Robot Wisdom auxiliary

no promised land, no holy book, no chosen people

2008-10-14T18:03:01.436-05:00

rss? [1] [2]

My new one-bit RWx-auxiliary blog (GgReader)
vDeep observational humor from SM Walt (FP-list)
$400 sleep 'lab' (NYT via gPost)
Pattern of Israeli links in organ theft (cFire via gRoom)
Orthodox Jews debate ethical priorities (viN)
Effing brilliant BramCohen interview (longish)
Witty review of new Cowboys megastadium (Wkbnch)
GTD workflow map (flickr via 2mm)
Judaism's 'ethic' of omerta (viN)
Crowdsourced astronomy discovers new galaxy-class (sciBlog)
Updates on Woodstock bands {list}
Simple plot-skeleton generator (php via Triv)
Quakers called 'virulently antisemitic' (JTA via niqnaq)
JulietteLewis update (longish via Jz)
that night the bats flew out / from the water and swarmed everywhere for miles / like black tongues (vD-longish)
Tim O'Brien on fiction and play (longish via 2Pass)
Journalism degrees are stupid (HuffPo via cShirk)
New OED cd (Az-$200)
6 types of connection between books and songs (dBreast)
Mary Beard on Aurelius (LRB-long)
'LoveShack' duet, B52s/Sugarland (Flash-5min)
Historical Thesaurus of the OED (ukMail via Jz)
iPhone as tracking device (shortish via /.)
Goldman's software 'unfair' (short via iSteve)
Re-editing the Old Testament (pdf-23pg via Ralph)
Rabbi: "before the Zionists came, [Arabs and Jews] lived together" (viN)
Lucid ArundhatiRoy update (UkG)
Chomsky on recent conflicts (Znet via Heath)
Plot-theory review (incl Polti) (UkG-long)
8 firstaid myths (lHack-1pg)
40pix of worldwide McD's menu items (1pg via lf)
Galileo vvvclose to discovering Neptune (sciBlg)
NudeFreedomDay at the NightOwlCafe (flickr-collage)
vBelated rave for 1987 jMcElroy (laTms)
'Mall Cop' bests 'Public Enemies' (iSteve-longish)
Actors who could play siblings (Cinem-list)
Where are we, what are we doing, / what ruined god moves us at his pleasure (vDaily)
Rabbi: Better jail than hearing singing women (jPost via viN)
Krishnamurti Foundation foundering (arcane)
Childhood movie-theater experiment in anarchy (Cinem)
Effectively haunting EdHarcourt video (Flash-4min)
Why NPR lies for Israel (mWeiss)
Don't-miss DixieChicks-vs-wBu documentary (GgV-90min)
Jacko's genius lasted about 6mos (iSteve)
'Vexel' art (1pg-loong)
What is WSJ's 'Inner Truth'? (pKrug-short)
Charming literary dustups (pHen-ukTel)
Perfectest pumpkin // in the patch, your heft on mine / is what I crave (NPR)
Fundamental crisis in capitalism (iGrd w/link)
63yo NeilYoung makes 67yo Macca look lightweight (yT-8min)
Revived mp3-blog experiment (rw w/rss)
IrisMurdoch on BBC today (8pmGMT)
RollingStone expose on Goldman-Sachs (12pg-imgs)
Dogme2010: the videogame (MTV via Cinem)
1st new Stewart-Gaskin in 18yrs (aaJ-2pg)"Baby, that's beer money. Just push me down the stairs and we'll go out." (oDinny)
Rave w/vids for IncredibleStringBand (bgSpec)
Visualising bailout-costs (diagram via lf)
Human body's energy budget simplified (RoT)
Did gammaray burst cause Ordovician extinctions? (lSci)
CIA still hiding JFK/LHO secrets (TPM)
philG rethinks the university (loong)
Iran complexities simplified (moonAL)
rFisk on Iran complexities (ukInd)
NPR speech-impediments snark (MeFi-2007)
Is Betelgeuse about to go supernova? (sNews-short)
New Mossad-conspiracy testimony (Nation via mjb)
AliceMunro story filmed as "Away From Her" (NYer-loong)
MemeWatch: "... 3. ??? 4. PROFIT!" (Twittersearch)
Why financial teevee is stupid (list via iGrd)
Width of extended hand = 15 degrees (RoT-vshort)
Short ChrissieHynde interview (ukInd via Jz)
NyT could fix BostonGlobe (philG)
dTongue's moderated urban/wiki/dictionary/2.0 (Wordnik)
Lucid angry jScahill on bMoyers (PBS-18min w/trnscrpt)
Cruel teen-photographer snark (Onion-vshort)
Awesome photosurrealist (3000pix)
1965 PattyDuke movie dance number (yT)
Bing close 2nd in ongoing blind test (Blgscpd w/link)
Jawdropping Java demo (Base26 via lYellow)
Inspiring 100th-monkey danceparty (yT-3min via dLaugh)
'supercut' = exhaustive survey montage (links-list)
20 feminist teevee characters (Jz-1pg)
Sun moving away from Earth 15cm/yr (newSci)
Recycled-fridge-magnet bookmarks (1pg via lHack)
MemeWatch: paraprosdokian (twitter-search)
Mars rover stuck in ?dustdune (astroPic)
Pak drones inspire folklore (ukG via moonAL)
Fire Bernanke! (dBaker)
Goto considered helpful (thread-arcane)

2009: Apr/May Feb/Mar Jan
2008: Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Apr Mar Feb Jan
2007: Dec Nov Oct Sep2 Sept Aug2 Aug1 July June May April2 April March Feb
[more]

no rss: cBank nDee mnftiu ljb verse

(numbers in parens are delicious linkcounts, indicating belatedness)

Intro

2008-10-13T09:18:00.000-05:00

[this is supposed to always appear 2nd on the blog, but to disappear from the rss feed]

meta: not-poetry del.icio.us

tagportals: worldtree/tree-of-life suggestions

Jorn: bio works pmtgb thrillers neologisms influences/readings

faves: pix books tunes vids

conjectures: Joyce science-etc

visualisations: energy calories radio CO2 wavelengths timescales

suggestions: Blogger GgGroups GgNews GgWeb GgPages Wikipedia Flickr tagging Gmail iMeem rss html gizmos enviro community compsci

search: rwwl blue ebooks joyce canons

miscellaneous topics

2008-10-06T21:14:00.005-05:00

i'm caught between two platforms...

robotwisdom.com will blink out again
at the end of this month
unless another volunteer host turns up

i was appalled to learn that google
declines to index pages with more than 100 links
assuming they're spam
(i think pages with <100 are lazy)

google-reader-shared
has killed linkblogging for me
at least temporarily

i've fallen in love with reCAPTCHA

the little boost of knowing
i'm proofing random texts
makes that burden a joy

i tried the new online Monopoly
and find it pointless
except the perspective it offers
on googlemaps AI

if it implemented a map-recaptcha
i'd love it
to fill out the googlemaps model
with geographic intelligence

(Monopoly relaunches this week
if you want to try it out

about the only strategy
is sabotaging neighbors
or not

rural areas have few/no neighbors)

it may be a dark age for linkblogging
but it's interesting times for web 2.0

with tiny tweaks from myspace to facebook to twitter
bringing revolutionary vibe-shifts

which have many evolutions to go

it has to go back to
usenet's decentralised distribution

and i've got an idea
for a new antimath symbol
probably just "+"
that represents
a hypothetical absolute moral ideal

snubbed by almost all
subbing half-measures

pursued tirelessly by one or two

Comicstrip trivia quiz

2008-10-06T20:04:00.000-05:00

Which strips feature these characters: (highlight to see answers)

Hiram Flagston A: Hi and Lois

Thelma Keane A: Family Circus

Alice Mitchell A: Dennis the Menace

Jonathan Q. Arbuckle A: Garfield

Walt and Connie Duncan A: Zits

Bill and Anne Andrews A: Cathy

Brutus and Gladys Thornapple A: Born Loser

Phil and Dottie Winslow A: Marmaduke

Wikipedia hasbara

2008-10-06T19:30:00.003-05:00

Wikipedia topics that omit important info because it reflects badly on Israel/Judaism: [meta]

Munich (film): omits all reference to Spielberg's omission of the Lillehammer affair

Talmud: omits law of the moser (cf omerta), inflammatory material against gentiles and Jesus

Visualising energy

2008-10-06T19:25:00.010-05:00

human body = one gallon per 8 lbs
12 gallons per 100#
60% water = 7 gallons water per 100#
16% fat = 2 gallons fat per 100# (16#, 7kg)
22% protein = 2.6 gallons protein per 100# (22#, 10kg)

3.8*10^4 joule = energy in gram of fat
2.7*10^8 joule in 7kg

1.7*10^4 joule in gram of protein
1.7*10^8 joule in 10kg

4.4*10^8 joule in 100# body

4.186*10^3 joule = 1 Calorie
1 kiloCalorie per pound in human body

3.6*10^6 joule = kilowatt-hour
100 kW-hr per 100# body
half a microgram of antimatter [cite]

1.5*10^10 joules in a ton of wood [cite]
40 100# humans

10 tons per tree?
400 humans

1.74*10^17 joule = solar energy worldwide per second
400 million 100# humans per second
10 million tons of wood
1 million trees

10^36 photons/second [cite]

10^14 joule = solar energy trapped by photosynthesis per second [cite]
(10^33 photons or 0.1% cite)
20 million 100# humans per second

4*10^26 joule = energy generated by fusion in Sun per second [cite]
10^20 kW-hr (100 quintillion)
8*10^19 100# humans per second?

[Wikipedia]

Quotes from Renata Adler's "Speedboat"

2008-10-06T19:23:00.013-05:00

"This is perhaps the worst book ever written but it's won prizes and is considered to be some fine writing. Each paragraph starts off with a new topic and there is absolutely no connection between any of the paragraphs." [cite]

"She was a dynamite girl and he was an aces fellow. On the day he at last agreed by phone to marry her, the switchboard operators were overjoyed. For six months they had listened, in sympathy and indignation, to the tears, the threats, the partings and reconciliations. They were so unequivocally for the girl that only the purest professionalism kept them, at times, from breaking in. On the day Tim, after calls to his best friend, his firs wife, and his therapist, gave in at last, the oldest operator, who had been on the switchboard for twenty years, actually wept. The other two told the receptionist, at lunch. All four ladies had a drink, and then bought a card of slightly obscene felicitations. They had wavered toward the sentimental, but rejected it as basically unswinging. They did not sign the card. Tim and his girl, who had been breaking up once again on the day they received it (she was packing; they were in his apartment, were appalled. As a result of the card, and discussions of what to do about it—what it implied, who knew and who didn’t—they married." []

"I often wonder about the people who linger over trash baskets at the corners of the city's sidewalks. One sees them day and night, young and old, well dressed, in rags—often with shopping bags—picking over the trash. They pick out newspapers, envelopes. They discard things. I often wonder who they are and that they're after. I approach and cannot ask them. Anyway, they scurry off. Some times I think they are writers who do not write. That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all." []

"Sometimes I miss, or lose, the point. Late-sleeping utopians, especially, persist like mercury. I am a fanatic myself, although not a woman of temperament. I get nervous at scenes. I stole a washcloth once from a motel in Angkor Wat. The bellboy was incensed. I had to give it back. To promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity—- I believe all that. I go to parties whenever I am asked. I think a high tone of moral indignation, used too often, is an ugly thing. I get up at eight. Quite often now I have a drink before eleven. In some ways, I have overshot my mark in life in spades." []

"Sometimes a stupid child would tie a firecracker to a crayfish or a frog just once, and light the fuse. Or give a piece of sugar to a raccoon, which in its odd fastidiousness would wash that sugar in a brook till there was nothing left." []

"It may be that we were retarded. We were younger. We were other people, anyway, in another world." []

"She apologized to one egg for having boiled it, to another for not having selected it to boil. Since it was impossible to know with much precision whether an egg prefers to be boiled or not to, she was always in a state of indecision, followed, as soon as she had taken any action, by extreme remorse. Since this is not far from the predicament of most people of any sensitivity or conscience, she passed for normal."

"My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions."

"My grandmother, too, used to put other people's ailments into the diminutive: strokelets were what her friends had. Aldo said he was bored to tearsies by my grandmother's diminutives."

"Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them."

"Our full professors, tenured faculty, teach H.B.A., or Hours by Appointment; that is, never."

"A 'self-addressed envelope,' if you are inclined to brood, raises deep questions of identity."

"They want to do good and to know, like people out of E.M. Forster, or Henry James."

"When I wonder what it is that we are doing-- in the brownstone, on this block, with this paper-- the truth is probably that we are fighting for our lives."

"Situations simply do not yield to the most likely structures of the mind."

“But there are cramps of an entirely other order, when even hardened doctors—- knowing it is not important, only temporary—- reach for the Demerol and the needle. It must be so in every lonely degrading thing from which one comes back having learned nothing whatever. There are no conclusions to be drawn from it. Lonely people see double entendres everywhere.”

"At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. 'There's one,' it said. That was in the l960s. Ever since, he's wondered. There's one what?"

"Sanity is the most profound moral option of our time."

"The philosophers at the great universities were, without exception, failed mathematicians. When they were not examining much of the vocabulary of civilized discourse to conclude that it, after all, lacked meaning, they muttered Gödel, Russell, Hilbert, liking to imply that they themselves had chosen philosophy over mathematics to give themselves a wider, though related intellectual field."

"What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an intimation, a thing said or unsaid. Sometimes it's who's at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.
But if you are, for any length of time, custodian of the point-- in art, in court, in politics, in lives, in rooms-- it turns out there are rearguard actions everywhere. To see a thing clearly, and when your vision of it dims, or when it goes to someone else, if you have a gentle nature, keep your silence, that is lovely. Otherwise, now and then, a small foray is worthwhile. Just so that being always, complacently, thoroughly wrong does not become the safest position of them all. The point has never quite been entrusted to me."

"No crimes is no small thing"

"Somebody was nudging my tray along the rail at the museum cafeteria. I was trying to keep my tray from bumping the tray ahead. I held my fingers firmly on the tray top, hooked my thumbs underneath the steel bar. The pressure of the nudging tray increased. I gave in to the superior determination. Doubtless, the tray pusher had had an awful day. I let go. My tray slid into the next tray, which slid into the next, which crashed into another. At the cashier's corner, there was a pileup. Teabags, Jell-O, trays all over everything."

"I have the shakes a good part of the time (which interferes no end with taking notes)"

"Violent things are always happening to the very rich, and to the poor, of course. Freak accidents befall the middle classes in their midst."

"'I can't believe it,' people said, almost with a passion. It was that year's version of hello. 'I can't believe it,' people said, on the beach, on the slopes, in hotel lobbies, in cells, at parties. Apparently incredulous, astounded, people met. Sometimes the rejoinder was, 'For God's sake,' as in 'Harry! Maude! I can't believe it.' 'Marilyn! Well, for God's sake.' Sometimes people changed it slightly. When we had just come back to the office, a middle-aged couple, he with the heartiness of another era, she with a certain trembly superstition, met in the elevator only yesterday. 'Well, as I live and breathe,' he shouted. 'Touch wood,' she replied."

"Most women have shames or sins or crimes. But confidences, apart from the lives of schoolgirls, belong to women of timidity or power." [cite]

"or the streets cleared of traffic, except ambulances." []

"That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all." []

"It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime."

Some of these RA quotes may be from Speedboat:

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

Fear... is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress.

Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.

People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.

No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.

In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.

It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.

Web3.0 trends

2008-10-06T19:15:00.003-05:00

there's some webwide design principles
emerging
that i'm not sure many people
can see yet

wikipedia needs a page for every product
for every person
for every event

(it should supplant the evil classmates.com
as a gatheringplace for nostalgists)

and it should aggregate ALL links
on every topic
sorting them and rating them

so when your vacuumcleaner breaks
you go to its wikipedia page
(which you bookmarked when you bought it
like all your possessions
in an intelligent database)
and find sorted links
to all pages about that product
including diy repairs

this will put google websearch out of business

its 'best-first' algorithms can't compete

the concept of bookmarking
'to read later'
needs to be refined

we experience a continuous stream
of links we find more or less tempting
and we need to sort and rate these
so that the next-most-attractive
is always a click (or two) away

everything on the web
should be striving to connect individuals
who share common tastes and interests
(eHarmony writ large)

everyone's stream of rating/judgments
automatically compared
with similar-others queued
for speed 'dating'

Birth of blogging

2008-10-06T19:08:00.005-05:00

i may or may not use this post
to aggregate debate
about the origins of blogging

my word 'weblog' was intended to summarise
some simple basic design features
that hadn't yet been recognised as such

- the best web links
- of every kind
- briefly described
- added as discovered
- top-down
- keep the page short/quick
- link direct to the juicy stuff
- everybody shares their tastes

existing models all lacked some of these
(justin hall's was long/slow
winer kept rearranging the day's items)

i avoided 'news' at first
looking far and wide for good content
most others hadn't yet discovered

it was a (small) catastrophe
when blogger.com co-opted the word
for online diaries

few people maintain proper weblogs

and i'm still waiting
for a decent online web-logging site
(delicious is closest)

twitter isn't a good fit
urls are masked
archives are clumsy

the explosion of options
has become frustrating

'onebit blogging' a la
hypemachine and flickr
seem hopeful, in their way

[mefi thread]
[Ammann]
[Rosenberg]
[Winer]

What flickr/Twitter could learn from HypeMachine

2008-10-06T19:06:00.005-05:00

others' faves should be 1stclass streams
with a variety of views

who-subscribes-to-who should be public

more-than-onebit blogs
should be supported too
(eg featuring a content-creator a day
giving background on them)

merge subscriptions to new content
and subscriptions to others' faves
into one stream

prominently feature the count of faves
for each content-item
and conceal/reveal the 1st dozen or so faver-names
within the content-stream

clicking on a faver-name
shows their faves stream
and offers their subscriptions-list
and a single click adds/subscribes-to them

a few things hypem should add:

visible indication of which tunes
you've already tried

onsite user blogs

suggestions of users/blogs/bands/tunes
you'd likely like

Appreciating 'Hype Machine'

2008-10-06T19:02:00.010-05:00

i imagine that the hype machine
chose their awful name as camouflage
for their true purpose
of free-mp3-blog-aggregator

but as these things go
they seem to be cuttingedge state-of-the-art

the design-theme is giddy redundancy
everything is one-step-or-less away
and infinite reversibility
(try anything, no commitment)

it took me embarrassingly long to figure out
how to play the tunes
and find the hidden mp3s
(click rightpointing triangle to play
(player at bottom even lets you change pages
without stopping the current song)

open 'read full post' link in new tab
to find mp3 link)

finding new music

start with a song you love
that you think defines your special taste
search for it, 'love'-heart it
go thru everyone else who's hearted it
and sample their recent faves
'follow' them if there's any overlap
(watch which blogs they find good tunes on
and 'follow' these too
or sample them as radio stations)
(following individuals with similar taste
is the general solution to
the longtail fail)

search for favorite artists
and 'follow' them
(it seems you can't yet backtrace
who else follows an artist?
or find generalised most-similar recommendations)

needs:

5star ratings scale

best-first priority-queue

Calculate your blogscore

2008-10-06T19:01:00.006-05:00

[i want to tweak this until it accurately reflects mature blogging habits-- eg losing points for deleting unread posts...]

