The roiling media-orgy surrounding Barack Obama’s pastor, Reverend Wright, will ultimately yield great benefit to Mr. Obama’s campaign. Why?
The controversy draws significant attention to the fact that Senator Obama is Christian. Some of the less scrupulous portions of American society have been trying to put the notion that Obama practices Islam into the heads of [...]
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Posted in Art, Meta, tagged Art, flickr, procedural on March 30, 2008 | 1 Comment »
… and I started a flickr account to host my sundry meager attempts at art.
Vain, I know. Practical? Probably.
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Posted in Business, Computing, Quantification, tagged Quantification, Maps, Geography, mapping, weather, autos, meteorology, driving, cars, estimation, mashup on March 28, 2008 | No Comments »
The weather affects how long it takes to travel from one place to the next, but I’m not aware of any mapping application that incorporates this fact. From what I can tell from a brief overview, the standard mapping applications seem to rely on relatively static estimations of expected speed limits and traffic for a [...]
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Posted in Art, Computing, Musing, Quantification, tagged Art, Innovation, Visualization, failure, brainstorm, graphing, knots, thought, problem solving, ideas on March 27, 2008 | No Comments »
It would be pretty interesting to visualize brainstorming sessions or problem-solving attempts that don’t quite get the job done.
There’s something oddly tragic and beautiful about the notion of a brain rustling around an issue, prodding it from many angles, and occasionally rebounding with an ache and a “THWRANG” after a head-long charge. If these thoughts [...]
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Anarchist.
“Better a ghost of a revolution than an elder of an empire.”
Fascist.
“Better a soldier in restricting armor than a barbarian in the finest of furs.”
Socialist.
“Better an overbearing father than an absent mother.”
Capitalist.
“Better an open range herd than a farm-fattened few.”
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They say that history is written by the victors. Furthermore, I’d like to add that in the business world, history ends up being written primarily about the victors. For every 10 new books about Google coming out, you’d be hard pressed to find a single memorial to Altavista. To me, this seems to be a [...]
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Posted in Art, Silly, tagged band, band names, Comedy, funny, humor, Music, names, Silly on March 24, 2008 | No Comments »
Sadly cliche, but irresistible. Fictional band names! Rock away.
Malassezia furfur
Uppercut Sunday
Fifth Fraction From Fibonacci
The Complex Conjugates
Evidence of Oreos
The Vile Vials
Doctor Bunsen and the Backroom Burners
Whifff!
Spawn Moore and the Overlords
Stars Seen Behind Your Eyelids
This is way too fun.
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Posted in Computing, Quantification, Science-ish, tagged classes, college, courses, Math, models, reviews, school, statistics on March 23, 2008 | No Comments »
A fair portion of schools have taken the effort to mandate/encourage course evaluations, most often submitted by students at the end of a given term. I’m aware that these reviews are used to help professors brush up on the places where they didn’t do so well, and also to given administrators some means of weeding [...]
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Posted in Art, Silly, Society & Politics, tagged Literature, Art, allegory, parable, story, disgusting, drunk, neo-aesopian, question on March 23, 2008 | No Comments »
There’s a bathroom at a party. It’s not very clean, not totally filthy, but has some toilets, a few sinks, and a big trash bin.
A rich man stumbles into the bathroom, drunk and about to vomit. He goes over to a sink and lets loose. The sink is too shallow to catch the vomit gracefully [...]
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Posted in Computing, General, Science-ish, tagged humor, jokes, artificial intelligence, AI, Turing, machine, intelligence, Turing Test on March 20, 2008 | No Comments »
As an adolescent, I invented a silly landmark for myself. I would only consider myself proficient in a language if I could “get” a joke in that language which had no straightforward translation into my primary language.
Hardly a scientific milestone, but it seemed to make sense back then, since “getting” a joke requires at least [...]
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Posted in Art, Computing, Musing, tagged Art, creative, fMRI, MRI, Music, software, Video, Visualization on March 20, 2008 | No Comments »
The challenge is to condense the multi-format feedback loop that exists between various artists into a single experience. I have two possible solutions, one reasonable, one far-out.
The reasonable idea is pretty straightforward and uses a combination of readily available hardware and relatively straightforward software.
We start with a song, playing on a computer. Maybe it’s something [...]
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Perhaps a weapon style to be used in some martial arts flick, perhaps just the fevered product of a dream of ninjas.
Chain-like weapons are interesting for their ability to provide the user extended reach, high speeds of impact, and entanglement of opponents. However, successful entanglement can require continued exertion from the wielder, as they must [...]
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Posted in Art, Computing, Musing, tagged Art, audio, drama, feedback, Music, painting, poem, sculpture, technology on March 17, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Great works of art often inspire further masterpieces, though not necessarily in the same medium as the original.
A musician sees a beautiful painting and composes a song that tells the same story. An abstract artist listens to a masterful concerto and incorporates representations of the music into her next sculpture. A playwright observes both [...]
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Using feeds for web-aggregation is handy, but over time, my news feed aggregator tends to fill up with stuff that I barely ever read. Sure, I’ll skim the title for just about anything that shows up, but at some point even the skimming takes up a considerable chunk of time.
To reduce clutter right now, I [...]
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Posted in Business, Computing, Quantification, Society & Politics, tagged Business, citizen, democracy, law, legal, Money, parse, Semantic Web, transparency on March 14, 2008 | No Comments »
Combing through legal documents can be a pain. General business contracts, policy documents, laws, you name it, they’re a pain. Lawyers in the crowd, you should rightly feel good about your skill with these arcane tools of modern society.
I’d like to make a simple system for speed-anotating legal documents to highlight the key points for [...]
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