to collect in a mass

"I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you..."

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:59:30 -0800

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.
So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.
Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it. Make your mistakes, next year and forever.””

- Neil Gaiman (via thoughtsdetained)

Concentration of Power

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:46:34 -0800

dihard:

According to recent financial data from the 3rd quarter of 2010, six banks represent 64% of GDP. These are JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. In 2006, before the financial crisis, that number was 55%. And fifteen years ago, it was 17%.

fuckyeaheyegasms: Dragonfly Covered with Dew, Photo by Martin...

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:51:16 -0800

fuckyeaheyegasms:

Dragonfly Covered with Dew, Photo by Martin Amm

Submitted by ladybirdallie

(No…this is not a sculpture, it’s a macro, a close up image of a dragonfly)

James Petterson Inc

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:43:42 -0800

justine:

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Records,” published last fall, as the author with the most New York Times best sellers, 45, but that number is already out of date: he now has 51 — 35 of which went to No. 1.”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.

"What we witnessed was truly a perverse form of competition,” said Ronald Congemi, the former chief..."

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:41:01 -0800

““What we witnessed was truly a perverse form of competition,” said Ronald Congemi, the former chief executive of Star Systems, one of the regional PIN-based networks that has struggled to compete with Visa. “They competed on the basis of raising prices. What other industry do you know that gets away with that?””

- The Card Game - How Visa, Using Fees Behind Its Debit Card, Dominates a Market - Series - NYTimes.com

Technology Trends for 2010

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:20:48 -0800

Technology Trends for 2010

Info-graphic comparing countries’ health care spending per...

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:59:44 -0800

Info-graphic comparing countries’ health care spending per person to average life expectancy at birth.

Restaurants Use Menu Psychology to Entice Diners

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:11:49 -0800

Restaurants Use Menu Psychology to Entice Diners

John Graham-Cumming: Tonight, I’m going to write myself an...

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:24:00 -0800

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.

Code That Protects Most Cellphone Calls Is Deciphered

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:31:06 -0800

Code That Protects Most Cellphone Calls Is Deciphered

Really interesting, albeit long (1.5 hours), video on...

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:41:05 -0800

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.

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.