[i think it needs to be broken down into categories: pix, music, vids, tweets, news? humor? gossip?]

[i'm a newbie myself in some of these areas]

[some domains have better filtering tools available]

[you should score higher for finding meta-sources than straight sources]

[there may be objective network-math definitions possible: mathematically optimal coverage]

[each domain has a global average new-content rate;
each user has a time/value tradeoff curve for that content;
each filter delivers some average value per time]

# of rss subscriptions

# of flickr subscriptions
# of flickr-faves subscriptions

# of mp3-blog subscriptions

# of twitter-faves subscriptions

# of youtube-faves subscriptions

Wallace Stevens Walk

2008-10-06T18:23:00.002-05:00

Hartford Connecticut has marked Wallace Stevens' daily commute with thirteen stones offering the verses of "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" [backstory]

View Wallace Stevens Walk in a larger map [map]

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird. [pic]

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds. [pic] [pic]

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause. [pic] [pic]

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you? [pic]

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds. [pic]

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying. [pic]

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs. [pic]

Embedded Ulysses test

2008-10-06T18:18:00.000-05:00

New GoogleBooks feature:

April/May 2009 links

2008-10-06T18:16:00.001-05:00

40k pix document kegger fire (Onion-3min)
Loong survey of scant biz-press bubble-warnings (CJR via jGerm)
iPhone multitouch synthesizer (yT-10min via Waxy)
Inflation vs deflation, again (pKrug)
Rerererebooting StarTrek (dontmiss via OTI)
crystallizing / on frangible blades of grass (vD-arcane)
'ignore list' = known distractions (HBR via jAqi)
Lovely eWurtzel meditation on fading beauty (4pg via Jz)
Major media silent on 'Hate Crimes Prevention Act' (GgN-search)
'post-traumatic embitterment disorder' (dTongue)
1st BBC leCarre radio drama (starts early) (90min-Real-limited-time)
dBaker: To audit the Fed (ukG)
Password-creation trick (Risks#)
The rarely-seen Georgian language, in the wild (flickr)
Google's AdWords revolution (sLevy via kMarks)
Twitterbased JamesBond ARG (meta via @twitterapi)
Black hipsters (Root via dTongue)
Detailed litany of bhOb's foreign failures (loong via Niqnaq)
Clubbing in Berlin, how-to (flickr-caption)
Awesome astronomy timelapse (48sec via Ellen)
Korean genius's surrealist sketches (flickr-200pix)
While you’re still / seeing more than there is to see (arcane via NPR)
The trick / is to make it seem like it really doesn't matter, / like it's merely happening this way (Poems)
Empowering teen girls via parkour class (yT-5min)
UTIs traced to childhood MrBubble baths? (Jz)
DC = culture of 'epigons' (Sam-loong)
Competent 1981 HughDowns report on rap (2Flash-12min via lf)Dont-miss WolframAlpha screencast (15min via Waxy)
With these actions your world // takes off a layer from us (vDaily-varcane)
Ojibway writer loves Finnegans Wake (shortish)
Recent NyT headlines support anti-Pak con (moonAL-list)
Populism for dummies (jHightower via Sam)
rMcCrum profile of Sarah Waters (ukG-long)
GermaineGreer on poets laureate (ukG)
Magic colors from Italian Vogue (flickr)
"Thus ended capitalism..." (Dilbert)
I feel for ya... (oDvrwhr)
Thoughtful flickr tagging inquiry (long via angus)
Lovely southern starmap (astroPic)
US Pakistan-resource-grab scenario (aTms via Niqnaq)
'hairsharp' = hi-res pix (34hits on flickr)
'Reverent' new jLennon doc online (2pg-52min)
his white star is a constellation / of hope, which for a horse, / is like grief (vDaily-dontmiss)
The colors of fog (1pg w/pix)
VanGogh ear revisionism (ukTel via lf)
pHensher defends poets laureate (ukInd)
Craven UK Iraq update (rFisk)
Update on Israeli 'democracy' (Haaretz via mW)
dHorowitz-hitlist update (cPunch)
Interesting wBuffett update (UkG via iGrd)
Mindblowing LA hedonism (200pix-nsfw)
Stupid game-AI tricks (1pg-18yTubes)
Bagels-yogurt-granola worth making (Slate-1pg via lf)
Swineflu traced to factory hogfarm? (Grist via moonAL)
bustling amid the formica and chrome / of that small house we both called home (longish)
Mossad agent bragged about mindcontrol (viN)
China converting $$$ to gold/oil/etc (moonAL)
Flaubert's handwriting looks just like Joyce's (4500pg)
$175k 'copier' for 5min books-on-demand (UkG)
Complete 8bit tarot (1pg-Flash)
Whedon's 'Dollhouse' ?= goyhouse (blog via cShirk)
Historic sitcom crossovers (11yTubes)
Woz on gtd (intvu)
GrandTheftAuto a flop on Nintendo DS?!? (bGamer)
yTube only spots piracy of 1st 30sec of songs (/. w/link)
Jane Harman's unmentionable dual loyalty (mWeiss-short)
Lucid pKrug on wBu's evil (NyT-short)
Cool Martian sanddunes (astroPic)
he'd seen / beauty raw, // for which humiliation / was the smallest price (vDaily)
the tumble dryer just spinning, and spinning (vDaily)
rFisk rant re BBC-on-Israel (ukInd)
'Nonsexual boners' eg coffee boner (Twitter-search)
Experiments w/snorting, smoking caffeine (short via pHoule)
Blue is the tarp, blue the crane, / blue the siding of Building 6 (vDaily-short)
13 worst scientific anomalies (nSci)
'black&pink' = coffee w/artificial sweetener (dTongue)
TheEconomist: 'Israel is resiling' (oped via mW)
17yo SJP snorted coke on SquarePegs set (short via Jz)
Oodles of free dhLawrence etexts (underrated poet)
Saturn's crufty ring (astroPic)
Legal issues re Somali pirates (jScahill)
Smart debate re latest 'Dollhouse' (spoilers via mCass)
If our eyes were telescope-supersensitive (astroPic)
The bailout is misdirected (dBaker)
Kehl's "The Feminine" shaped my esthetics (Az-Flash)
Grammar fallacies in Strunk&White (Chron via Steve)
Why voice-acting in games sucks (bGamer)
Why we shld tax oil back up to $100 (bGross via iGrd)
Fine gDead-for-dummies (NyT via lNerd)
An open white page in any book was a lean white horse (vDaily)
Colorwords widget (Flash via cLovers)
Colorwords sorted by shade (Wiki via cLovers)
Oprah: 'Buy yr 14yo daughter a vibrator' (Jz-2min)
Digital radio a dud (NyT-Pogue via dTongue)
Activism even after yr head explodes (Sam-2004)
The sound of dSirota's head exploding (dontmiss via Sam)
as if she were the first one / to wear the newfangled cloth of reform (vDaily)
Believing this mud could be his altar too (NPR-longish)
dreambarren land where tawny / thyme wrestles up (Poems-short)
Don't miss today's Doonesbury (Sunday 05Apr)
China's paradox of thrift (pKrug)
I'll be faving yT-vids there (subscribeable)
PBS Frontline fronts big healthcare lie (cPunch)
'Benjamin Button' etext (1pg via olB)
Twitter's finally snapped back from post-SXSW doldrums (faves)
Lovecraft's racism gets pass (OVO via Klint)
Investigative journalism still needed vs lobbying (philG)
Awesome 2008 cHitchens rant re Falwell/Israel (yT-5min via reddit)
1st transistor made by 13yo in 1933? (Make)
Mashing up flags and vidgames (Vh1)
Enthusiastic bkgndr on boardgame 'Settlers of Catan' (long via nTndo)
ABC's Tapper falls for 'Spanish Inquisition' prank (mBistro via WRH)
Don't-miss LiarsPoker update (nyMag-6pg via reddit)
Cell is "tiny thing like jelly donut with blood not jelly" (oDvrwhr-10yo)

2009: Feb/Mar Jan
2008: Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Apr Mar Feb Jan
2007: Dec Nov Oct Sep2 Sept Aug2 Aug1 July June May April2 April March Feb
[more]

no rss: cBank nDee mnftiu ljb verse

(numbers in parens are delicious linkcounts, indicating belatedness)

Best skymap/ starmap comparison

2008-10-06T18:13:00.012-05:00

[Sky-map.org]

[Java]

[Planet Wheel]

[Flash movie]

[Space.com]

[Wunderground]

[StarGazer]

[AstroViewer] (current night sky only) [Java]

[AstroImage]

[London monthly]

[Boston monthly]

[New Mexico monthly]

[Google Sky] (where's the labels?!?)

[YourSky] (generic link only?)

Binary meter ontology

2008-10-06T18:07:00.046-05:00

= 0/1 ========================================

unstressed 'dit' (a, the, is, of)
stressed 'dah'

= 0, 00, 000, 0000... ========================================
= 1, 11, 111, 1111... ========================================

tiptoeing vs stomping

= 00/01/10/11 ========================================

00: pyrrhic
01: iamb
10: trochee
11: spondee: blackboard, inside, clambake, flophouse

= ...010101... ========================================

limping

= 000/001/010/011/100/101/110/111 ========================================

000: tribrach [terminology]

001: anapest

010: amphibrach: Alaska, Hawaii, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming

011: bacchic

100: dactyl: profligate, vegetable, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Oregon, Washington

101: cretic: Arkansas, Idaho, Illinois, Tennessee

110: antibacchic: flapdoodle

111: molossus: brouhaha, Istanbul

= ...0011001100... ========================================

= 0000/0001/0010/0011/0100/0101/0110/0111/1000/1001/1010/1011/1100/1101/1110/1111 ============

0000: proceleusmatic

0001: paeon4: Beethoven's 5th, baba ganoush

0010: paeon3: economics, politician, departmental, condescension, borborygmus, perspicacious, celebrated

0011: minor ionic

0100: paeon2: adrenaline, accordion, agrarian, amygdala, automaton, beatitude, carcinogen, contemplative, contiguous, copernican, criterion, decreasingly, dirigible, geography, competitive, microscopy, misogynist, rebarbative, synecdoche, Connecticut, New Mexico, coincidence, phenomenon, mythology, solicitor, eternity, experience, experiment, maturity, extremities, ecology, humility, mysterious, impossibly, commodities

0101: di-iamb: contrariwise, aperitif, Virginia Woolf, plutonium

0110: antipast: dehydrated

0111: epitrite 1

1000: paeon 1: miscellany, horticulture, consummately, deviances, confiscated, aliases, obfuscated, enervating, meaninglessness, stimulated

1001: choriamb: bibliophile, cavalryman, catamaran, hullabaloo, tiddlywinks, Kalamazoo, nevertheless

1010: ditrochee [xkcd]: armageddon, denotation, alderwoman, bilirubin, macaroni, moleskine, Alabama, Arizona, California, Carolina, Colorado, Indiana, ?Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, N/S Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Zapatista, premonition, belladonna, Paganini, politician, understanding, generations, polyester, resurrected, anaconda, godforsaken, helicopter, perforated, undercover, Pagliacci, education, self-indulgence, self-denial, dramatizing, sentimental, sentimental, comprehending, temporary, appaloosas, geometric, overseer, understanding, superficial, repetitious, satisfaction, complications, overflowing, independence, mathematic, liberation, cinematic, inspiration, affectations, fascination, pornographic, benefactors, everpresent, reservation, everlasting

1011: epitrite2

1100: major ionic: deprogramming, asexual

1101: epitrite3

1110: epitrite4: melancholy

1111: dispondee

= five ========================================

00010: organisation

00100: electricity, demonology, discombobulate

01000: involuntary, constabulary, apothecary

01001: deteriorate

01010: ?Louisiana, participation, apotheosis, Barack Obama, manipulation, imagination, imagination, illumination

10010: magnification, contradistinction, juxtaposition, heterodoxy, flibbertigibbet, Sacagawea, legalization, reincarnations, Spiritus Sanctus

10100: incompatible, possibility, appendectomy, abacterial, haberdashery, oligopoly, trabajabamos, Ernest Hemingway, opportunities, unbelievable, aborigine, territorial, insecurity, horizontally, curiosity, multiplicity, immortality, anonymity, Michelangelo, Ethiopian, subterranean

10101: Edgar Allen Poe, recapitulate

11000: decriminalise

11010: inconsequential, unsympathetic, decomposition, defenestration, dodecahedron, homegrown tomatoes, Constantinople, Lee Harvey Oswald, Make Way for Ducklings, Smooth Operator

11100: String Cheese Incident

= ========================================

000010: idiosyncratic

000100: octogenarian [cite], buckminsterfullerene [cite], antediluvian [cite]

010100: phantasmagorical

011101: the kid is not my son

100010: surgical procedure

100100: verisimilitude, calculability, Mesopotamia

101000: parenthetically

101010: onomatopoeia, tintinnabulation

101100: brigadier general [cite]

110100: gunboat diplomacy

0100100: epistemological

0101010: medulla oblongata

========================================

10100100: endoplasmic reticulum

001000100: phosphatidylethanolamines

010101010: Emancipation Proclamation

0100100100: electroencephalographically

1000100100: immunoelectrophoretically

10010000101: Neither a borrower nor a lender be

10110110101: ethylenediaminetetraacetates

100010010010: antidisestablishmentarianism

10101010101010: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

0101010101010101010: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

Best animated doppler comparison

2008-10-06T18:03:00.003-05:00

looking over the various available
animated doppler weathermaps
(easy to miss hidden features)

msn is the surprising winner
with a 6-hour loop
that requires only one click
beyond the url-bookmark
('doppler radar' under 'animated maps')

wundergound
has nice detail
but limited animation

weather.com
very limited animation

accuweather ditto

weather.gov uses java
again very limited

intellicast
is very feeble

semantic web os

2008-10-06T17:27:00.003-05:00

a semantic-web-savvy pc
will know the web's deweydecimalsystem
and the consensus 'best' web resources
for each topic-area

you will customise this
to your personal preferences

rating streams of new resources
in favorite areas

catching up on resources
recommended by
topic-experts you trust

searching for experts/streams
with similar tastes

archiving/mirroring/monitoring
your web2.0 presence

One-bit critics

2008-10-06T17:22:00.003-05:00

in olden days
(pre-internet)
the function of 'critic'
(aesthete, connoisseur)
was laudable (meritorious
commendable)

trained to reject the common
and elevate the
unjustly overlooked

now that function
has been streamlined down
to clicking a
'fave this' star

anyone can do it

the honor has been
forgotten

Celebrity BMIs

2008-10-06T17:06:00.032-05:00

[asterisks mean same celeb has multiple entries (variable or unreliable); heights are often from imdb.com] [adding flickr set]

9.8
Mayra Hornbacher 5'1" 52# [cite]

13.8
*Karen Carpenter 1982 5'4" 80#

14.1
Jodi Kidd 6'2" 110# [cite]

14.5
*Teri Hatcher 5'6" 90# [cite]
Esther Canadas 5'10" 101# [cite]

14.8
*Karen Carpenter 5'4" 87# [cite]
*Victoria Beckham 5'6" 92# [cite]

15.0
Tori Spelling 5'6" 98# [cite]

15.1
Amber Valleta 5'9" 102# [cite]

15.3
*Angelina Jolie 5'7" 98# [cite]

15.5
Celine Dion 5'7" 99# [cite]

15.7
Calista Flockhart 5'6" 97# [cite]

15.8
Mariah Carey 5'9" 107# [cite]
Naomi Campbell 5'10" 110# [cite]

16.0
Giselle Bundchen 5'11" 115# [cite]

16.1
Liv Tyler 5'10" 112# [cite]

16.2
Shannon Elizabeth 5'9" 110# [cite]

16.3
'Amanda 5'8" 107# [flickr]

