as deliberately leaving evidence for search teams leading in the wrong direction, and they leave a “signature” when they dump the bodies: a smiley face.
Link posted at 16:07
04/24/2008
Barack Obama (via azspot) (via marco) (via jakoblodwick)
Quote posted at 14:11
