A Formal Joke

Knock knock. Who is there?
I say "Hike" you say "Hike who?"
Haiku knock knock joke.

The Roots of Remix Culture

What are the roots of the remix culture?  You can ask Lawrence Lessig or you can ask your kid.  This year's inductees to the National Toy Hall of Fame were Candyland, the Jack-in-the-Box, and... The Cardboard Box. It's the ultimate open system.

Link

Mars Volta had a Dream Machine

Back when I was learning 3D animation in about 1994, I found a description of a "dream machine", a device that comprised a cylinder with holes cut in a pattern, placed on a turntable, with a lightbulb hanging in it. You were supposed to stare at it until you started dreaming. So I used Strata and Quicktime and made one. I never saw one until I went to a Mars Volta concert this summer, and they fired up a genuine dream machine.

Bike Safety

Based purely on observation, I concluded it must be against the law for bicycle riders to stop at stop signs, and it must be against the law for them to have lights at night. Imagine my surprise when I found out the exact opposite is true!

There are consequences of ignoring science

RFK Jr makes the connection between right-wing policy and natural consequences. I'm so glad that these things are being discussed, and that someone with such a recognizable name can represent this point of view at this time. It took some courage to spend this political capital at this time in this way.

Waterfall discovered

It's California... everyone everywhere. Google Maps in everyones's backyard. And then a news story of... oh a 400 foot waterfall in California nobody has ever seen. I'm thrilled. I'm so stoked. Looky here.

Harps Etc

Struck me as funny. I thought harps were etc.

Note to the music industry

Thank goodness there are people out there who have the time to articulate my sentiments exactly. Glen nMcDonald's note to the music industry about what turns a legimitate purchaser of music into a "thief" nails it point after point. Can you grab the RIAA by the collar, give them a shaking and make them read this? Would they get it?

Googe Maps: Plane over Walnut Creek

It's fun to catch the extraneous images in Google Maps, like the plane flying over the Buena Vista School in Walnut Creek.

Just Wondering - WW*D?

Here's an oldy google question from the circa 4 years ago Clear Night Sky:

WW*D?

Chronicle Obit - Thomas S. Adams

I'm glad the Chronicle of today reaches for the level of the Chronicle of my youth. Highlights from today's obit "Thomas S. Adams -- Descendant of presidents":

Thomas S. Adams... who thrived on good fellowship and the three-martini lunch, died Monday... He was 75.

He was... an elegantly dressed businessman who knew everybody and was as hearty as his drink of preference.

"Damn it," he would roar... "I'm related to John f--ing Quincy Adams."

After a few drinks... one could count on a hilarious soliloquy from Mr. Adams.

"Tommy was a simple guy," said his wife...

Time Traveler Convention at MIT

Of course, it's the first and only convention, because technically, you would only need one time traveler convention.
Link

SF AM radio station to go all podcast

I saw this in the Chron today: KYCY AM is switching over from talk radio to podcast. I'm not sure what to think about this reverse commute. Part of the appeal of podcasting is the personal choice subscription model where I control the content, so will this just be a commercialized radio version of public access TV? Could there something like Comcast's On Demand or TiVo's Season Pass? Like a combination of Sirius and Streamium? What I'd really like is an iPodder appliance for my dashboard so my "radio" streams my subscriptions directly via satellite so that I don't have to sync my iPod at a computer and then hook it into my car to listen.

That, and I'm going to miss Imus in the Morning. Unless, of course, I can start getting it on my iPod.

Habemus papam

On highway 580 in Richmond, California, this morning, the smoke was definitely white.

So tell me this: I remember in the papal elections 26 years ago that there was confusion - is the smoke white? Is it black? Geez, I don't know. It looks kind of gray.

The Vatican, worth trillions, had 26 years to put the best and brightest on a simple task: make the white smoke look really white, make the black smoke look really black. Disney can set off fireworks that look like Mickey Mouse. It's 2005, make the smoke work. Today it was: Is it black, is it white. It's sort of gray...

Hey, if they can crank it out at a factory in Berkeley, they can do it in Rome!
Link

The Green Hills of .... Nevada?

East of Boulder City,
originally uploaded by srnelson.

It's been really green in the desert this spring. Here's a view looking east of Boulder City on March 7.

BBDO Releases Report: Cell Phones and Coitus Interruptus

Why?