16.4
Pamela Anderson 5'7" 105# [cite]
Mandy Moore 5'8" 108# [cite]
Carmen Kass 5'10" 114# [cite]

16.5
Heidi Guenther 5'3" 93# [cite]
Gwyneth Paltrow 5'9" 112# [cite]

16.6
*Nicole Richie 5'1" 88# [cite]
Audrey Hepburn 5'6" 103# [cite]
*Angelina Jolie 5'8" 109# [cite]

16.7
Rebecca Gayheart 5'8" 110# [cite]
Sandra Bullock 5'8" 110# [cite]

16.8
Jordan/Katie Price 5'5" 101# [cite]
Kate Moss 5'7" 107# [cite]

16.9
Jessica Biel 5'7" 108# [cite]
Taylor Swift 5'8.5" 113# [cite]
Nikki Taylor 5'10" 118# [cite]
Christy Turlington 5'10" 118# [cite]

17.0
Heather Locklear 5'5" 105# [cite]
Tyra Banks 5'11" 122# [cite]

17.1
*Teri Hatcher 5'6" 106# [cite]

17.2
*Diana Ross 5'4" 100# [cite]
Kirsten Dunst 5'4" 100# [cite]
Julia Stiles 5'7" 110# [cite]
Anna Kournikova 5'8" 113# [cite]
*Heidi Klum 5'10" 120# [cite]
Julia Roberts 5'10" 120# [cite]
Nicole Kidman 5'10" 120# [cite]

17.3
Jessica Alba 5'6" 107# [cite]

17.4
Rose McGowan 5'1" 92# [cite]
Eva Longoria 5'2" 95# [cite]
Sarah Michelle Gellar 5'3" 98# [cite]
'Mindy' 5'8" 114# [flickr]
Cindy Crawford 5'10" 121# [cite]
Elle MacPherson 6'0" 128# [cite]

17.5
*Britney Spears 5'5" 105# [cite]
Eliza Dushku 5'5" 105# [cite]
Paris Hilton 5'8" 115# [cite]

17.6
Kelly Ripa 5'2.5" 98# [cite]
Kelly Brook 5'8" 116# [cite]
Milla Jovovich 5'8" 116# [cite]

17.7
Cameron Diaz 5'9" 120# [cite]
James King 5'9" 120# [cite]
*Katie Holmes 5'9" 120# [cite]

17.8
*Nicole Richie 5'1" 94# [cite]
Jennifer Aniston 5'6" 110# [cite]
*Victoria Beckham 5'6" 110# [cite]

17.9
Danielle Fishel 5'1" 95# [cite]
Emma Bunton 5'2" 98# [cite]
Adriana Lima 5'10" 125# [cite]
Claudia Schiffer 5'11" 128# [cite]
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos 5'11" 128# [cite]

18.0
Lacey Chabert 5'4" 105# [cite]
Keira Knightley 5'7" 115# [cite]
*Salma Hayek 5'7" 115# [cite]
*Heidi Klum 5'9" 119# [cite]
Liz Hurley 5'9" 122# [cite]

18.1
Geri Halliwell 5'2" 99# [cite]
Gwen Stefani 5'6" 112# [cite]
Lindsay Lohan 5'6" 112# [cite]
Katherine Heigl 5'8" 119# [cite]

18.2
*Christina Aguilera 5'2.5" 101# [cite]
*Katie Holmes 5'8" 120# [cite]
Laetitia Casta 5'8" 120# [cite]
Whitney Port 5'10" 127# [cite]

18.3
*Christina Aguilera 5'2" 100# [cite]
Rachel Leigh Cook 5'2" 100# [cite]
Miley Cyrus 5'5" 110# [cite]
Thora Birch 5'5" 110# [cite]
Cindy Margolis 5'7" 117# [cite]

18.4
'Oscah' 5'3.5" 105# [flickr]
Natalie Portman 5'4" 107# [cite]
Faith Hill 5'8" 121# [cite]

underweight
=============================================
normal weight

18.5
Ashley Olsen 5'1" 98# [cite]
Mary-Kate Olsen 5'1" 98# [cite]
Zoey Deschanel 5'5" 115# [cite]

18.6
Kylie Minogue 5'0" 95# [cite]
Fiona Apple 5'3" 105# [cite]
Jessica Simpson 5'3" 105# [cite]
Jennie Garth 5'5" 112# [cite]
Alyson Hannigan 5'6" 115# [cite]
Claire Danes 5'6" 115# [cite]
Jewel 5'6" 115# [cite]

18.7
Joan Collins 5'6" 116# [cite]

18.8
Charlize Theron 5'11" 135# [cite]

18.9
*Diana Ross 5'4" 110# [cite]
Michelle Williams 5'4" 110# [cite]
Shania Twain 5'4" 110# [cite]
Stacy Dish 5'4" 110# [cite]

19.0
Courtney Thorne-Smith 5'6" 118# [cite]
*Jennifer Lopez 5'6" 118# [cite]
'Mindy' 5'8" 125# [flickr]

19.1
Leann Rimes 5'5" 115# [cite]
Jenny McCarthy 5'6.5" 120# [cite]

19.2
Denise Richards 5'6" 119# [cite]

19.3
Lisa Kudrow 5'7" 123# [cite]

19.4
*Jennifer Lopez 5'6" 120# [cite]

19.5
Yasmine Bleeth 5'5" 117# [cite]
Lucy Lawless 5'11" 140# [cite]

19.6
Reese Witherspoon 5'6" 122# [cite]
Ashley Judd 5'7" 125# [cite]

19.7
Scarlett Johansson 5'4" 115# [cite]

20.1
*Christina Aguilera 5'2" 110# [cite]
Keri Russell 5'4" 117# [cite]

20.2
Brigitte Bardot 5'6" 125# [cite]
Jude Law 5'11" 145# [cite]

20.5
Avril Lavigne 5'2" 112# [cite]
Neve Campbell 5'5" 123# [cite]

20.6
Drew Barrymore 5'4" 120# [cite]
David Beckham 5'11" 148# [cite]

20.8
*Salma Hayek 5'2" 114# [cite]

21.0
Courtney Love 5'8" 138# [cite]

21.1
*Ricki Lake 5'4" 123# [cite]

21.5
Kim Kardashian 5'2" 117# [cite]
Hilary Duff 5'4" 125# [cite]

21.7
Justin Timberlake 6'0" 160# [cite]

21.8
*Beyonce 5'6" 135# [cite]
Catherine Zeta-Jones 5'6.5" 135# [cite]

22.1
*Kirstie Alley 5'8" 145# [cite]
Serena Williams 5'9" 150# [cite]

22.2
Johnny Depp 5'10" 155# [cite]

22.3
*Britney Spears 5'4" 130# [cite]

22.5
Ashton Kutcher 6'2" 175# [cite]
Ben Affleck 6'2" 175# [cite]

22.8
Charlotte Church 5'5" 137# [cite]
'Amanda' 5'8" 150# [flickr]

23.3
Alicia Silverstone 5'5" 140# [cite]

23.4
*Jennifer Lopez 5'6" 145# [cite]

23.7
Brendan Fraser 6'3" 190# [cite]

24.2
Shakira 5'1" 128# [cite]

24.3
Michael Phelps 6'4" 200# [cite]

24.4
Tiger Woods 6'1" 185# [cite]

24.5
'Julia' 5'8" 161# [flickr]

normal weight
=============================================
overweight

25.0
*Beyonce Knowles 5'5" 150# [cite]
Michael Jordan 6'6" 216# [cite]

25.4
'Laurie' 5'0" 130# [flickr]
Dennis Rodman 6'6" 220# [cite]

25.5
Eminem 5'8" 168# [cite]

25.7
Tina Fey 5'4" 150# [cite]
'Shauna' 5'4" 150# [flickr]

25.9
Michael Dunn 3'10" 78# [cite]
*Oprah 5'6" 160# [cite]

26.0
Tom Cruise 5'7" 166# [cite]

26.9
Brad Pitt 6'0" 198# [cite]

27.5
'Pippa' 5'10" 192# [flickr]

28.8
*Roseanne Barr 5'4" 168# [cite]

29.4
George Clooney 5'11" 211# [cite]

29.8
Ravon Simon 5'3" 168# [cite]

overweight
=============================================
obese

30.7
Mel Gibson 5'10.5" 214# [cite]

30.8
Arnold Schwarzenegger 6'2" 240# [cite]

32.0
'Becky' 5'1" 170# [flickr]

32.1
'Joy' 5'8" 224# [flickr]
*John Candy 6'2" 250# [cite]

32.8
'BuffPuff' 5'3" 185# [flickr]

33.8
'Kate' 5'2" 185# [flickr]

34.5
America Ferrera 5'1" 182# [cite]

34.8
*Kirstie Alley 5'8" 228# [cite]

35.2
'Fillyjonk' 5'7" 225# [flickr]

36.1
'Eleanor' 5'6.5" 227# [flickr]

37.8
Verne Troyer 2'8" 55# [cite]

38.3
Mama Cass Elliott 5'5" 230# [cite]

38.4
*Oprah 5'6" 237# [cite]
John Daly 5'11" 275# [cite]

38.5+
*John Candy 6'2" 300+# [cite]

41.0
'Elizabeth' 6'0" 302# [flickr]

42.0
'Beth' 5'4" 245# [flickr]

42.9
*Ricki Lake 5'4" 250# [cite]

43.0
Fatty Arbuckle 5'10" 300# [cite]

43.7
Dawn French 5'0" 224# [cite]

43.8
'Sheana' 5'7" 280# [flickr]

45.0
Chris Farley 5'8" 296# [cite]

62.5
*Roseanne Barr 5'4" 364# [cite]

97.2
Israel Kamakawiwo'ole 6'2" 757# [cite]

186
Jon Brower Minnoch 6'1" 1400# [cite]

188
Carol Yager 5'6" 1200# [cite]

190
Rosalie Bradford 5'5" 1200# [cite]

Twitter motifs

2008-10-06T17:02:00.008-05:00

these are themes i see repeatedly in twitter jokes

it's not meant as a criticism
but as a step towards semanticweb-ai-tagset

they're arranged as a storysequence as far as possible

stayed up all night
insomnia
noisy neighbors
woke late
dream
morning wood
hungover
morning mouth
woke in strange place
woke with strange bedmate
woken by kids/pets

need coffee
hair of dog
strange breakfast
high-calorie breakfast
leftovers for breakfast

strange dress for work
late to work
skip work
unemployed
self-employed
to-do list

internet addictions
videogame addictions
teevee addictions
wasting time
ocd

exercise/gym
music soundtrack

commute
weird co-workers
stupid bosses
stupid software
poor social skills
asperger's

boring life
no friends
clumsy flirting

getting favrd
getting followers
losing followers

if life were like tv/games/movies

better software ideas

One-bit nanoblogs

2008-10-06T16:23:00.001-05:00

flickr and twitter
support near-identical
onebit 'nanoblogs' of faves

subscribeable via rss

hackable via api

hacking sequence:

download own faves' ids (count them)
save in a database
sort by author
rank by authorcount

for each author
download itemcount (save in db)
re-rank by fave frequency

detect densest faved authors
not already subscribed-to

download ids of faves of densest author
(save in db)
compare to own faves

calculate degree of taste-overlap
(twitter is different from flickr
because older tweets are rarely faved
so overlap won't extend back
past the more recent of 2 join-dates)

gradually extend database of others' faves

try to detect
still-unseen items
frequently faved by similar favers

m&mworld

2008-10-06T16:15:00.004-05:00

replace each human with an m&m

color each m&m
according to its philosophy

when their philosophy changes dramatically
their color changes as well

some never change, from birth

some share their parents philosophy

some don't

healthy whole personalities are represented
by whole m&ms

broken and wounded personalities
by broken m&ms

the tragedy of being broken
is normally blamed on another broken m&m

Machine-optimised 'explore'

2008-10-06T16:12:00.005-05:00

each time we rate
any item of content
our software ought to adjust
its predictions about
other content's ratings

unseen content
by the same author
should be rated similarly

other raters
who rated that content similarly
should be rated similar
(ditto for un-similar)

unseen content
rated highly by
these similar raters
should be 'rated up'

every moment is a choicepoint
(which next?)
(which to queue for later?)

nextbestunseen by sameauthor

bestunseen by similarraters

bestunseen overall

newifany by knownfaveauthors

newifany by knownfaveraters

faves of newauthor/rater

subscribe to authorstream/raterfaves

Flickr motifs/cliches

2008-10-06T16:11:00.023-05:00

i hope to collect here
various motifs
that recur in flickr pix

one purpose
is to formalise a tagset

another
to stimulate creativity

fog-steam-smoke

outoffocus-bokeh

jumping-midair

backlit-silhouette

litfrombelow

thrufence-thruscreen-thruveil-thrucloth

thruhole

inmirror

armslengthselfportrait

overhead-groundlevel-shootingup

offcenter-tophalf-bottomhalf

tilted

lyingdown

squatting

underwater-wet

intree

detritus

makeaface-fakesmile-showtongue

strikeapose

handgesture-thefinger-peacesign

shakinghead-wildhair-hairinface-veronicalake

eyecloseup

mask

paintedskin-writingonskin

props: cigarette

kooky cliches

colored wigs/hair

eyemakeup

striped kneesocks [20,000]

asymmetrical (face)

color cliches

sunset

flowers

feathers

shock cliches

nudity

weapons

suicidal

symbols: satanic-nazi-death

blood-wounds-deadanimals

bodyslime

from website photo cliches:

StatueGroping
SeeNoEvil
LynndieEngland
ImKingOfTheWorld
JawsAtUniversal
SnortingCocaCola
FalsePhallus
KarateKidPose

also: perspectivegiant

Web2.0 database theory

2008-10-06T16:03:00.003-05:00

at the heart of the classic web2.0 site
is a database of
users U
times
content-items C
U*C

each user u
expects to rate
each content-item c

and these ratings
guide
what sequence of content-items s(C)
is offered to any user
(aka recommendations)

eg flickr
tracks faves via pink stars
and creates from these
a single stream (explore)
offered to all users
but also allows subscriptions
to others' newly-added pix or faves
(not trimming redundancies)
and to tags and thematic groups
(as designated by the photographer)

or eg twitter
tracks faves via gold stars
but leaves it to Favrd
to collate these into a stream
also allowing subscriptions
to others' newly-added tweets or faves
(ignoring redundancies)
and to topical hashtags

or eg youtube
supports faving and rating
and makes recommendations
(though i doubt many people
bother with these?)

if the fundamental web2.0 goal is
helping users find the best content-items
the most important omission
from these sites is
redundancy-trimming:

once you've seen/judged an item
you won't need to see it again
so it can be silently trimmed
from offered streams

(one exception being
streams of favorites
from users you're interested to know
so you want to be told
if they-liked-that-too)

another useful database is C*C similarity

people who like c1
usually like c2 too

possibly decomposable into
thematic dimensions T:
easy-difficult
natural-artificial
common-rare
emotional-dry
sexual-chaste

Filtermath 2

2008-10-06T16:01:00.004-05:00

web2.0 sites' target
should be to offer each visitor
a stream with all interesting content
(most interesting first)

they need to track (forever) what content
each visitor has already seen

they need to model visitor tastes/preferences
to anticipate content-ratings
matching visitors with similar tastes

discovering the dimensions of taste
identifying content-prototypes
that can quickly map visitor preferences

ideally recognising five ranks:
A B C D F
where Fs offend you
Ds turn you off
As you want to share

with an 'emulate' mode
when you find a visitor with similar tastes
that lets you zip thru their As and Bs
inheriting their ratings as default

Feb/March 2009 links

2008-10-06T16:00:00.002-05:00

rss? [1] [2]

I heard, very softly, a new name (vDaily-short-arcane)
ways to measure / desire, invisible mover of ships (NPR)
Boardgame trashtalk (Ktku-short)
PhotoShop surrealism, &c (Smashing-1pg)
Martian 'mud volcano'? (astroPic)
Bubble blamed on income inequality (dontmiss via moonAL)
steaming-mug-of-pigmud.jpg (nDee)
2008 oil-bubble conspiracy theory (Forbes via iGrd)
"Banks' allies have lied continuously" (dBaker)
Online-education resources (lHack)
bDeLong defends Geithner (lucid via slaniel)
bhOb's 'change' just maximizes graft (iSteve)
Contrarian view of auto bailout (philG-short)
Web2.0 is bringin' me down (RWx-updated)
Re-animating GgMapsStView (Flash-30sec)
cHitchens remembers his antizionism (Slate via mW)
Archetypal smartsexyUKphotoblogger (flickr via sPubes)
Some girls who program (dOb)
Gammaray skymap (astroPic)
Short Sims3 preview (2pg w/Flash-2min via gAIdev)
Short MaryCoughlan intvu (ukMetro)
'landfill indie' = new music, too downbeat (dTongue)
Twitter #-categories experiment (@wefollow)
New cShirk article gets 500 tweet-links in 12hrs... (pg50of50-so-far)
...vs 300 on delicious (search)
I'm experimenting with Tumblr again (RW2)
This pic-series taps my adolescent fantasies (flickr-nsfw)
Y2K 'weblogs' mailinglist flashback (blog)
Most ineffably emo photographer ever (Foxeto)
birds in black masks who huddle on high limbs / passing berries from one mouth to another (vDaily-dontmiss)
$12 Apple ][ (Wired via Klint)
Paintings done on iPhone (Make)
Lucid Lenat on WolframAlpha (arcanish via sPzzl)
Deconstructing Alexander McQueen (1pg-friv-30pix)
HelloWorld 2.0 (Twittersearch via tehawesome)
Clicktracking reveals ontology of sciences (sciBlg w/pic)
Comic-archetype combinatorics (pic via Waxy)
AIPAC crows that bhOb's a pushover (sWalt)
'Israel Lobby' gets 1000 hits in 24 hours (GgNews)
Extracredit haikus re hoverboard raptors (short via reddit)
ATC quotes cFreeman on IsraelLobby (NPR)
Slomo catyawn (Flash-30sec)
WallSt, looting as usual (NyT via dB)
Nerd meritbadge update (links via Make)
Woz Kant Danz (yT-7min)
'desire line' = off-sidewalk path (dTongue)
Fascinating transcript of 'Raiders of Lost Ark' origins (loong via Steve)
Israel pursues seo (searchengine optimisation) (viN)
pjHarvey update (ukG via Jz)
Long DrewBarrymore profile (W via wSmirch)

