to collect in a mass

livejamie: Lin-Manuel Miranda performs an incredible rap about...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:51:59 -0800

livejamie:

Lin-Manuel Miranda performs an incredible rap about Alexander Hamilton to Obama at the White House Poetry Jam

Face-Off With a Deadly Predator Pretty interesting!

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:50:52 -0800

Face-Off With a Deadly Predator

Pretty interesting!

Scaling in Games & Virtual Worlds

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:04:14 -0800

Scaling in Games & Virtual Worlds

Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo in SF talking about, among other...

Sat, 03 May 2008 17:02:00 -0700

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.

I built a couple Tumblr-related tools using AppEngine a couple...

Thu, 01 May 2008 22:03:00 -0700

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 =)

Retired NY cops are able to connect murder to dozens around country

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:07:12 -0700

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.

"I also think that my party can be smug, detached, and dogmatic at times. I believe in free market,..."

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:11:21 -0700

“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)

"Do not descend too deeply into specialism in your work. Educate all your parts. You will be..."

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:40:47 -0700

“

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”

livejamie: Lost Generation: This is stunningly simple and...

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:29:00 -0700

livejamie:

Lost Generation: This is stunningly simple and beautiful.

Reblog Notes Display Fixed

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:28:27 -0700

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.

"If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our..."

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 12:41:39 -0700

“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.

dihard: This is what I hate about marketing classes (taken...

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:44:34 -0700

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.

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

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:47:40 -0700

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

- John Wooden

When someone says they have, for example, 20/40 vision (this is...

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:54:00 -0700

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.

Iraq By The Numbers

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:56:59 -0700

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.

New primary system for Washington State

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:48:48 -0700

New primary system for Washington State:

“Under a surprise 7-2 ruling handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, the state is allowed to begin using a primary that would put all candidates on the same ballot and advance the top two finishers to the general election, regardless of party…

Analysts said the system should favor centrists with crossover appeal over hard-edged partisans. The new method also offers the intriguing possibility of November elections between two candidates from the same party.” (emphasis is mine)

Senator Clinton's "Million Little Pieces" moment

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 09:20:00 -0700

Senator Clinton's "Million Little Pieces" moment:

“Senator Clinton’s campaign has launched one of the oddest bits of political propaganda in the history of modern politics. Called DelegateHub.com, it is a web site that does nothing less than lay out, in glorious policy-wonk detail, their rationale for stealing the Democratic nomination…

Gore’s Electoral College loss in 2000 was a calamity, and the idea that that sort of end-run might be perpetrated on us again by a member of our own party strikes us as a betrayal of trust…

Even worse, not only are Clinton’s rationales for increasing the delegate count anti-democratic, they are mutually contradictory. DelegateHub explains her goal to seat Florida and Michigan as a question of fundamental fairness, but in explaining superdelegates, they call the popular vote an arbitrary metric. So which is it: fair, or arbitrary? The campaign never says, because of course, there’s no actual principle here. Things that increase her delegate count are good, period.”

Imagining The Tenth Dimension I know this is older, but it came...

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:02:38 -0800

Imagining The Tenth Dimension

I know this is older, but it came up again over a dinner discussion. I had to find it to send to someone after dinner, so I figured I’d post it here, too.

Added Tumblr Notes / Rebloggers To Each Post

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:39:00 -0800

UPDATED (4/11/2008): The problems described in this post have been fixed. I also decided to leave the reblog comments instead of requiring you to hover over some text to see them.

UPDATE: Like with most version 1.0 solutions, I got feedback and made changes. On permalink posts, there’s a link in the sidebar for posts with reblog notes, and the notes will slide down. On index pages, if there are notes, a “show reblog notes” link will show up and exhibit the same sliding behavior. There are still issues with one of the services I use to enable this which results in some posts with notes not actually appearing to have notes. Other times, the notes will be missing information like usernames or user icons. I feel like that’s pretty much out of my hands, unfortunately.

During my conversation with joelaz about accessing Tumblr notes and what you could do with them, he mentioned that it would be neat to display the notes alongside a post . I really liked that idea, so I added that information to my sidebar. You can see it on “post” pages that have reblogging activity (give it a second to load). It’s designed to not show anything if there haven’t been any reblogs relating to the post. If there are reblogs, then you’ll see the rebloggers’ icons and usernames, as well as who they each reblogged it from. I’ve set it up so that the icon will always link to that user’s main page, and the username will link to that user’s reblog post if they added anything to it; otherwise, it will also link to that user’s main page. That’s a limitation of the data available in the notes page. If you hover over the reblogger’s username, you’ll see some of the text that they added, if they added anything.

Unfortunately, my experience with one of the web services I used (Dapper) to make this has been quite frustrating, and I’ve wasted hours trying to get it to work on both posts with many reblogs and posts with only a few reblogs. It doesn’t seem to want to do both, so I left it working for posts with (what appear to be) more than three reblogs. I wouldn’t even need Dapper if Yahoo Pipes did something I think it should, and I’ve given feedback to the Pipes team about it. Anyway, here are some posts where you can see the rebloggers list in action:

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/25255357

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/24798348

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/27649141

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/23845269

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/23859873 (4 reblogs and it works)

Here are some posts where there are reblogs (click the “Show/Hide Notes” link above the footer to see them if you’re using Firefox) but no rebloggers listed in the sidebar:

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/23377331 (3 reblogs and it doesn’t work)

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/25077239 (3 reblogs, again)

http://coacervo.tumblr.com/post/26267925 (2 reblogs)

I left some debugging stuff around (some javascript functions and that Show/Hide Notes link I mentioned above) in case I decide to dig into it some more. Please excuse the mess =) If anyone has any suggestions or comments, let me know!

Velcro being pulled apart. See also: Velcro under a microscope

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 10:35:39 -0800

Velcro being pulled apart. See also: Velcro under a microscope