The quote goes, “History is written by the victor.”
A stirring insight into the reality that, historically, those who wield power are best able to propagate their accounts and perspectives on the world. After all, in the historical case of warring proto-states, it’s tough to imagine the losers scribing a grand narrative from the grave or [...]
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Powerful data visualizations are like masterful paintings– through art and insight, they intimate broad ideas and usher in understanding.
I, however, am neither a master painter nor an expert data visualizer. Neither are many of my contemporaries in the “technically skilled and socially aware” demographic. Still, I believe that even mediocre pieces of art or analysis [...]
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Certain elements in cinema tend to occur in clusters. I’m talking about groups of tropes that stick together and recur in different films with only minor alterations. Stereotypical characters, repetitive martial arts attack patterns, overwraught exclamations and pithy wisecracks. The big, quiet, intimidating guy who turns out to be clever/nice in the end, the post-slash [...]
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Proto-lewd punnery and double-entendre overheard at a party:
The difference between a straight man and a gay man is a six pack…
Followed by:
Makes sense. He’s more beer-curious than bi-curious.
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For those outside the know, lifestreaming is the phenomenon of more or less continuous recording and transmission of observations about one’s life. It’s the log of a perpetual twitterer, the live webcam someone wears on their hat, the flickr account of a geotagged-mobile-phone-camera-addict.
The side of lifestreaming everyone talks about is the fact that you get [...]
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If there is such a thing as a universal truism, is there a way to communicate it universally?
Some working definitions to guide the thought process:
Truism
A bit of wisdom about life. More specifically, wisdom that can be practically applied.
Universal
Applicable and understandable at some point in any given person’s life, regardless of cultural circumstances. Caveats added for [...]
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A hearty congratulations to the forward-minded people at the Sunlight Foundation for their most recent effort, a highly-comment-able version of the Transparency in Government Act of 2008.
While one certainly can’t expect all legislation to become this accessible in a heartbeat (especially those with even more arcane references to older bills), the very act of crying [...]
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Posted in Musing, Society & Politics, tagged algebra, automata, Education, engaging, high school, junior high, Math, regular expressions, secondary, teachers, teaching on April 2, 2008 | No Comments »
Perhaps an enterprising secondary school math teacher could lead the charge by introducing regular expressions in Algebra class.
Regular expressions are algebraic, useful for logical theory and, eventually, handy for programming manipulations with real language. I posit that introducing students to regular expressions at the same time that they’re learning the axioms of algebra would be [...]
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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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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, 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 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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A lot of politicians like to claim the title of “maverick” — implying that they are someone who is willing to step outside the bounds of business-as-usual politics to accomplish things according to their own principles. Self-marketing and image manipulation aside, there ought to be a way to test such a claim. I [...]
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Would it be possible to get a pseudo-randomly generated patent application through the U.S. Patent System? How about a bunch of patents with the same parameters, but different random seeds? I’m sure that the success of such an experiment would depend closely on the initial parameters chosen.
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