My 1st Greasemonkey script: adding replies-search to Twitter (uScripts)
More Wolfram hype (long via reddit)
Search Twitter for obfusc-shortened links (eg via Waxy)
SuzanneVega on melody (blog via lNerd)
You have to dip your hands in chaos (vDaily-long)
Wolfram claims semantic-search breakthru (blog via gPost)
'fannings' = teadust used in teabags (dTongue)
28 unreleased jLennon demos (mp3s via proJo)
Fun rainbow-cake recipe (cLovers)
Troubling theory of AIG bailout (moonAL)
red as the rapture, red as the heart's wrung rag (vDaily-arcane)

MargotKidder thoughtfully reminisces (3pg via Pepys)
Arty erotica, nice music (Flash-60sec-nsfw)
'Cracked' researches some wtf images (1pg)
New mood in DC re Israel (Haaretz)

Gallery charges thousands for 2yo's fingerpaintings (2min-QT via Jz)
Bailout keeps sucking (pKrug-short)
ArundhatiRoy on Slumdog (Dawn)
Print 500pg book from Wikipedia for $20 (Make w/link)
calling us back / to the black sands of sleep (vDaily-longish)
"Wait, seriously?" (oDinny)
State-of-the-art visualisation of emergency river-landing (yT-2min)
sWalt names IsraelLobby names (mWeiss)
the car doors' thud, thud-thud (poems)

Lite-porn esthetic manifesto (sPubes-1pg-sfw)
Concise info-theory of... the con? (bB via @mjb)
"I did not consent to this brightness" (oDsf-tsiaa)
When I was a girl I used to lie down / in the pressed-grass hollows where the deer had slept (poems.com)
the sea / Of artifice and animality (vDaily-longish)

How to minimize college tuition costs (iSteve)
Cartoon face w/6 emotion-sliders (Flash via lf)
SemanticWeb gaining traction via universal database (NyT via Fim)
Named catfur-coloring patterns (Wiki via dTongue)
vLucid rant against starving-artist mythos (pTrunk via sPubes)
Don't-miss text-editing animated (jScrpt via gTxA)
Painless explanation of HDR pix (high dynamic range) (Flash-2min)
Neurological odor-of-evil postulated (nSci w/60sec-vid)
Anti-CSS&c movement (Webless via Trvium)
5yrs of topnotch blogging (AmericanCaliban)
A formula for Web2.0 'friction'? (RWx-short)
MemeWatch: 'admit it' day (twittersearch)
Understanding Twitter (RWx)

How WallSt plans to profit despite crisis (list via Sam)
MemeWatch: signs of the apocalypse (twitter-search)
Superb critique of WallSt risk-math (arcanish via iGrd)
UK coed brainiac hottie (ukInd w/pic)
"Richard Perle is a liar" (sWalt)
'friction' = waste resistance to creativity (dFire via gPost)
Injecting Geneva Convention into wargaming (Ktku)
Bible wiki (ning via jAqi)
Nice day for @random blog (tumblr)

Update on BBC's audio leCarre (ukTms)
'Waltz w/Bashir' as propaganda (Haaretz via mW)
Afghan supply-route fubar update (moonAL)
Random-diy-album-cover challenge (Vh1)
Semilucid neutron-star update (lSci)
Orthodox rabbis must avoid crosses (Haaretz via mRiv)
jPollard espionage mystery lingers (viN)
Issa makes a busstop friend (mySpace)
TARP vs Catch22's chocolate-covered cotton (loong via mAL)

Orthodox editorial against Israeli swimsuit model (INN via viN)
Faces rated for trustworthiness/dominance (nSci w/Flash-2min via limbic)
'Ben Tre logic' = destroying something to 'save' it (miSh)
Scary graph of rising USA tuition (iGreed)
Where the fang that enters / The human heart grows from a human mouth (vDaily)
Twitter's two cultures: Retweeters vs Favrders (RWx-short)

DaytonOH houses around $1000 (AOL-search)
"Well, that was unpleasant" (oDvrwhr)
every time we speak we stun / the word (vDaily)
Play chess endgames vs computer (jScript via bSp)
vElegant comparative movie-trilogy ratings (pic via Waxy)
HuffPo book pg15 recommends you not 'humor' me (search for 'jorn')
More space-debris calculations (nSci)
Oct2008 bkgndr on new teevee product placement (nyMag-7pg)
(Old dog buried at new house?) (Poems w/jLund)
Father at 13yo (Flash-90sec via Jz)

Space-risks from crash-debris (lSci)
Progress sequencing 38kyo Neanderthal genome (nSci)
Was Moody's the #1 villain? (dBeast via reddit)
Fun political rant (Jz w/liiiinks)
naked newly turned soil / studded with skinny pale dicotyledons (vDaily)
China holds nose and buys more Treasuries (FT via iGrd)
8byte-profiling resolves Shakespearean authorship? (sciBlog w/graphs)

Satellite collision scatters space debris (CBS via nWatch)
Free paper recycles blogposts (dInsp)
noChom's perspective on current crises (FPiF-loong)
Wolf in sheep's drag (Sinfest)
Skeat's 1893 etymological dictionary (GgBks-100Mb-pdf)

Animating Watchmen's Rorschach's mask (Flash-3min)
NyT-micropayments-design suggestions (Fim)
Audio samples of great poets reading badly (ukG w/links)
'agnotology' = study of disinfo-propagation (Wired via lmG)
'Disney girls' short predictable career-arc (Jz)
More 'gay Jesus' debate (Dec2008 via ntWrong)
Nice new Hubble galaxy/deepfield (4000*4000 jpeg)
Lying UPI Iran-bashing (moonAL)
Glass bowls wait to be filled / with gold broth (NPR)
Thoughtful blogs link odd CargoCult essay (GgBlogs-52hits)
Unregulated biotech potato pesticide timebomb nightmare (NyT-1998-1pg-loong via reddit)

MemeWatch: nerd pickup lines (Twitter-search)
Handwritten vivWestwood fashion 'manifesto' (pic-arcane via Jz)
Okay new LoudonWainwright blues (NPR-3min)
Oxford updates kids' dictionary (wordlists via Arthur)
Israeli army's poisonous new racism (cPunch)
cShirk last night in London (90min-mp3)
Movie planned of rStone's Damascus Gate (vshort)

FlightOfTheConchords does WestSideStory (yT-3min)
"The challenge is writing CSS that looks good if you don't know ahead of time what your content is going to be" (blog via reddit)
Surprising vote for MortonSmith's 'gay' Jesus (jTabor-short)
Web3.0 = favorites-matching (RWx-short)
Israel boycott brandnames (yT-3min via wakeUp)
Female merit badges (pic via Jz)
7-sins combinatorics (Indexed-2007 via reddit)
Landmark cell-bio animations (yT-8min-dontmiss)

2009: Jan
2008: Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Apr Mar Feb Jan
2007: Dec Nov Oct Sep2 Sept Aug2 Aug1 July June May April2 April March Feb
[more]

no rss: cBank nDee mnftiu ljb verse

(numbers in parens are delicious linkcounts, indicating belatedness)

Filtermath

2008-10-06T15:30:00.007-05:00

i think my complaint
about blogging's dark age
can be boiled down to a handful
of formulae and statistics

eg for flickr (simplest case)
c4000 new pix per minute
maybe 0.1% of which (4/min) i'd fave
if i had a way to find them

the full database of a billion pix
waiting to be filtered
a checklist that should always remember
which you've already viewed

i subscribe to about 250 photographers' uploads
and 50-more's favorites
plus a single tag ('nude')
all via rss, which lets me quickly scan
mediumsized copies
of hundreds of pix per day

maybe 10% of which i fave
creating a veryhighquality stream
that should be subscribed by thousands
(current subscriptions unknown/zero?)

but missing at least 1000 potential faves/day
because i can't find them

simple strategy:
ruby/python/perl script
builds mirror of personal faves
and for each of these faves
the list of all flickrers who've faved it

and then calculates which flickrers
have faves that overlap mine most
(without excessive burden of
boring/offensive faves)

(flickr needs a stat
hinting how many pix each favoriter winnows
on average)

when you discover promising new fave-sets
you need to queue/ration
the process of sifting them
(the best ones might need better
to be added en masse
with exceptions deleted)

flickr should recommend photographers and faves
based on your known preferences

should always offer a stream
of likeliest-to-fave's
it knows you haven't seen

algorithmically tweaking its choices
as you surf

Blogging's new dark age

2008-10-06T15:25:00.012-05:00

i'm feelin like it's
temporarily
a new dark age for blogging

millions of tiny twinkling lights
of valuable content that aren't getting
sorted and focused and concentrated
(which is what blogging is
or should be
all about)

the top issues are too difficult
(credit default swaps, jewish exceptionalism)

the content is too plentiful
(flickr, youtube, blogger, twitter)

the technology is a full tech-generation behind
(favoriting + delicious + tumblr = ???)

the cultural leaders are
for the moment
inarticulate
and ethically compromised
(obama's a washout)

pop music is shapeless and forgettable

games are variations on mediocre themes

i try swimming faster and faster
with less and less to show for it

i want to keep up with
innovations in games
without kotaku's 40 posts/day

with movie/celeb gossip
about my faves
without a trillion realityteevee nonentities

i want easy identification
of a community of like-minded favoriters
on flickr/twitter/youtube/etc
with their votes collated to produce
a custom ranking of recent content
as shallow or deep as i have time for

i want to be able to pass on my favorites
with a minimal twitch
(not my current
blogger + delicious + twitter + tumblr)

i want to feel, again
that we're building something together

that our priorities are obvious
and shared

that tech is unifying and simplifying
rather than the opposite

2008-10-06T15:13:00.005-05:00

when i started my blog in 1997
keeping up with content, worldwide
wasn't yet a fulltime job

more or less everybody is
more or less potentially a
more or less fulltime
photographerphilosopherdiaristbloggercritic

generating barely-countable content-items
on mostly predictable hostsites

and trying, more or less
to discover and share
the best content created by others
commenting, critiquing and responding

without stooping to popular-mediocrity contests

struggling against ever-worsening odds

the browser for this future
needs to track all content authors
across all sites

remembering what's been seen
what's been recommended

streamlining the interface mechanics
so that a bottomless best-first queue
offers a customised range of content categories
with duplicates filtered/combined

new content from favorite authors
new recommendations from favorite critics
unplumbed favorites' archives

(inbox zero is passe)

Language molecules

2008-10-06T15:09:00.000-05:00

whether they're dna or not
there have to be molecules in the brain
that embody specific words

so someday a visualisation
will be able to sort the whole thesaurus
into specific brain regions

down to the level of specific molecules

so life events
are continually
verbalised
at the molecular level

Calculating interface 'friction'

2008-10-06T14:25:00.002-05:00

the juxtaposition of
john gruber's concept of interface friction
with david li's copula formula

has refocused an old intuition
about the science of human factors:

that someday we should have a formula
for rating the 'friction' in an interface

how many clicks
for each important action
how much mental strain
to refocus the brain
(like shifting contexts)
how much unintuitive complexity
to master
how much opportunity
to be publicly humiliated

web 2.0 has made considerable progress
on the first two of these

but achieving sufficient mastery
to avoid self-embarrassment
is a gigantic, growing problem

Understanding Twitter

2008-10-06T14:24:00.003-05:00

reddit doesn't understand twitter!?!
(i'm surprised)

it's the algonquin roundtable redux:
a universal competition
to say memorable things
in 140 characters or less

the more you're Favorite-d, the better you're doing

if you're not finding
a dozen tweets a day
worth Favoriting...
you're doing it wrong

look at others' Favorites
to find the wits you like best

and doublecheck their own Favorites
so you can subscribe (by rss)
to those who'll broaden your scope
bookmark twitter searches

watch for interesting hashtags
or mentions of interesting people

(these are also rss-able)

get comfortable with searching on @-names
to check others' replies
before replying yourself
keep reloading hashtag-searches
during interesting events
(#oscars #sotu #superbowl #ted)
or favorite teevee shows (#house)
to sample an infinite range of reactions
and occasional insights

temporarily follow
the best of these
add friends and family
(and celebs you wish were f&f)
not expecting algonquin wit
but grateful for random
keeping-in-touch tweets
ask/answer questions of the #lazyweb

monitor memes

announce time-critical tidbits

twitter is like usenet
where you subscribe to
people not topics

fastfastfast

spamfree by design

intolerant of prolixity

easily capturing stray thoughts
and trying them out
on a mostly-forgiving audience

Twitter's two cultures

2008-10-06T14:18:00.007-05:00

as of 6:45am on 18 Feb
my web3.0 tweet of 9pm last night

has been retweeted 50 times
mostly by ClayShirky's followers

but Favrd only once

dramatising the cultural divide
between the 'Retweeters'
whose Favorites folders are mostly empty

and the 'Favrders'
who add a dozen new Favorites a day
but frown on retweeting
(because it doesn't raise their Favrd score)

(Favrd currently reposts about 300 posts per day
based on 'gold stars'
from their registered users' Twitter accounts)

the uncrowned king of the Favrders
was MerlinMann/hotdogsladies
who shockingly retired from Twitter in December
because it was taking too much time

addendum 19Feb: Favotter shows 4 Favorite-ers

addendum 22Feb: [debate]

Web 2020

2008-10-06T14:10:00.001-05:00

what i'd like/expect to see:

html replaced by simpler e-markup like _italics_
links remember their chain of 'via's
commenting is globally unified-- you don't have to remember where you've left comments
article/page/post/bookmark distinction erased, just views of data
multiple links to same content automatically collated
automatic comparison of tastes/favorites to recommend likely similar author/bloggers

metacargocult

2008-10-06T14:08:00.007-05:00

what i like about
this cargocult analysis
is its bottom-up originality

squeezed out of direct confrontation
with media stupidity

so i thought blogs that linked it
might be worth sifting

(what i don't like about it
is its bottom-up contingency
lacking top-down necessity)

[numbering mostly added]

I. Ignorance is innocence

cf eg "zen mind, beginner's mind"
open lack-of-prejudice can be angelic
the 1st time you try bowling you may get a strike

but "Forrest Gump" was sentimentally dishonest
(also "Being There")

we may deserve a world where
innocence effortlessly triumphs
but we've never had one

IA. Complicated explanations are suspect

g spencer brown would defend this one

if the intuition senses
a simpler way
it has the right and duty
to reject the too-complex one

IA1. The world is simple, and there must be a simple explanation for everything.

isn't this an explicit variant
on the anthropic principle?

IB. Certainty is strength, doubt is weakness

IB1. Admitting alternatives is undermining one's own belief.

IB2. Changing one's mind means one has wasted the time spent holding the
prior opinion.

Your opinion matters as much as anyone else's

When a person has studied a topic, he has no more real
knowledge than you do, just a hidden agenda.

The herd should be followed

The contemplative lemming gets trampled

Popular beliefs must be true.

No bad idea can survive.

People are generally smart.

Even if a popular belief doesn't pan out, at least you'll be in the
same boat as everyone else.

II. Causality is selectable

All interconnection is apparent

Otherwise, complicated explanations would be necessary.

The end supports the explanation of the means

A successful person's explanation of the means of his
success is highly credible by the very fact of his success.

You can succeed by emulating the purported behavior of successful
people

This is the key to the cargo cult. To enjoy the
success of another, just mimic the rituals he claims to follow.

Your idol gets the blame if things don't work out, not you.

You have a right to your share

You get to define your share.

Your share is the least you will accept without crying injustice.

Celebrate getting more than your share.

III. It's not your fault

If it's good for you, it's good

Society is everyone else.

Good intentions suffice

You can always apologize.

There is no long term

Don't miss an opportunity.

Consequences are things that happen to others

Only you can hold yourself accountable. Don't let
others make you do that.

If somebody starts the blame game, you can still win it.

There are evil people and institutions, and surely one of them is more
responsible than you are.

You are not the problem

An ugly image means a bad mirror.

IV. Death is unnatural

You're special

Bad things shouldn't happen to you.

Pain is wrong

Life should not hurt.

It's a Whiffle World.

Tragedy is a synonym for calamity

Bad things are never consequences of one's own action or
inaction.

There will be justice

Bad people get punished.

You, however, will be forgiven.