Anyway, how can there be an article about this that doesn't mention the example that everybody actually saw.

Googlism of the day

My greatest fear.

Two del.icio.us bookmarklets - look up tag and popular entries from selection

Here are two bookmarklets that help you look up things on del.icio.us:

tag?

popular?

Drag these links to your toolbar, then when you highlight a word on a page you're browsing and click on the bookmarklet, you'll get the del.icio.us page of links tagged using that word (tag?) or the del.icio.us page of popular links (lots of links added recently) using that word as a tag. Try it: highlight (select) this word: design and see the del.icio.us entries for the word "design".

Thanks to Aaron Straup Cope for the base code I yoinked for this.

Blogs and feeds are the Internet's sensory system. That's what's so important.

By now, it seems to be way too self-referential and self-indulgent to ask "why are blogs important" but I've been thinking about it in a different way, and I thought I would share it.

The Internet-connected world is a big-ass system that comprises both the real world and the exploding information space that describes that world. Biological organisms (e.g. we) evolved sensory organs, sensory systems, an integrating nervous system, and some level of integrative consciousness to monitor and grok our environment so that we could make choices, initially about how to survive, and ultimately do more. Eyes converted light into nerve impulses. Brains filtered and integrated those signals (e.g. binocular vision) to extract higher-level information. Consciousness learned when not to be fooled by the information. It took millions of years of evolution to arrive at these systems.

Social systems evolved sensory systems to monitor and grok the environment to the advantage of the group. A sentry guarded the village so that everybody else could get a good night's sleep, systems of communication and trust evolved. It took thousands of years of social evolution to arrive at these sensory systems.

Technology emerged as the environment got more complex. Radar guards the coast so that everybody gets a good night sleep. It took hundreds of years to develop these technical sensory systems, with remarkable acceleration in recent decades.

Enter the Internet, with Google's 8,058,044,651 pages and counting. Have you seen them all? What is the sensory system of the Internet? It's evolving, and that evolution has happened over the last several years, with equally remarkable acceleration in recent months.

Millions of years, thousands of years, hundreds of years, decades, years, months.

I think blogs are a key part of this new sensory system, and the infrastructure such as RSS, tags, search, etc. integrate this sensory system into information to guide specific action. Simple example: I need to buy a new car. I can't possibly process all the information now available to best make that choice. Expert automotive bloggers attend to that part of the environment; they sense, report, aggregate, feed. I process and integrate that feed with others, and my decision is better informed. Multiply that by all the other areas where specialized sensing and feeding, in the form of blogs and feeds, result in better informed action. Attention is paid to these sensory systems, so they are reinforced, and so they emerge and evolve. Rapidly. That's their role and that's why they're important.

SpellWeb adds Yahoo! votes

SpellWeb went from scraping all the search engines I could scrape down to the one that gave me a true API to its results: Google. Several weeks ago, I added Alexa results, and now that Yahoo! has opened up their APIs to developers, it was a simple matter to add Yahoo! search results as well, so check it out.

The Yahoo! APIs, use the simple REST web service interface, so the call to Yahoo! is based on an http request with parameters, and parsing the XML file that's returned. For SpellWeb, I'm using a Perl script that uses LWP to make the call and XPATH to read the results.

Link

Random numbers less random around world events?

This one intrigues me: a study shows that random number generators become less random around major global events (9/11, Tsunami). Its one of those statistical correlations that's hard to explain or refute, though it harkens back to mundane explanations for remote viewing experiments, the Bible Code, Father Ernetti's Chronovisor and Asimov's psychohistory.

via Minding the Planet

OrganicHTML Grows Your Site... Or Something

Those of you into black boxes, check out OrganicHTML, which, uh...

Color Picker based on Flickr Tags

It's February 2005, and Greg Minshall might say if you want to get rid of your cat, name it "Tags".

But Krazydad's "Colr Pickr" is an especially creative use of tagged data, building a color picker out of Flickr-tagged images based on average color value. I'm not sure if Flickr feeds the color value automatically, or whether Krazydad has done a pre-scan, but if I find out I'll edit the post.

I first did a color picker many years ago when JavaScript first came out (It was called LiveScript before Netscape did the industry a disservice by renaming it JavaScript and confusing a generation of sales people who sold Java services as JavaScript and vice versa.)