to collect in a mass

11/21/2009

livejamie:

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

» Scaling in Games & Virtual Worlds

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
This resonates with why I don’t have cable or satellite, why I posted this quote back in December, and why I had been secretly hoping that the writer’s strike would never end.

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 =)

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

livejamie:

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

“ I also think that my party can be smug, detached, and dogmatic at times. I believe in free market, competition, and entrepreneurship, and think no small number of government programs don’t work as advertised. I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers. „

Barack Obama (via azspot) (via marco) (via jakoblodwick)

Quote posted at 14:11

04/16/2008

“ 

Do not descend too deeply into specialism in your work. Educate all your parts. You will be healthier. Replace cynicism with its old-fashioned antidote, skepticism.

Don’t confuse success with excellence. The poet Robert Penn Warren once told me that ‘careerism is death.’

Insist on heroes. And be one.

Read. The book is still the greatest manmade machine of all — not the car, not the TV, not the computer.

Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality.

Serve your country. Insist that we fight the right wars. Convince your government that the real threat comes from within this favored land, as Lincoln knew. Governments always forget that. Do not let your government outsource honesty, transparency, or candor. Do not let your government outsource democracy. Steel yourselves. Your generation will have to repair this damage. And it will not be easy.

Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothing to do with the actual defense of our country — they just make our country worth defending.

Do not lose your enthusiasm. In its Greek etymology, the word enthusiasm means, ‘God in us.’

 „

Ken Burns, “A Vanguard Against this New Separatism”

Quote posted at 22:40

04/14/2008

livejamie:

Lost Generation: This is stunningly simple and beautiful.

Video posted at 13:29

04/12/2008

Reblog Notes Display Fixed

After flying to S.F. and back yesterday (uhg), I slept in and stayed inside today to recoup.  I got a Google App Engine account a couple days ago and decided today that I was going to learn some Python and fix the reblog notes that were only partially working.  I replaced the Yahoo Pipe and the (crappy) Dapper dependency, and now it works like a charm (during all my tests, at least).  It only works in Firefox, but I’m fine with that.  Some other people have expressed an interest in displaying notes on their Tumblrs, but my app currently requires specific html elements to exist and javascript additions in multiple locations within a template.  I’ll see what I can do about simplifying that.

I’ve got some other ideas for some Tumblr services that I can’t do with any of the web services I know of due to various limitations of each.  I don’t think I’ll be limited by App Engine, so I’ll see if I can get to some of them in the following week.

Text posted at 00:28

04/05/2008

“ If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise. „

Aldous Huxley (via micahbaldwin)

That could be true, but we could also work on changing our perspectives and personalities to allow for all of those things.  Implying that we need a miracle drug belittles the tremendous capacity for change that we all have within us.

Quote posted at 12:41

03/28/2008

dihard: This is what I hate about marketing classes (taken from a powerpoint lecture slide). Marketing is really interesting and plays a huge part of any entity, but it has changed from the archaic “3C’s of Pricing” (they’re cost, consumer, and competitors, by the way) or the “4P’s of the Marketing Mix” (product, price, promotion, and place). A good marketer today knows how to navigate through the business as well as virtual world - to be able to go to a firm and provide five things it can do to get on a natural page search. Top results on Google are like 5th Avenue real estate. I’ve heard the top result gets 70% of hits, the second 20% and the 3rd about 5%. Andrew’s post is pretty telling, except I don’t know what “the fold” even means. […] The “fold” is a term that comes from the newspaper world.  When you fold a newspaper in half to put it in a stand, anything you can see is said to be “above the fold.”  In the web world, it means the part of a page you can see without having to scroll.

dihard:

This is what I hate about marketing classes (taken from a powerpoint lecture slide). Marketing is really interesting and plays a huge part of any entity, but it has changed from the archaic “3C’s of Pricing” (they’re cost, consumer, and competitors, by the way) or the “4P’s of the Marketing Mix” (product, price, promotion, and place).

A good marketer today knows how to navigate through the business as well as virtual world - to be able to go to a firm and provide five things it can do to get on a natural page search. Top results on Google are like 5th Avenue real estate. I’ve heard the top result gets 70% of hits, the second 20% and the 3rd about 5%. Andrew’s post is pretty telling, except I don’t know what “the fold” even means.

[…]

The “fold” is a term that comes from the newspaper world.  When you fold a newspaper in half to put it in a stand, anything you can see is said to be “above the fold.”  In the web world, it means the part of a page you can see without having to scroll.

Photo posted at 15:44

03/22/2008

“ You cannot live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you. „

John Wooden

Quote posted at 20:47

When someone says they have, for example, 20/40 vision (this is US-specific, apparently), do you know what those numbers mean?  I didn’t until just now.  I just renewed my driver’s license online for the first time (no waiting in line at the DMV: nice!), and they asked me to certify that my vision is no worse than 20/40.  There was a footnote that said you have 20/40 eyesight if you need an object to be 20 feet away to be as clear as that object would be if it were 40 feet away for someone with normal vision.  The standard chart you’ve probably had to read at one point in your life (pictured above) is called a Snellen Chart: This line, designated 20/20, is the smallest line that a person with normal acuity can read at a distance of twenty feet. Three lines above, the letters have twice the dimensions of those on the 20/20 line. The chart is at a distance of twenty feet, but a person with normal acuity could be expected to read these letters at a distance of forty feet. This line is designated by the ratio 20/40. If this is the smallest line a person can read, the person’s acuity is “20/40,” meaning, in a very rough kind of way, that this person needs to approach to a distance of twenty feet to read letters that a person with normal acuity could read at forty feet. In an even rougher way, this person could be said to have “half” the normal acuity.

When someone says they have, for example, 20/40 vision (this is US-specific, apparently), do you know what those numbers mean?  I didn’t until just now.  I just renewed my driver’s license online for the first time (no waiting in line at the DMV: nice!), and they asked me to certify that my vision is no worse than 20/40.  There was a footnote that said you have 20/40 eyesight if you need an object to be 20 feet away to be as clear as that object would be if it were 40 feet away for someone with normal vision.  The standard chart you’ve probably had to read at one point in your life (pictured above) is called a Snellen Chart:

This line, designated 20/20, is the smallest line that a person with normal acuity can read at a distance of twenty feet.
Three lines above, the letters have twice the dimensions of those on the 20/20 line. The chart is at a distance of twenty feet, but a person with normal acuity could be expected to read these letters at a distance of forty feet. This line is designated by the ratio 20/40. If this is the smallest line a person can read, the person’s acuity is “20/40,” meaning, in a very rough kind of way, that this person needs to approach to a distance of twenty feet to read letters that a person with normal acuity could read at forty feet. In an even rougher way, this person could be said to have “half” the normal acuity.

Photo posted at 18:54

03/18/2008

» Iraq By The Numbers

Civilian Deaths, US Troop Deaths, Daily Crude Oil Production, Electricity Generated, Number of Phone Subscribers, and Iraqi Detainees in US Custody over the last 5 years.  Note the “prewar level” and “stated goal” markers, too.

If those numbers are accurate, then we’re seeing the lowest number of civilian and troop deaths since the war began.  Regardless of what you think about the war, that’s a good thing.

Link posted at 19:56

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