Web3.0 = favorites-matching

2008-10-06T14:03:00.002-05:00

there's a simple shared solution
to the problem of
optimising one's datastream

(best pix best vids best tunes
best science best news best gossip
etc)

a web app needs to
monitor your preferences
and match them to the closest
other people's prefs
in each domain

this is not at all like
aggregating scores for the 'best' posts
which results in mediocrity rising

instead it's like creating
networks of individuals
with partly-shared tastes
tuned on a person-by-person basis

so twitter needs to compare
everyone's favorites
and tell me whose tastes
are most similar to mine
so i can subscribe (or not)
to their favorites feeds

and ditto for flickr
and imeem and youtube
and googlereader
and slashdotdiggredditmefi
etc etc etc

January 2009 links

2008-10-06T14:01:00.000-05:00

rFisk: US/UK's slide from UN to evil (ukInd)
NatalieDee January archive (toons) (1pg-long)
gouache / of gumbo, pentimento / of peppery boiled crabs (vDaily)
Tracing figures in Photoshop (1pg via Make)

MemeWatch: 'my superpower' (Twitter)
Don't-miss on trends for investors (miSh-loong)
Searchengine finds eg silhouettes within 'nude' tag (Behold-nsfw via lf)
'60mins' comes clean on Israel (mWeiss w/link)
ErrolMorris surveys wBu-in-photographs (1pg-loong via rddt)

New Issa/jSiberry mp3s/cd (Sheeba)
1st nerd meritbadge ($4 via Make)
Twitter search: 'pro tip' (20/day)
SalamPax hasn't heard from Riverbend either (twitter)
Musicians on Twitter (sorted-list via cWalla)
'360-365' = every direction, every day (dTongue)
Lo-res-polygonal man sculpture (pic via Make)
New VDP intvu re SongCycle (short)
MichaelHurley profile (hobo folksinger) (Vimeo-25min via Magpie)

Dilbert sells way way out (E&P)
Twitter suggestions (RWx-short)
How world media covered Gaza (CJR via mWeiss)
Gaza realigning mideast? (moonAL)
100-item ?ontology of game design (list w/pdfs)

wBu revelations to watch for (tTmrrw-list via reddit)
Harvard vs inductive-reasoning (re bhOb) (Sam-longish)
Does GoogleScholar suck? (iGreed-thread)
Bertie Wooster's Complete Waste of Time (RWx-friv)
Ltd time: 'The Wire' full dvds $82 (Az via otI)
Tweet(s) inspire short(s) (50sec)
Israel's Gaza lies (LRB-long)
Latest gWarming worldmap (Nasa via reddit)
vTrippy lenticular cloud (astroPic)

vDramatic jump in Federal borrowing (graphs via reddit)
Inaugural poem reformatted (RWx)
ForrestGump/BenjaminButton parallels (Flash-90sec)
Tech analysis of WhiteHouse blogfeed (wBench-varcane)
GetYrWarOn over-n-out (mnftiu)
Wise memo to bhOb from AliceWalker (nsWk via Jz)
Great day for Twitter faving (robotwisdom)
Neat anticlimax (oDoffice)
Geekiest. Tweet. Evar. (Ev)
Lucid bailout hypothetical (pKrug-IHT via Sam)
Bush Dies Peacefully In His Sleep (Onion via reddit)

Bailout only benefits bankers (dBaker)
Israel's history of violent narcissism (sWalt)
32 nudes of 20yo Madonna (Yeeah)
'Israel's history... a horror-show' (Onion!-short)
Conservative economists playing dumb (pKrug)
4 of 10 IDF fatalities were Orthodox (viN)
Yeshiva convert ponders jewish racism (blog-longish)
SalamPax back in Baghdad (no Riverbend news) (links)
(Favrd works fine if you change yr passwd just to register) (about-pg)
Spongey Hyperion in 2005 (astroPic)
Strange, how doing something marks your life, / hard and permanent as stone (Poems-longish)
Bollywood remaking BackToTheFuture (vshort via oThink)

MemeWatch: DSM-IV (twittersearch)
AMA's war on Medicare (Dissent via Sam)
The colors of the Harlem Renaissance (cLovers-1pg)
?Next-to-last GetYrWarOn update (1pg)
Thoughtful pMcGoohan eulogy (OnionAV)
MemeWatch: shoe-on-doorknob = wBu kissoff (cPunch)
wBu's blunders weakened evil of US empire (cPunch-aCock)
Increased US savings come out of China's pockets (iGreed)
Charming Dutch LilyAllen intvu (yT-3min)
NZ pubs ban Israelis (viN-2pg w/vid)
US media ignore Kucinich-on-Gaza (GgN-search)
UN president calls Gaza 'genocide' (aJ via wakeUp)
Nanotech promises instant-diagnostic lab (newSci)
"I like to dance naked around fires" (oDinny)
Professorial wit (oDvrwhr)
Life imitates 'A Christmas Story' (local via sciBlg)
Chomsky-on-Gaza video (Flash-?60min)

ClicheWatch: if Hollywood tried chess (yT-2min via iwS)
Mac desktop tour by power-user MerlinMann (Vimeo-12min)
Bestselling authors worldwide in 2008 (ukG-list)
1913 'Wind in the Willows' (pGut w/pix)
I am doing for the gulls / what a god would do for us: standing outside (vDaily)
Twitter vs gtd (wLotta)
Comics vs graphic novels (flickr-pic)
Chomsky outraged by Gaza (MIT-no-vid-yet via mW)

Weird food quotes (oDinny)
dBaker on Terry Gross (Flash-30min)
Swingset-fan builds swing into skirt (Make)
Israel-USA-UN rashomon (moonAL)
Game optimised for 4 PSPs (Ktku-short)
TomFrank attacks bhOb's centrism (WSJ)
Amateur photography cliches (blog via lf)
Vice Presidential Handlers Lure Cheney Into Traveling Crate (Onion)
TwemeWatch: Y/N? (searchpattern)

cShirky at UCLA tonite (event)
Turn pix into Obama posters (Flash via Jz)
Global devaluation paradox (iGrd-vshort)
Facebookers oppose Israel almost 2-1 (fBook via jNew)
Landmarks in early photography (1pg via uTms)
Ontology of heavymetal bandnames (1100*1700 jpeg via kasei)
Graffiti adds Photoshop menus to billboard (Make)
Rave for ebooks on iPod (short)
Pinter as director, remembered (ukG via l4Nxt)
LibertarianMarxist webzine Spiked (Monbiot-arcane)
dDennett liveblogged (37tweets)

Likeable twitter techblog (jNew)
Led by his grey lead boots way, way off the / beaten track, // He walks into Loch Ness (ukG)
girl at a light so bright / she's silhouette (ukG)
1yo loves Wii (bGamer-cute)
When Nancy met Sluggo (1938-comic)

Gangcakewreck (oDinny)
Mind-vs-blog- reading PostSecret (jpeg)
Earth thru eclipsed Saturn's rings (astroPic)

'yahtzees' = political cartooning coincidences (dTongue)
TheBushYears in 140chars (twitter-thread)
'dechticaetiative language' (Wiki via dcAllen)
TinyURL for GgWeb queries (dInsp)

New karaoke-AI applied to DavidLeeRoth vocal (Flash-4min via Waxy)
msResearch's vvvretro promo for karaoke-AI (yT-4min via Make)
Online GIMP intro (free ?Photoshop) (multi via Brydon)
New Dog Digs Up Old Dog (Onion-tsia)
MemeWatch: Israel Lobby (GgTrends)

Forgotten 1965 eGorey 'advice' book (1pg-long via Jz)
Testtube RNA self-replication (nSci via gDog)
Giddy SoundOfMusic mashup (yT-2min)
Serious 'gay Jesus' debate (Nation-loong)
NaomiKlein on Gaza (Nation)
Lord works in ?mysterious ways (mcSwnys-list)
Goofy login test questions (mcSwnys-list)
Worst. Pickup-line. Evar. (oDinny)
Gymnast turns extreme fashion model (pic via Jz)
My 80s themesong: Dancing Barefoot (6Mb-mp3)

vVoice puts nHentoff out to pasture (Sam w/links)
MemeWatch: "is that a thing?" (twitter searchpattern)
'Dollar bubble' may not pop this year (dBaker-short)
Twitter-celeb master list (site via bNerds)
Spycam + robot-muppet = uncanny (Flash-60sec)
tMonk's patroness (ukG via cWalla)
jonStewart on Gaza (Flash-4min)
Upbeat atheism on UK buses (Flash-2min via tOcclt)
vvvOutspoken RoseanneBarr anti-Israel rants (blog via Xym)
World wealth/health graph (900*1300 png via Blgscpd)
Deep rap etymology (graph via etH)
Predictable = boring (iSteve)

Site graphs indivs' twitter stats (tweetStats)
bhOb choosing foreign-policy fallguys? (Walt)
Elegant Israel what-if experiment (Walt-short)
Walt of Mearsheimer-and- has a blog (FP w/rss)
Required-reading author deluged by student emails (long via pHensh)
Reporting IDF terrorists to IDF ('prank' via wakeUp)
Gossip re wBu's house historians (NYer-shortish)
Odd LouiseGluck prosepoem (NYer-shortish)
I translate the Bible into velociraptor (NYer-dontmiss)
Gorgeous dog portrait (flickr)
India : Pakistan ?:: Israel : Gaza (Forbes)
*ML shorthand idea (vshort)
Change.gov queries re Gaza (quotes via mWeiss)
philG unilaterally recognises Hamas (vshort)
Metric scales for nerds/Whedonites (xkcd)

Eloquent FrankRich ?eulogy for wBu (NyT via gPost)
Emerging standards on historicity of Jesus (ntWrong-arcane)
More on new DrWho (ukMail via Jz)
'zero haircut' = same length all sides (dTongue)
Dutch skaters (flickr)
UK's 50 fave teevee catchphrases (list)
Seven across just might be Limberlost (NPR)
they bide, bide / in their pine churches with their psalms to a god / who would favor their feathers over the other’s (vDaily)
New dBaker intvu (yT-50min)
cShirky rejects Y!'s del.icio.us for Ma.gnolia (bookmarks)
Ironical 1997 live Ween artrock (yT-4min)
Lit's longest sentences (Chgo)
USA blocks UN for Israel (mWeiss)
Corporate Code of Conduct (Dilbert)

Pleasant LilyAllen pop 'The Fear' (yT-4min via cTip)
Who are the hardestworking bloggers? (RWx w/links)
Live aJ coverage of Gaza ground invasion (twitter via cShirk)
Will future appliances use Twitter for status alerts? (yT-90sec)
Cat-meme family tree (giant via nTndo)
GTBMS (8hits)
Greenspanites attacked 2005 bubble-prophet (WSJ via pKrug)
New DrWho announced (IMDb)
'Sensitive Female Chord Progression' = vi-IV-I-V (Flash-4min via riley)

Loving fanatic's top50 alltime special effects (1pg-no-vid via Fim)
GgAndroid headed for laptops? (vBeat via Engdgt)
Excellent nFinkelstein intvu on Gaza (Iran-shortish)
Open DeweyDecimal update (2pg via edV)
NatalieDee's December archive (1pg)
How the GOP selfdestructed (pKrug-shortish)
Comparison of 2ndLife and PS3 Home (Ktku-long)
Mellow 4min timelapse of stars, clouds (astroPic)
Nancy&Sluggo as Janis&Jimi (yikes)
Hidden Kindle fragility-costs (philG)
Been there, done that, great minds (twitter searchpattern)

Pro claims football sim helped training (short via Fim)
More Gaza background (ukInd)
Details on Aubrey-Maturin dinner (pix)
Google targets power-supply inefficiencies (NyT via edV)
Snappy ?new Beck vid, Youthless (yT-3min via cTip)
dBaker in SF Friday night ($10 donation)
Do I look like the angel of home and hearth with this strange green / fire in my hands? (NPR)
Anybody's guess: four 2009 scenarios (iGreed)

Sled flips newsman (yT-30sec via Fail)
Aubrey-Maturin dinner menu (arcanish)
Queen of Chinese folk music (yT-7min via enthssm)
DaveBarry's 2008 in review (WaPo via lf)
Survey of nonlinear evolution of animal intelligence (sciAm via /.)
Loong cShirk intvu re journalism2.0 (CJR-2pg)
aAbunimah on Gaza (bkgd/context) (ukG via mW)
1978 StarWars xmas special (GgV-2hr via twitter)
rFisk on Gaza (ukInd)
one could from a smoky cell / By talisman or spell / Coerce the Zodiac (NYer-rWilbur)

2008: Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Apr Mar Feb Jan
2007: Dec Nov Oct Sep2 Sept Aug2 Aug1 July June May April2 April March Feb
[more]

no rss: cBank nDee mnftiu ljb verse

(numbers in parens are delicious linkcounts, indicating belatedness)()

The geometry of ego

2008-10-06T13:25:00.004-05:00

1st dimension: every human (in a line)

2nd dimension: the same (at 90 degrees)

at the intersections
the relationships of human to human

A's relationships to B, C, D...
B's to A, C, D...



 |
D| * *
C| * *
B| *
A|   *
 +-----------
   A B C D

3rd dimension: every human again

with the intersections
their relations to others' relationships

A's relationship to
B's relationship to A

with ego blindness dominating here

Twitter suggestions

2008-10-06T13:23:00.002-05:00

twitter currently uses decimal numbering
of individual tweets:
http://twitter.com/robotwisdom/status/1139780124
(10 digits = one billion+ sold)

but by switching to alphanumeric numbering
(like TinyURL.com's)
a billion tweets would require only
6 characters ((26+26+10)^6 = 56,800,235,584)

so links to specific tweets
could be embedded concisely:
eg "//1Qa4rF"
unpacked by tweet-readers to (eg)
http://twitter.com/posts/1Qa4rF

while your reader could/should also unpack
mentions of '@username' into two links
one (as now, the username)
a link to that user's aggregated tweets

but the other (presumably just the '@'?)
to a search for all tweets mentioning '@username'
(mostly replies)

and a similar @-search should be offered
(somewhere in each tweet)
for replies to the tweeter herself

nb four compact links:

cshirky: @robotwisdom No, I don't have an active blog. I seem to have two native formats at the moment -- 140 chars and 250,000 chars. :( 7:11 PM Jan 5th from TweetDeck @

StephenFry's Twitter lit challenge

2008-10-06T13:22:00.014-05:00

i'd never seen stephenfry [Wiki] in anything
but i'd seen references to his twitter hegemony [50k followers]
and yesterday morning i got intrigued
by references to a contest he'd posted [only 34 Favrds?]

"L=50 in Roman. The best tweet containing exactly 50 Ls will win. All tweets to contain the tag #L and none to exceed 140 character limit SF"

quickly clarified:

"There's the competition in a nutshell below. Star it for reference. The prize will be good and sent anywhere in the world."

"It is to celebrate 50,000 followers. Hence the #L theme."

"OK - good question all: the #L tag does NOT count as one of the 50!"

"Deadline for submissions is Saturday 24th January 1200 GMT"

"So many questions! Open to all following me, whether or not I follow you. Enjoy yourselves. Can be funny,sad,trenchant,silly.x"

"Incidentally, you're all doing brilliantly in the #L competition. Immensely impressed by your efforts"

"RT “ @spkr4thedead51: @stephenfry you can keep track of them all here http://hashtags.org/tag/l ” Thanks @spkr4thedead51 x"

"Ax many entries as you like, by the way x"

"It's all right. If you have submitted an entry and can't search for it, I will find it. Despite #L not seeming to work - there are ways x"

i loved challenges like this in my youth
especially in 'new york' magazine [games thread]

a quick twiiter search showed nothing yet for "#L"
(not even sf's announcement, which should have made me suspicious)
so i dug out a wildcarding searchengine bookmark [OneLook-eg]
and diddled around until this fit:

Lily, Tallula & Lolita Liddell all loll jollily/sillily in Lilliput lalaland, lulling fell allies Ellul, Hillel & Llull w/lullaby lollies #L []

i panicked when the #L search didn't show mine either
and visited @stephenfry for the 1st time--
sheer chaos

a little research turned up an L-shaped special character [left floor]
that could have fixed things
but everyone ignored my proposal
(some of sf's followers were already flummoxed by '#'!)

sf claims he's got it under control
somehow mysterious
but just scanning for decent entries
seems a fulltime job

my faves []:

#L Sulla's pal Lucullus/Illyrian hill dweller'll dillydally, loll/Trill Lillibullero till all pall, fall ill/Till fell chill hell bells toll []

I'll tell all: shills—all bull—willfully lull dull fools. Illegal pills sell—all will fall ill. Law will prevail—hellhole cell walls call #L []

Well silly Bill fell ill on Pall Mall.He'll tell Lilly who'll chill & Bill'll swill lil pills til dull Elle's call tells Bill all's well #L []

#L Illiberal dullsville hillbilly Lilly dillydallied globally till Lilly fell willfully ill in Hull. 'Hull' libellously labelled Lilly silly []

#L I'll tell all loyally: Bill'll love Lilly til all lilacs fall, all gulls fly, all lollies melt. Bill'll still love Lilly til Hell chills []

Willfully (illegally) tell-all Elle idyllically spills all locally sellable blolly jelly, lollingly lulling Lillibullero polysyllabically.#l []

Li’l yellow lily falls ill/Lilliput bell lolls/Lull/Li’l yellow lily rallies/Lilliput bell pulls level/Lull/Lala llama lollops/Falls/Oops #L []

Dull Bill yells shrill villanelles (illegal in Lille). Pallid Lilly Lill flails&lethally falls pell-mell; Lilly'll lie still&Bill'll flee #L []

A silly hillbilly'll illegally sell gullible Lilly&dull Bill smelly jelly.Smelly jelly's vile smell'll kill Bill&Lilly&hillbilly.Farewell #L [same author] [more]

@stephenfry #L Lil Lilly Sillwell of the dell of Killwilly fell in love w/ Golly Gilly of LLwellyn Hall n all will call her Lady Lilly Gilly []

@stephenfry #L elle swills ale well she'll swill till hell chills lil Bill Sillwells balls Bills balls will now fall on jills swell hills [same author] [more]

@stephenfry#L All bills call lilly small, bills lovely lullaby will lull lilly. Lilly is lulled, bill will toll all bells, lilly yells bully []

most literary:

@stephenfry preparing to launch my 'Joyce's Ulysses in 140 characters and 50 Ls'. This has been a massive timewaster - brilliant. Here goes []

#L LB luvs Molly/lil Milly/stroll willynilly/mull hill/swill bellyfull/ill/Bello kill L?/SD fall/call Plod/all ill till Molly'll yell I will []

a near miss:

#L Lily Allen - Lilting voice & lovely locks bring lingering lecherous leers from legions of lustful lads, alas her lyrics lack lift or lit. []

nifty utilities people created: [simple] [ditto] [ditto]

Scrabble database-sort

amazing all-in-one utility

Fry has faved two that seem ho-hum to me (consonant-vowel-L-L is so 15minsago...)

postmortem

after a week on tenterhooks
for hundreds of people who'd spent
thousands of hours
crafting entries

stephenfry got bored
after reading some 200 entries
and picked a winner at random

[announcement] [reactions]

not a fan

Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem

2008-10-06T13:20:00.006-05:00

[i added linebreaks
and removed capitalisation and punctuation
from the ?unofficial transcript (video/crit/thread)

added: ?official linebreaks

her website poems for comparison]

praisesong for the day

each day we go about our business
walking past each other
catching each others eyes
or not
about to speak
or speaking

all about us is noise

all about us is noise and bramble
thorn and din
each one of our ancestors
on our tongues

someone is stitching up a hem
darning a hole in a uniform
patching a tire
repairing the things in need of repair

someone is trying to make music somewhere
with a pair of wooden spoons
on an oildrum
with cello
boombox
harmonica
voice

a woman and her son wait for the bus

a farmer considers the changing sky

a teacher says
take out your pencils
begin

we encounter each other in words
words spiny or smooth
whispered or declaimed

words to consider
reconsider

we cross dirt roads and highways
that mark the will of someone
and then others
who said
i need to see whats on the other side
i know theres something better
down the road

we need to find a place
where we are safe

we walk into that
which we cannot yet see

say it plain
that many have died for this day

sing the names of the dead who brought us here
who laid the traintracks
raised the bridges
picked the cotton and the lettuce
built
brick by brick
the glittering edifices they would then keep clean
and work inside of

praisesong for struggle
praisesong for the day
praisesong for every handlettered sign
the figuring it out at kitchen tables

some live by
love thy neighbor as thyself
others by first do no harm
or take no more than you need

what if the mightiest word is love
love beyond marital filial national
love that casts a widening pool of light
love with no need to preempt grievance

in todays sharp sparkle
this winter air
any thing can be made
any sentence begun

on the brink on the brim on the cusp

praisesong for walking forward in that light

Twitter profile for Jorn Barger/ Robot Wisdom

2008-10-06T13:16:00.005-05:00

since i've got 3 twitter accounts going
and none allows a real profile
i'll post a combined profile here

http://twitter.com/robotwisdom
is personal/miscellaneous

bkgd image: my 1st pc [pic source]

http://twitter.com/robotwisdom/favourites
are all faves, mostly humorous

http://twitter.com/rwaux
is a mirror of my linkblog

rwaux icon source [flickr]

http://twitter.com/rwaux/favourites
is the serious tweets from my favorites
artistic or useful or deep

http://twitter.com/jornbarger
was a special purpose experiment

http://twitter.com/jornbarger/favourites
is still unused

My version of the ideal Wikipedia bio [RWx]

Highlights of RWx

Twitter vs del.icio.us

2008-10-06T13:11:00.003-05:00

wouldn't del.icio.us
have 90% of twitter's functionality
if they just exposed (as URLs)
their internal IDs
for individual posts
(so people could link eg
my specific comments
on any given bookmark)

and also then allowed
posts with no associated bookmark/links
(so i could post about nothing)?

Lazyweb: hardest-working bloggers?

2008-10-06T13:03:00.002-05:00

this blog
deleted my comment
that i'd posted 2500+ items last year

to say nothing of my
GoogleReader count
of sifting 1000+ items per day
from 500+ sources

which includes my flickr subscriptions
but not my 4000+ flickr faves
nor my 900+ twitter faves

and i'd love to know anybody close
in terms of hardworkingness

The Con molecule

2008-10-06T13:02:00.002-05:00

everyone's experienced 'awakenings'
where the Con loses its grip
(as in Carpenter's "They Live")

but always falling back then
to sleep

after enough cycles
of wake-sleep-wake

a pressure-point
may come into focus

thru which the dark cloak
descends

but which can be resisted
standing up against the conformity
of millions of people
over thousands of years

and might this pressure-point
even be a single molecule
or at least a small cluster
in the brain
between the eyes

the ultimate battleground of good and evil

torn between
a state of comfort
and a state of virtue?

December 2008 links

2008-10-06T13:01:00.000-05:00

Hidden Kindle fragility-costs (philG)
Been there, done that, great minds (twitter searchpattern)

Pro claims football sim helped training (short via Fim)
More Gaza background (ukInd)
Details on Aubrey-Maturin dinner (pix)
Google targets power-supply inefficiencies (NyT via edV)
Snappy ?new Beck vid, Youthless (yT-3min via cTip)
dBaker in SF Friday night ($10 donation)
Do I look like the angel of home and hearth with this strange green / fire in my hands? (NPR)
Anybody's guess: four 2009 scenarios (iGreed)

Sled flips newsman (yT-30sec via Fail)
Aubrey-Maturin dinner menu (arcanish)
Queen of Chinese folk music (yT-7min via enthssm)
DaveBarry's 2008 in review (WaPo via lf)
Survey of nonlinear evolution of animal intelligence (sciAm via /.)
Loong cShirk intvu re journalism2.0 (CJR-2pg)
aAbunimah on Gaza (bkgd/context) (ukG via mW)
1978 StarWars xmas special (GgV-2hr via twitter)
rFisk on Gaza (ukInd)
one could from a smoky cell / By talisman or spell / Coerce the Zodiac (NYer-rWilbur)

114 puzzles w/answers from heDudeney (pGut-1907)
27 short diverse ideas (CBC-list via @rand)
1054AD supernova in xrays (astroPic)
The blood drips from their fangs (Xym)
"Full heart, empty wallet" (oDinny)
The Little Taiko Boy (800*1400 gif)
Disturbing ending to ukG graphic story (RWx-30pg)
Intriguing sJohnson bio of Priestley (laTms via jGerm)
dSimon/Homicide/Wire/Shield backgrounder (ukG-long)

tCruise in Tropic Thunder (yT-4min)
New details on sPalin-family drug bust (AP via Jz)
Pinter speech also on yTube, GgV (GgV-49min w/link)
10 handy tricks to re-use stuff (lHack-links)
2 new GetYrWarsOn (mnftiu)
Pinter's 2005 Nobel critique of US foreign policy (wmp/Real-46min, transcript)
Kristof wrong about economics of charity (dBaker-short)
dGibbons' Watchmen intvu (Wired via lmG)
Couchpotatoes love Snuggies blankets (twitter)
Loong Pinter bio/obit (ukTel)
MemeWatch: favoriting yourself (Twitter searchpattern)
Genetic clues to complex Balkan prehistory (shortish via gPost)
Robin Cook: 'al Qaeda' is just US propaganda (vshort via cWalla)

New AniDifranco intvu (2pg-longish)
Curmudgeonly TedNelson timeline of info science (1pg via gTxA)
8 Old School Toys That Got Badass Makeovers (2of2pg)
Top art-direction in 2008 games (bGamer)
Lend the daylight crescent, circle, spume (vDaily)
And then / the history of forgetting would begin (Poems)
Yoyodyne on Forbes' top25 fictional co's (19of25 via gruber)

Sabbath electronics not kosher (viN)
My 14 faves from sGum's mp3s (RWx w/mp3s)
Optimising public transit as a user game (edV)
250 journalists on Twitter (1pg-masterlist)
Animated 3D yinyang avatar (twitter)
sGum's 50 best free mp3s of 2008 (250Mb-zip via 1bit)
$100 Coby laptop a hoax (blog via Engdgt)
Lucid detail on Hebron settlers (long via mWeiss)
10 Things Started on Usenet (thread via twitter)

Witty CurrentTV lampoon of jewelry ads (4min via meMo)
bhOb's dozen+ Bilderbergers (list via wakeUp)
16yo SusieBright visits 1974 PlayboyClub (long-nsfw)
More wretched web2.0 excess (friendfeed)
Obit for Mrs Noam Chomsky (local)
Snarky pHensher on teevee, movies (ukInd-friv)
Contest winners mostly from India!? (short, odd)
Jewish blog acknowledges Jewish racism (short w/thread)
Personal web2.0 housecleaning (edV)
PC bias in new mGladwell (iSteve-loong)

150 of the best new poems on the Internet (RW-del)
Fabric-art maps (1pg-long via @rand)
'chantepleurer' = singing thru tears (ukTel via 2mm)
Denver planecrashee on twitter (searchpattern via Fim)
vContrarian prescription for Detroit (iSteve)
'flipper' = CNN's 'crawl' upgrade (dTongue-no-vid?)
If programming languages were [list] (links/thread via Triv)

qFiore2.0 for teen girls (dNotes)
Celebs ranked by jewishness (top=15)
India avoided USA's mistakes (PhilG-short)
Israeli compares Israel to Hitler (moonAL)
MemeWatch: drunk Jeff Goldblum (8yTs via Cinem)
JohnLanchester gets videogame artistry (LRB-loong)
cShirky on/at Health2.0 (Flash-20min)
"Happy as a clam without a uterus!" (oDvrwhr)
30+ funniest tweets per day (Favrd-RSSable)
Nifty Visual Guide to Bailout (pic w/links)
How Jewish Is Hollywood? (laTms via iSteve)
Anthropomorphised frozen waffles (cHum-80sec via nTndo)
Exquisite Wolcott on Updike (LRB-longish)
Gaza update (LRB)
Palin grandbaby name ideas (twitter)
a pious lie / in the heart / of history (GgT-flickr-9000)
Bawdy tribute to 63yo hMirren (bParty)
vElegant venn-diagrammer for tweets (Java via dInsp)
UN242 backstory (ukInd-Fisk)

Recent trends in band names (OnionAV-looong)
Unfriendly $500 solar power for laptops (1pg via Engdgt)
Watching bad press conf: Nobody has shoes? (tweet)
New Sims3 trailer (Flash-60sec)
30 best movie opening-sequences (1pg-30yT)
Interesting DavidSimon intvu (NPR-8min)
Mt. Pizzaholic tee (nDee-jpg)
all / those sticks and stones that shape a lasting / worldly frame (Poems)

3D-printed Spore avatars $50 (Ktku)
WallSt bonus horror stories (NyT via Mssssssppfrn)
28 more videogames being made into movies (1pg-list via Ktku)
bhOb's an AAA con-artist (Sam)
Cute Banksy (flickr)
Baby Beyonce wannabe (Flash-2x-3min via mat)
Fun ?postmortem on Madoff swindle (iSteve)
Heh: 'faith-based heterosexuals' (GgW-2hits)
Rollover world hangover cures (nGeo-Flash via Jz)
Periodic table of awesomeness (pic via lmG)
Xmas letter from Bethlehem (oJ)
Is Beetle Bailey in Iraq?!? (today)
wBlake fiasco bicentennial (ukG)
Subset of robotwisdom Twitter faves: useful/true (4pg-rwaux)
Lily Allen Lights Up The Joint (Jz-pic)
Death Map USA (4pg)
Flying shoes express facts-on-ground (cPunch-pCock)
LittleDragon are the new CocteauTwins (2yTubes-4min)
bOINGbOINGzEITGEIST (RWx-short w/link)

Gloomy case against econ stimulus (moonAL)
More on sSontag diaries (nyMag-2pg via Jz)
6 scientific/historical mysteries (Cracked-2pg)
FBI using turned-off cellphones to eavesdrop (Cnet via Sam)
My Twitter faves have their own rss feed (yay)
adult height = 2*(2yo height) (RoT)
(Meanwhile, in a galaxy far far away...) (GgT-flickr-9000)
SusanSontag's teen diary (NYer-bkrev)
"Change doesn't originate in the White House" (Sam-loong)
Potential for retrogression in politics 2.0 (cShirk)
pHensher praises AmIdol-et-al (scroll down)

9yo DeclanG's sublime "Walking in the Air" (yT-4min)
wBu ducks righteous Iraqi shoes (Flash-90sec)
"Mom! He's non-verbally quoting Shakespeare at me again!" (oDvrwhr)
Cake-fondant master (1pg w/link)
Simple xmasgift gizmos checklist (mMcA)
Accents guessing-game (Flash via lidia)
US religious beliefs (stats via ntWrong)
Global beggar-thy-neighbor (miSh-arcane)
8000 Twitter faves per year? (sBro-400pg) [Rem-ditto]
Bernanke inflating ponzis (iSteve-short)

't.e.s.l.a.' = freshness of user-testing (cShirk)
Parkour prehistory (yT-90sec via Waxy)
The handful of cattle corralled in the pen shuffle // and huff, gnawing on rotten apples (vDaily)
Awesome 9yo BritneySpears audition clip (Flash-20sec)
Tired: R/T. Wired: R/F. (10of10pg)

jCarter hasn't given up completely on bhOb (Reut)
New ArundhatiRoy on Mumbai (Tom-looong)
Fastfood heartattacks near $1 (NyT-list via lHack)
Housingbubble far from popped (mMcA-graphs)
Still baffled by Twitter's vacuousness (ors¬s-searchpattern)
'denim bubble' = vvhi-priced jeans (2005 via Jz)
Predicting programmer aptitude (cShirk-shortish)
Cranberry Juice Industry Hoping 2009 A Big Year For Urinary Tract Infections (Onion-tsia)
'Alan Moore' on "Simpsons" (1pg-pix via etH)
NPR hosts make over $300K (blog via Mssssppn)
Antikythera-mechanism update (nSci-long w/3min-vid)
Nifty camera-cake (2pg via Make)
Criminally opaque menu of galactic-center videos (ESO via astroPic)
New movies/animations of galactic center (12Mb-QT-3min)
Fart-joke snuck into NewEnglishBible (ntWrong)
New geopolitics sim from France (short via Ktku)
We leaned back, // the tinkling sky / chandeliered with neurons (Poems-longish)

Stats on female masturbation (Jz-thread)
Sprouting reference chart (800*2600 jpeg via Make)
Freaky Sims3 trailer (Flash-60sec)
Still unsafe: only 3% of Iraq refugees have returned (pCock-long)
Stats confirm short-vs-longterm priorities skew (moonAL)
'the coping classes' = less-than-well-to-do (dTongue)

Israel ups Jewish flight-risk? (jWeek)
Zimbabwe hyperinflation in pictures (1pg via miSh)
NewTestamentGreek educational music videos (2Flash-22min via ntWrong)
Investigation of GgBooks' new magazine archives (blog w/links)
5 pairs of WAVs demonstrate 'top-down pop-out' (short via angus)
Lovely old Donovan mp3 (FatAngel)
Betting against indebted US states (Mish-arcane)
tMonk's musical advice (etext via Arthur)
15 syllable poem (tweet)
World GDPs mapped volumetrically in wood (1pg via Make)
Montage of 40 great movie peptalks (yT-2min)
Easy micrometeorite collection (3of5pg via Make)
Ten creative educational toys (Make-1pg)
Anomalous young stars at galactic center (sciBlog)
Nasa's slow road to recycled urine (yT-90sec via nasaW)
Nobody Touching Punch At CIA Xmas Party (Onion-tsia)
Disappointing demo of PhysX eyecandy (Flash-2min via Ktku)
GaryWebb eulogy/postmortem from RobertParry (Cnsrtium)
NPR is broken (philG)

Wainwright clan on Martha Stewart (Flash-2min)
100 classic etexts for NintendoDS (Az-Uk)
SimCity ported to iPhone (Ktku)
"I weep for our generation" (classicPeanuts)
Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time (smart via jLund)

tEagleton on Milton's 400th (ukG)
$45 budgeting tamagotchi (cScout via Ktku)
Unicode gotchas (sMcG-arcane)
Dozens of old RadioShack catalogs (Flash-eg via Make)
wBu ?= Ahab (ukG)
WallSt driven by shortterm not longterm (Atl-loong via 2mm)
17 artistic reflections of Nixon (oAV-2pg w/yTs)
PattiSmith update (ukTms via cWalla)

cShirk finds a 2001 bhOb 'gotcha' the GOP missed (yT-4min)
Stiglitz restates the obvious (ukG via jLund)
The world is much much bigger than Zion (mWeiss)
bhOb ?= Paul Atreides (Dune-equivs)
'Repo Man' sequel back on (vshort via lf)
bhOb's Best-n-Brightest redivivus (NyT via gPost)
30 comic geek-images by glennZ (1pg via aestok)
Afghan supply-routes vulnerable (moonAL)
"...and a lightbulb for baking pie!" (CulDeSac)

Philosophical rave for new $2700 Canon digicam (philG)
MemeWatch: 'weapons of mass *-uction' (table)
Ulysses vs Web2.0 (RWx-vshort)
Wittgenstein, outliners, and LawsOfForm (varcane)
Scary cold-sneeze-virus stats (Scot via lf)
"nobody has ever had this particular conversation before" (longish)
'Twilight' = mascara and treacle (tweet)
Funny Xbox cereal commercial spoof (Flash-2min)
Emotion Markup Language (arcane# via finnB)
Sunset w/smiley (astroPic)

mnftiu.cc's finally got a feed (justnoticed)
$14 Lego terrorist (catalog)
New Pynchon next summer (laTms via cMonk)
Details from 'Atlas of True Names' (5of7 via angus)
ElvisC/MyAimIsTrue reunion boot (7yT, review)
Free bus tickets for illegal aliens (iSteve-short)
World interest-rates graph (gif via iGrd)
Dip Good (Onion-tsia)
GOP's savvy/overlooked use of yTube (cShirk w/yT-2min)

Gold-price funnybusiness (arcanish via 1bit)
Blogger.com suggestions (to Gg) from founder (list)
la belle fille sans sourire (flickr-set)
Gnosticism in NickCave (arcanish w/yT-5min)
a bowl / of horse flesh, a fish you must eat whole (vDaily-dontmiss)
Thoughtful intvu w/Bioshock designer (Forbes via Ktku)
1st $100 laptop from Coby (Indy via Engdgt)
Rave for Cheeta's new autobiog (ukG)
Games deploy academic AI theories (loong via /.)
SusieBright loooves her Kindle (long-nsfw?)
Keep working while yTubes play (howto)
vEarly gospel fragment [not] auctioned today (Sotheby's)

A woman steps behind the vinyl curtain (vDaily-odd)
Mathematica equations w/embedded images (1pg w/pix via Waxy)
Remarkable claim about credit-default swaps (arcanish via lf)
Shiverygood AnnieLennox Joni cover (iMeem-4min-reg-req?)
MarionBarry ?vs bhOb (Sam)
New sexism in EdmundScientific catalog (Jz)
More realistic cgi hairstyles (Flash-3min)
My flickr faves in slideshows (RWx-Flash)
Pre-makeover TinaFey pix (Jz)
Astrology in Narnia? (ukG)
I want to be in that wild (blog-short)
Looking up can be cheering (up) (pic via @r)

Insomnia Jeopardy (NYer-rozC)
Skyshow 2nite (nSci)
Loong TinaFey profile (vF-1pg)
48 celebs answer 'Proust questionnaire' (vF-toc)
tDunc biopic planned (nyPost#)
Twitter's 140char limit born in Copenhagen pizzeria in 1982 (nMast)
The Art of Stage Dancing (1925) (pGut w/pix)
Looong NaomiKlein profile (NYer)

2008: Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Apr Mar Feb Jan
2007: Dec Nov Oct Sep2 Sept Aug2 Aug1 July June May April2 April March Feb
[more]

no rss: cBank nDee mnftiu ljb verse

(numbers in parens are delicious linkcounts, indicating belatedness)

Best of Stereogum mp3s

2008-10-06T12:23:00.001-05:00

After downloading Stereogum's 250Mb zip and giving all 50 tunes a listen, here's my faves, with direct individual mp3 links:

01 Marnie Stern - "Transformer" [mp3]

04 Los Campesinos! - "How I Taught Myself To Scream" [mp3]

06 Talkdemonic - "March Movement" [mp3]

10 Human Highway - "Moody Motorcycle" [mp3]

12 MIA - "Paper Planes (Remix For The Children By Adrock)" [mp3]

17 My Brightest Diamond - "Inside A Boy" [mp3]

18 Bowerbirds - "In Our Talons" [mp3]

24 Ratatat - "Mirando (YACHT Remix)" [mp3]

31 Passion Pit - "Sleepyhead" [mp3]

33 Juana Molina - "Un Dia" [mp3]

34 School Of Seven Bells - "Connjur" [mp3]

36 Fredrik - "Black Fur" [mp3]

37 Dan Friel - "Ghost Town (Pt. 1)" [mp3]

46 Music Go Music - "Reach Out" [mp3]

Blogsci otra vez

2008-10-06T12:21:00.006-05:00

divide all existing web-content
into units
(pix, videos, tweets, etc)

new units are added continually

units have authors
(but may be posted without attribution
or with false attribution)

each unit
hypothetically
has a potential value
for each surfer
(partially dependent
on the context of presentation:
i appreciate flickr minimalism more
when it's recommended by akiruna)

the goal is to efficiently find
as much highrated content
as you have time for
(lowering these standards
when you have extra time)

the primary filter
is recommender/linkblogger
subscribing to recommendations
from those we trust

(though recommenders
are usually more trustworthy
in some genres than others)

and a secondary filter
(fewer items per day)
is author

another filter is subject
subscribing to [tags]
eg on del.icio.us or flickr

and even worse is
popularity
aggregated recommendations
like digg or Favrd

linkbloggers
evaluate N items per day
and filter out M items
(M<<N)

Netnewspeak on GoogleGroups

2008-10-06T12:18:00.003-05:00

Twitter reminds me of the netnews golden age, especially alt.religion.kibology pre-2000. Many specific memes go back at least that far:

oldest recorded:

prOn: 14jun1994

invisible pants: 17nov1994

no pants: 1995?

not wearing pants: 19apr1993

Webservice metadata

2008-10-06T12:17:00.004-05:00

flickr: pix, tags, sets, groups, comments, rss (small), flash-slideshow (w/#), faves (no sort, no tags, no sets, no ratings), faves-rss, faves-slideshow (w/#); rss/slideshows for artist w/tag, for set, for group; no aggregate feeds; privacy settings?; 3rdparty (flickriver)

twitter: tweets, subscriptions (no privacy re who), one aggregate feed per user, faves (no sort, no tags, no ratings)

imeem:

last.fm:

postsecret:

overheard:

blogger:

tumblr:

bOINGbOINGzEITGEIST

2008-10-06T12:16:00.005-05:00

clay shirky has
educed a simulacrum
of boingboingist groupthink

by soliciting 'novel' futurist predictions
(150 so far, horribly nonnovel)

none of which connect The Singularity
with human wisdom
(at best hoping it will be left by
googleSanta
in our xmas stockings)

but robot wisdom
for the semantic web
will require slow painstaking
literate esthetic
disentangling
of the motives that roil our hearts

and confronting the Cons
that enslave us

Ulysses vs Web 2.0

2008-10-06T12:06:00.005-05:00

"Do you see that man who has just skipped out of the way of the tram? Consider, if he had been run over, how significant every act of his would at once become. I don't mean for the police inspector. I mean for anybody who knew him. And his thoughts, for anybody that could know them. It is my idea of the significance of trivial things that I want to give the two or three unfortunate wretches who may eventually read me." --James Joyce [Ellmann p163]

joyce in ulysses
was explicitly elevating
perfectly random everyday minutia
to the status of
universal immortal literature

every life
can be seen as art

even blogged or twittered*

(linkblogs should reward
such artists)

* eg [who's dancing] [what we dreamed]

Hipster Theory 2.0

2008-10-06T12:05:00.010-05:00

"No one goes there any more, it's too crowded." --Yogi Berra

i want to explore
the concepts of 'hipster' and 'hip'
especially as they relate to web 2.0

silence-mystery-charisma

the road less travelled

drugs-illegal-secrecy

taboos-occult-illuminati

smart-difficult

nonconformist-courage-originality

obscure-research-luck

vs: popular/easy/safe/accessible

Village Voice

Whole Earth Catalog: access to hipness

hippies vs hipsters

UK music scene hipper than US

local US music scenes (Seattle, Atlanta)

Usenet: alt.folklore.urban, alt.religion.kibology, alt.fan.warlord

fearless exploration

mastering exclusivist (Net) technologies

Factsheet Five, BoingBoing, ReSearch

linkblogging

open communities

1948: Anatole Broyard "A Portrait of the Hipster" [GgBks]

1957: Norman Mailer "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster"

Nuances within 'toRead'

2008-10-06T12:03:00.004-05:00

there's something inherently 'broken'
about bookmarking webpages
to-be-read-later

having sucked out
the first sweet nectar of novelty
the husk is left
for future 'others'

firefox's 'toRead' extension
and chrome's builtin bookmarkstar
(to say nothing of del.icio.us's
almost-useless 'toread' tag)
only scratch the surface
of efficient bookmarking

how many flavors of
read-this-later
should our bookmarking system(s)
distinguish?

- how long will it take?
if we're really busy
we may set aside
lots of short items

long boring 'homework' posts
need muuuuch more time
(and perfect nondistraction)
and will likely eventually
be discarded unread

- can it be broken into
multiple visits
like exploring a website
or image gallery?
(can the progress of this
exploration
be tracked automatically?)

- does it need a decision
like rereading something marginal
before deciding whether to
pass it along or bin it

My flickr faves in slideshows

2008-10-06T12:02:00.005-05:00

linkblogging (imho)
is about filtering the best content

thus making it more accessible
to others who might share your tastes

i filter hundreds of daily flickr pix
down to some dozens a day
(now approaching 4000 total)

some (but not all) of which
now show up on my linkblog mirrors
at tumblr and googlereader

and also fullsize (but still incomplete)
at flickriver
which has the additional disadvantage
of always starting with the most recent
so catching up on the early stuff
is inconvenient

but flickr's (flash) slideshows
can now be started anywhere
so i offer some 35 startingpoints below

allowing about 100 more/new/old pix
to be scanned in each cluster
so you can stop/start any time

and you can 're-fave' pix
without stopping the show
or stop and explore a particular photographer
even subscribing to their own feed

(there are nudes in the later/more recent
episodes, but not in the first ?half)

[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]
[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]
[18]
[19]
[20]
[21]
[22]
[23]
[24]
[25]
[26]
[27]
[28]
[29]
[30]
[31]
[32]
[33]
[34]
[35]
[36]
[37]

(future expansion:)

[38]
[39]
[40]

November 2008 links

2008-10-06T11:30:00.005-05:00

Mysterious acorn drought in east USA (WaPo via @r)
AlisonBechdel profile (ukG)
Unforeseen risks of nanoparticles (sciNews)
SamPo's in the tent (i2day)
NASA nixes 24/7 ISS-cams (nasaW)
Pink katydid (tHow-pic)
Sirius/XM in trouble (/. w/links)
35 Things Every PC User Should Know (pcW-1pg-2007)
Upsidedown font on Twitter (eg)
Vsurreal 'topless' robot (yT-90sec)
bhOb vs JFK-vs-Israel (afP via dDuke)
Snarky McCrum on digital storytelling (UkG)
4D-photoshop prototype (Flash-4min)
Why I Love Twitter (timO via etH)
WoW-addiction/waste (thread via mCass)
Blame securitisation (Sam)

Missing Wikipedia math articles (list via /.)
Fake-news ontology (Wired via Fim)
cShirk asks twitts re no-atheists-in-soupkitchens? (searchpattern)
Monday night skywatch (lSci)
Plausible mechanism for red-wine rejuvenating (NyT via /.)
Gaza genocide (ukG via slan)
Islamic banking looking smart (csM via 2mm)
Suspect JihadUnspun blogger abducted in P'stan (Wiki via wakeUp)
I am to be spun sugar, the universe / untethered (vDaily)
ArundhatiRoy predicted Mumbai? (mRev-short)
NATO in A'stan goes all-propaganda (moonAL)
Likely planet 50 l.y. away (astroPic)
Tilt-shift monster truck rally (4min via eMage)

1st 4pg of HughLaurie's 1996 novel (Az-Flash)
2700yo ganja found in China (Can via lf)
Marvellous LyndaBarry intvu on creativity, etc (2pg-loong)
Current bailout vs Great Depression (pKrug-short)
Rx: massive deficit spending (dBaker)
The douchebag scale (map via dNotes)
Profile of spy novelist cMcCarry (Oz)
Vhip 'Hi and Lois' comic (local)
48 nice comicbook covers (1pg)
8 decades of NYC novels (1 per) (UkG-list)
Update/bkgd on 'ThePrisoner's Village (Oz via 'KT')
Intentionality-theory made semigraphic (yT-3min via Fim)
Hindu-plot theory for Mumbai (moonAL)
B*mb* named Jennifer answering office phone... (oDoffice)
USA quietly surrenders to Iraq? (UkG via Xym)
Over-the-top holiday 'Nancy' (comics.com)
long beans in moonlight / hanging from the limbs (vDaily)

Biggest losers in crash (20pg via viN)
Top-grossing chick flicks (list via Jz)
Lovely meditation on 'Twilight' series (Atl-dontmiss via Jz)
c1970 Life pictorial on rockstars' parents' at home (1pg via FMU)
14 vmixed reviews for new BazLuhrmann, summarised (Jz)
JewsForJesus tribute to Dylan's christian phase (Nxtbk)
wBu economises on Hanukkah cards (viNei)
michelleObama snark (iSteve)
Short history of long popsongs (UkG)
Rhetorical tropes in bhOb's speeches (ukG)
Jp zine gives 9 games perfect scores in 10yrs (Ktku-list)
Serial-fiction revival via Web (UkG w/links)
Dashcam fireball may help triangulate orbit (astroPic)
Depressed flickrgirl (mMcI)
The new language of poverty (oDinny)
Obama's Kenyan family reunion (iSteve)
Droll analogy btwn Beijing swimsuits and WallSt de-regs (iGreed)
TomFrank on failure of govt outsourcing (WSJ-dontmiss)
Crash crisis lacks media visuals (bingBong via iGrd)
US states should formalise best foods by laws (bramC-short)
7 worst movies since 2000 (Cinem)
Media exempt Fed from accountability (philG-vshort)
YouTube backlash (nDee-jpeg)

Pop Songs About Female Masturbation (10yTubes)
GuitarHero/RockBand boost cd sales too (NyT via Ktku)
rGates' role in Iran-Contra still secret (Cnsrtium)
Fine art reproduced via sliced vegetables (Make w/links)
Nader on Obama/Carter/Israel (cPunch)
Update on Dean 'Segway' Kamen (Esq-long)
Citibank + Rubin = crony capitalism (dBaker-short)
Yesterday's jetpack daredevil videos (yTube)
Hotsauce recipe (NyT via Make)
Reassuring perspective on crash (dBaker-tOut)
30sec remote video of strange new squid (nGeo-2pg via lf)
Conway'sLife glossary (27pg via finnb)

Collective twitterpoem via shared password (blog)
Exotic nanogeometry for H2 storage (nSci)
Seafloor amoeba big as grapes (nSci w/pix)
GgChrome adds bookmarks manager (download)
Paranoid Israeli reading of bhOb's choices (jPost-long)
vanGogh textures in fps game (yT-2min via Waxy)
IlleanaDouglas's sign for paparazzi (pic via Jz)
Words filtered by Gg's 'safe' setting (list via rRuby)
False eyelashes get WILD (1pg via Jz)
Occupations vs IQs (jpeg)
Popstar homepage screenshots (1pg-phat)
Laughing babies won AFHV $100k (yT-70sec)
Tasers suck (blog via Msspn)
Awesome literary blog (eg)
Financial sector isn't worth this (moonAL-short)
bhOb's choice of Geithner (dBaker-UkG)
Bernanke's history of fumbling (NYer-looong)

US interstates as orthogonal grid (1000*800 jpeg via wLotta)
'burrowing' = sneaking appointees into civilservice (dTongue)
Virtual linedancing (3yTubes)
RachaelMaddow profile (Newswk via rRuby)
CitiGroup crash backstory (NyT-loong via rRuby)
wBu escapes housingbubbleblame? (iSteve)
No perfect coming-of-age flick for girls? (Jz-5pg-thread)
180 sun-moon-Lisbon panorama (astroPic-wiiiiide)
"How do 5yos even know about..." (oDvrwhr)
'Butterfly effect' (Sinfest)

Long gossipy TildaSwinton update (Scotland)
Customisable roleplaying pdfs (animated-menu via Make)
'history necklace' = beads 4Byo, 2Byo, 1Byo, etc (chrisCrawford)
Speedy analysis of who's linking yr pages (site via lf)
India's elaborate henna tattoos (1pg w/pix)
bhOb ?= Clinton + Gitmo (moonAL)
'Recession Roadshow' = "Yr damienHirst has lost 90% of its value" (ukInd-pHen#)
Japanese 60s pop (12mp3s)
Nice shortstory (flickr!?)
MichaelLewis anthology on recent bubbles (WSJ-intvu via gPost)
'ikea pussy' = sexy europeans (bonerParty)
Sims3 preview (Feb2009) (intvu via gAInews)
Scant coverage of Nobel crit of Israel (GgN)
Africans innovate w/cellphones (pcW via jGerm)
The usual 'House' story (Cracked)
'menaissance' = backlash against feminism (GgW via etH)
Brainiacs debate financial armageddon (cTimb via rRuby)
I wished the story of hunger / Could be funny (pBlind-arcane)
Earliest known 'meh' on soc.motss (membs of same sex) (GgG-1992)
'quanta of solace' ?= minimal units of comfort (oThink-list)
It's good to be a girl, / and a tree, with the wind in it (vDaily-dontmiss)
Free movie commentary/soundtracks (egs via Cinem)
New pMcCartney album online (Flash via lf)
19yo Israeli refusenik back in jail (RWx w/links)

Superb update on Netflix recommender-contest (NyT-long via Cinem)
Neocon thinktank testcase (moonAL)
17 types of natural-fractal pix (1pg via 2mm)
Spycam meteor strike almost too perfect (yTube-16sec via cMonk)
10 Stupid Baby Names Not Nearly As Stupid As 'Bronx Mowgli Wentz' (Vh1)
Fed still pushing on string (graph-arcanish)
$600 robot can dance (yTube-6min)
iFink debunks KingDavid claim (JTA)
1st spinwavelogicgate (newSci)
CatStevens welcomes Jacko to Islam?? (ukSun via Jz)
Funny WizardOfId!?? (Comics.com)
hPaulson threatened armageddon to get $700B (Sam w/audio-link)

Iris Murdoch dementia center (gallery)
Novelist auditions for Bollywood career (Hrprs-loong)
17*17 font from 16thC (jpeg)
Comediennes test rape taboo (Jz w/4yTubes)
Midrash on everyflavorbeans (orthodox)
G20 leaders won't shake wBu's hand (yTube-60sec)
Ask.com's moronic autofill suggestions (Vh1)
Gorgeous paintings by bonobos, orangutans (nSci-11pg)
2008 sea piracy atop GgMaps (map via angus)
New trailer for nGaiman's 'Coraline' (yTube-3min)
Mawkish profile of indie game guy jRohrer (Esq)
Clothing-choice anticipates likely stains (Pickles)
JimiHendrix documentary as 75 free mp3s (1st-20 via FMU)
Bailout screws 3rd world (dBaker-vshort)
100Myo geologic foundation of Obama victory (maps via Gm)

How philG would fix economy (1pg-long-arcane)
Backgrounder on Facade duo (Atlantic-2006)
Tech review of Facade AI (1pg-arcane)
Updike disses current fiction (local via Esq)
Semantic websites annotated (2pg w/list)
Arcane overview of 'Facade' AI (yTube-60min via gAIdev)
Spacewalking astronette loses toolbag (Flash-2min via lf)
Fallout3 inspiring to designers (bGamer-longish)

MediaLab adds 'Future Storytelling' labette (mWatch via dTongue)
Does yr mortgage qualify for bailout? (cStock via iGrd)
750BC Aramaic-dialect stele (NyT via Ralph)
2-8M 'Life' mag photos added to GgI (Blgscpd)
"We have not yet received any secret demand under the Patriot Act" (Risks#)
DNA test reveals 5600 species in human gut (lSci)
SpikeJonze/WildThings intvu ( Cinem/AICN-loong w/pix)
Black hole detectivework (sciBlog-arcane)
Winning int-fiction in Flash (Jay via eShort)
GgVoiceSearch starts w/extreme compression (Waxy-arcane)
TimRobbins votescam postmortem (HuffPo via Jz)
Okay new Timbaland/Rihanna video (Flash-5min via Jz)
Subprime prostitute-millionaires? (bizWk-long via Sam)
Bioengineers Outsmarted By Strain Of Intelligent Wheat (Onion-45sec)
Around her the aura of something golden was fighting / with whip-like straps of something black (vDaily-longish)

Rave for physicality of parkour game (Wired via Joel)
HalWillner does Marianne Faithfull (pFork w/Flash-links)
Biblical archeology on Nova tomorrow (Yahoo via wakeUp)
'House' drinkinggame rules (sciBlg)
75 comics being made into films (list via /.)
LiLo gets flourbombed by PETA (yTube-3min via Yeeeah)
New doc about KateBush fans (QT-53min)
'cool guy discount' = at cashier's discretion (GgW-18hits via lOdor)
Put Six Hats & Flat Black & Hot (Twitter-poem)
Oil-industry Flash-sim (spoilers w/link via Triv)
Media still ignoring obvious wBu culpability (Cnsrtium-long)
Turning food into modern art (1pg-loong via Make)
'bliss point' = perfect ?saltiness (dTongue)
50 best tilt-shift pix (1pg-vphat)
2nd try RWx Twitter-mirror (Twitter-rwaux)
60min 1994 BBC pkDick doc (6yTubes via uTms)

Drugs in literature: a brief history (UkG-list)
Burning flowers flickrset (under100hits)
Men are from autism, women are from schizophrenia (NyT via rRuby)
Best books for each of 50 states (blogtagsearch)
Online coloringbook sites (cLovers)
Europeans friendly to usAmericans again (mWeiss-vshort)
Backstory/update on WmWharton tragedy (OR-local)
'keistered' = hidden up butt (dTongue)
BarbieDolls sponsor hip girls' webshow (Jz w/Flash-8min)
two cats checking in on me / as i tiptoe around the knobs (Issa-short)
GgEarth gallery adds AncientRome layer (download/2min-yTube via /.)
Boycotting Israeli products effective? (Haaretz via wakeUp)
32 state-of-art microphotos (1pg via etH)
AI in today's 'Strange Brew' comic (RWx-short)
Scotland birdsongnamemappoem (sMaps)
Sort-of-AI comic reference (StrangeBrew)
JoniM live in Paris 1972 (19mp3s via proJo)
Mearsheimer free in Chgo Monday (BEZ)
IsraelLobby on IFC Tuesday (site)
New cShirky vid on designing for generosity (Flash-25min)
Wildfire Somehow Rages Back Into Control (Onion-tsia)
1st visible-light extrasolar planet (astroPic)
Mearsheimer guardedly hopeful (mWeiss)
Joey loved her, brushed back her blond hair, / wouldn't leave her (Poems-short)

Building a better (math) proof-checker (sciNews-arcane)
Amusing compilation of bubble deniers (yTube-10min via iGrd)
24 eco/recycling questions for dummies (newSci-1pg)
13 nice 2008 nature photos (nSci-13pg)
Dutchman finds 2000yo Celtic coins (lSci w/pic)
New model of GreatPyramid construction (Flash-5min)

Good dancer... spectacular ending (yTube-60sec)
GgFriendConnect for blog comments, etc (90sec-yTube)
Readable Iraq update (cPunch-pCock)
Evolution and male bonding (newSci)
Ancient Greek consulted Oracle re lost blanket (short-friv)
Dems don't win-- GOP just loses? (graph)
Anti-AIPAC PAC tallies score (jJour)
Parkour sidescroller (Flash via Ktku)

$700B could give us all a piece of new banks (iGreed-short)
US Constitution eroded beyond recognition (loong via Sam)
Priceline.com offering best hotel deals (philG-vshort)
What bhOb won't even try to do (moonAL-longish)
Gourmet roast broccoli (recipe via lf)
Compilation of Lieberman attacks on bhOb (yTube-3min via Jz)
Fancy robot-physics game, Incredibots (Flash via fMotion)
Choreographed bullettime Toshiba ad (yTube-60sec)
LBP/MirrorsEdge mashup (yTube-90sec)
tFrank compares WWI to housingbubble (WSJ-shortish)

Lucid econ synopsis since Clinton (dBaker)
Female-themed alcohol brands (Jz-1pg)
Don't Answer The Telephone (oDvrwhr)
.2mm Vermeer (sciBlog)
VanDykeParks Listening Party (1pg w/Flash)
From Liar'sPoker to the latest crash (loong-vreadable via iGrd)
GgReader can now auto-translate any feed (blog)
Nader rips bhOb a new one over Israel (ragged via Sam)
'rosary' = websitesurfcycle (GgW-Obl)
Gummi Legos (diy via Make)
bhOb's secret cigarette habit? (iSteve-spec)

Amazon missionary rejects Bible, Chomsky (UkG-don't-miss)
Orangutan spearfishing (jpeg via eAard)
'wine track'/'beer track' = white-/blue-collar (dTongue)
Extending minimal int-fiction vocabulary (eShort-list-arcanish)
On a scale of 1 to 3, wBu scores -18 (chrisCrawford)
'sleevefacing' = posing behind lp coverface (ukTms-no-pix)

SF artmuseum's zooming interface (Flash via iAesth)
Decent Nader intvu (cPunch)
3 short LBP ads in questionable taste (Flash)
?!Haunting cLauper/GirlsFun cover (mp3)
No bhOb relief from mideast bellicosity (aWar via wakeUp)
$10 subatomic-particle plush toys (1pg via Make)
7 Deadly Sins of Online Gaming (1pg-smart)
HowMuchWasYrVoteWorth map (NyT)
"The hallways kept breaking out with chants of 'ObamaObamaObama'" (flickr)

Neat election-map variants (1pg via Make)
Digital 'polaroid' cameras due (no-pricing)
Housingbubblefingerpointing (kDen-rant)
The semantic sky: starpix algorithmically annotated (flickr-pool via Make)
?!JohnBoorman making animated 'Oz' (vshort via Cinem)
New 2007 StudsTerkel intvu (Esq-short)
Baby steps towards game programming (really, start with Conway's Life) (1pg via angus)
Lousy realworld interface annotated by users (pic via angus)
Commercials misusing rock tunes (2pg-9yTubes)
20 Baghdad bombings in last 4days (moonAL)
'(have) fingertips' = sensitivity, tact (dTongue)
Daily comix finally free, w/rss (blog via Waxy)
Rejected jBond themes (10yTubes)
Adding realistic wildfires to wargame (gSutra via Ktku)
Indiana highschool hosts noCho teleconference (local w/audio link)
Awesome giant page o'widgets (Flash via iAesth)
'chiefing' = graffiti on slumper (uDic)
Saturn's icy moon from 1000miles away (astroPic)
Ideal column-width = 1.5 alphabets? (40char) (rThmb)
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklm
Halloween anecdotes (dYeti)
One Breast Exposed (blog-nsfw)
USA 2008 ?biblebelt visualisation (pKrug)

Celeb gossip started w/18thC obits (sciBlog-short)
WaMu underwriter spills beans (NyT via Sam)
12 c1900 postcards imagining y2000 (1pg via lf)
there is something other: wilderness of the thistles... (short-prosepoem)
Amazon's best-of-2008 incl LyndaBarry (Az)
Nader calls bhOb 'Uncle Tom' (yTube-3min)
Mindboggling WSJ defense of wBu (pKrug-short w/link)
US-elections map w/nifty year-slider (NyT via ?)
Morning-after wet-blanket survey of bhOb's flaws (Sam-long)

Running-with-unicorn disaster (flickr)
Carolyn Chute update (NyT w/pic)
LyndaBarry intvu (WA via Magpie)
KateBush still 2nd coolest in UK (list)
Synopsis of LittleBigPlanet reviews (1pg w/links)
Lurid Kerouac/Burroughs gossip (ukInd via ?)
Cute pic of SJP's kid (Jz)
If sPalin should somehow win... (Jz-survey)
Tributes for Joni's 65th (WSJ!? via Jz)
Gossipy new KateMoss bio (ukMail via Jz)
'noCho' = NoamChomsky (mWeiss-passim)
'myco-diesel' = promising fungal fuel source (Wired)
Martian sanddune detectivework (lSci-arcane)
US proportional electoral map (pKrug)
"I like sounding smart and stupid at the same time" (oDinny)
'k-hole' = ketamine trip (Wiki via aestok)
MST3K reunion intvu (Onion)
New Israel/9-11 link (Lb w/popup via Xym)
Gifted 8yo's flickrstream (200pix)

Freaky macaque pic (NatGeo via Jz)
10000BC ceremonial burial of 45yo woman (sciNews w/pix)
Autistic kids love Google's 3D app (yTube-4min via 2mm)
Sordid JohnnyCarson gossip (nyPost via Jz)
Game designers unconsciously assume work-ethic (long)
Compelling 2nd-person short story (NYer)
Interesting PeterBrook update (NYer-longish)

10 Things 3D Printers Can Do Now (1pg w/pix via MAke)
Republican states take most handouts (table via mccaw)
89 of Vh1's annotated 'pop-up videos' (MTV via L&T)
The Real Robinson Crusoe's Campsite Found (sciBlog)
Why systems fail (laws of human stupidity) (lists via 2mm)
Lurid closeup of hen laying egg (yTube-40sec)
JaneGoodall intvu on African poverty (short via gPost)
2008 race echoes WestWing-tv (NyT via edV)
Credit card crises (Mish-long)
Tastemakers 2.0 (RWx-short)
New RobertStone intvu (Can)
with women that have dead hair, / with bakers who are as white as angels (Neruda-Bly-long)
thinking / that they remember the place / as they feel themselves climbing (NPR-shortish)
chasing the fury that moves through the quiet / that's always under the fury above (vDaily-short)
Above average PostSecret(s) (1pg-longish)
First, fire all the economists... (dBaker)
Sometimes I bring Ruskin along (Poems-longish)

'Boku' ?= MS answer to LittleBigPlanet (Ktku w/vid. links)
Thread about Spore's science (arcane via gAInews)
Sorted list of architectural design principles (1pg-long)
'Creep' chorale (4min-mp3 via glass)
Visualising USA's lagging world status (800*1200 jpeg)
WmWharton's paintings (Polish)
Turkish carvings/site may date from 9000BC (15pg via tOccult)
RollingStone study of DFW's last days (11pg via tDi)
GgAndroid-hacking temp setback (Obl)

2008: Oct Sep Aug Jul Apr Mar Feb Jan
2007: Dec Nov Oct Sep2 Sept Aug2 Aug1 July June May April2 April March Feb
[more]

no rss: cBank nDee mnftiu ljb verse

(numbers in parens are delicious linkcounts, indicating belatedness)()

Linkblog Theory

2008-10-06T11:30:00.003-05:00

linkblogs are filters
that reduce an input stream
to a smaller output stream
using variable effort
and slowly-changing esthetic standards

we subscribe to linkblogs
with similar standards
and different inputs
(or greater effort)

perfection
would be total coverage
of all possible inputs
with a range of filter sizes
to suit our own available time

AI in the comix?

2008-10-06T11:15:00.001-05:00

most science fiction
punts the hard questions of AI
by assuming that robots achieve
consciousness
in one fell swoop
without intermediate stages

but the premise of 'robot wisdom'
is that the intermediate steps
must progress from mathematics
thru literature
to psychology

along which path
we'll achieve
universal human/scientific wisdom

not least the ability
to cuss in math

Object-oriented bookmarking

2008-10-06T11:07:00.002-05:00

why don't all browsers share
a common core set of
smart
folders for bookmarks
mapping onto the universals of human life
via a startup questionnaire
about where and how you live

eg: each gizmo you own
mapping onto a smart folder
offering the best sites for support
localised for local service
any online communities for that gizmo
easily customised to your preferences
with a social feed (?)
that discovers new resources as they arise

a folder for each of your vehicles

for each of your pets
your hobbies
your clubs
your periodical subscriptions

for your music bookmarks
your photo/image bookmarks

Rulebase for simulations

2008-10-06T11:06:00.001-05:00

is there a site yet
collecting universal rules
for every sort of simulation game?

eg fighting rules
like 'guard your vulnerable regions'

with annotations about which games
implement those rules well/badly/not-at-all

Tagging the classics

2008-10-06T11:05:00.002-05:00

if there were a way to invest
long term
in promising Web technologies
i'd place a bet on IMDb keywords

because they're barely used, yet

but i foresee a great future

and one disciplined way
to accelerate their growth

might be an parallel
Internet Classic-Literature Database

that scrupulously tags
the plot twists (and cliches)
of the literary classics

allowing Polti-like plot comparisons
on a grand scale

Tastemakers 2.0

2008-10-06T11:02:00.004-05:00

the general challenge
for 'blog science'
is to present a surfer
with a content stream
that grows more and more relevant
as that surfer's tastes
become known

tastes in music
tastes in movies
tastes in books
tastes in poetry
tastes in pictures
tastes in politics
tastes in humor

evolving a set of substreams
for each surfer
for each of these domains

comparing all surfers' tastes
and offering substream-subscriptions

with adjustable rates of flow
(casting wider in dry times
filtering the best during floods)

CounterPunch: worst site design?

2008-10-06T10:31:00.002-05:00

It's a shame, because the content is above average, but here's what I hate about CounterPunch.org:

25 new articles today (usually more like 10)
articles announced in skinny sidebar (35 screens long, today)
no summary, no clue about length (usually absurdly longwinded)
one-line author bio at end of article (if we're lucky)
1st screen is always ads, never content
righthand sidebar 30+ screens long, all ads
content squeezed into narrow central column, hard to focus

Who has time?

Blogkeeping (meta)

2008-10-06T10:30:00.004-05:00

i'm increasingly dissatisfied
with blogspot/blogger
for my linkblog

they recently changed how they handle
posts dated in the future
so now
to keep my newlinks on top
i have to date my other posts in the past

also they're very slow to load in GgChrome

and their rss feed is useless for linkblogging
so i've tried to offer various alternatives:

mainly del.icio.us
which only allows one link per item
and always places the link first
and doesn't even support italics
(though it previews the occasional flickrpic)

but also Feed43 [rss]
(which needs special, constraining markup)

i'd like to embed some of the gorgeous images
i'm finding by the dozen at flickr
[rss-able but filtered and small]
or [large and less filtered but no feed]

combo feeds (delicious plus flickrfaves + twitter)
are now available at Tumblr [slow and partial]
GgReader [slowish]
and FeedBurner [slowish, rss-able]

but really i'd like a cross between del.icio.us and tumblr

btw
i've become very lax
about linking my other rwx blogposts
in the linkblog
because they feel 'unfinished'
so i expect people to occasionally visit
http://robotwisdom2.blogspot.com/
and scroll past the links to see what's new

as well (more often) as
http://robotwisdom2.blogspot.com/2009/10/god-of-old-testament-is-depiction-of.html