I was on the subway yesterday when I overheard two young women talking about the "Illuminati." My ears pricked up. Generally the people who are talking about the Illuminati fall into three categories: Robert Anton Wilson fans; conspiracy theorists; and conspiracy theorists who take Robert Anton Wilson seriously. Which category would they fall into? A few minutes later, though, I overheard the phrase "Angels & Demons" -- I won't link to the book, it was even worse than the DaVinci Code. Damn you, Dan Brown, for ruining my categorization scheme!
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| Dan Brown | Illuminati | New York City | Overheard | Robert Anton Wilson | Science Fiction | Subway
While searching for the name of Hofstadter's law ("It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law"), I ran across this article on legal self-reference and Stigler's law of eponymy ("No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer"), which is self-referential since Stigler didn't discover it. Makes me want to go read some Douglas Hofstadter. Ahh, full circle.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Law | Self-Reference
Like a bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap that weighs 240,000 pounds. See also the New York Times Millennium Time Capsule, the nuclear waste signs at Yucca Mountain, and the Rosetta Project for how to communicate with the future.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Land of the Lost | Language | Strange
Again, torture (and its efficacy) is in the news, which reminds me that I've been meaning to repost
Suggestions for Japanese Interpreters Based on Work in the Field by Major Sherwood Moran, a Japanese interpreter / interrogator during WWII. (The original link died, but Moran's grandson sent an updated PDF my way.) Previously linked to here.
| Military | Torture | WWII
If you know what it stands for, then you know to put it on your calendar.
Recently, Debbie and I took the kids on the "old house" tour of the Main Line, to show the boys where we grew up. First stop on the tour was my old house on Summit Grove Avenue in Bryn Mawr.
It wasn't there.
There was just a parking lot where my old house had been. Which was worse, in a way, than if someone had torn it down to build a new house. Or an office. Or, well, anything.
So I can understand how many must be feeling on hearing the news that GeoCities is shutting down, after all these years. (Since 1995!). Like so many websites, Ishbadiddle got its start on GeoCities -- you can still check out the old site while you get the chance.
I used to say that blogging was what really democratized the web. First there was desktop publishing, which was going to make it possible for anyone to create professional-looking media. But there was no distribution for citizen media, and unless your zine was in Factsheet 5 no one other than your friends would ever read it. The web was supposed to solve the distribution problem, but changing a site was even harder than desktop publishing -- meaning that most people just had a never-updated GeoCities page with pictures of their cats. Blogging changed that.
I suppose with the new social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) we're back to the distribution question -- how do you get people to read what you say?
So good-bye, GeoCities, and thanks for giving Ishbadiddle its start. Sorry you're going to become a parking lot. Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?
posted this | this entry's link | 2 comments | Social Networking | Social Software
I found XXCOPY a ways back when I was looking for a tool to "flatten" a directory (i.e., take all the files out of subfolders and put them all into one big folder). I'd been meaning to point to it, but forgot until this Gadgetopia post reminded me. It's a Really Useful Tool, if you don't mind going old-school command line, with a gazillion options to do anything you'd probably want to do when moving and/or copying files. Also recommended for day-to-day use: SuperCopier2, which replaces Windows native copy function. SC2 lets you choose options like "overwrite all" and will actually tell you if you don't have enough room to copy a batch of files. Things that the OS should do automatically, but somehow doesn't.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Freeware | Really Useful Tools
Lehman Sits on Bomb of Uranium Cake as Prices Slump. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. is sitting on enough uranium cake to make a nuclear bomb as it waits for prices of the commodity to rebound, according to traders and nuclear experts.
Now if GM starts buying centrifuges, we know we're all in trouble.
posted this | this entry's link | 2 comments | Lehman Brothers | Nuclear Weapons | Wall Street | Yellowcake
| Musicals | Public Art
happy 5th birthday, subservient chicken (via MeFi:
We needed to make less than 400 video clips seem like millions through sleight of hand and clever ambiguousness. I came up with some Actionscript, inspired by a program I had written when i was like 10 on my Commodore 64, which was in turn Inspired by the movie War Games. Replaced "How about a nice game of Chess?" with "Have it your way," and we were off to the races.There were two things about this that made it really exciting for me. First was that I had not just done simple keyword matching, where you would get all the results that matched a given word. I devised a system for matching phrases, words and fragments. Then the script would give a score for each possible video clip based on those phrases, and serve the highest scoring video. Second was that we decided to have everyone in the company participate in adding words and phrases to the data set. The catch was, that only a few people in the company knew what any video clip was supposed to be. So, we had people describing clips not based on what was shot, but what they perceived to be the shot. (The former psychology student in me LOVED this methodology). It made all the difference. Stuff we never thought about when making the shot-list magically seemed more descriptive of the video clips than the original.
Hard to believe that was five years ago. Blogdex. Remember Blogdex?
| Chickens | Fast Food | Memes | Viral Advertising
| Mashups | Science Fiction
Cynical-C is running a series called You Can't Please Everyone featuring the one-star Amazon reviews of classic works. So far they've done Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22, Casablanca, To Kill A Mockingbird, 1984, Zeppelin IV, Schindler's List, Pulp Fiction, and Sgt. Pepper. I think my favorite so far is this review of Are You Experienced :
Are you kidding me. Did Avril Lavigne ever use distortion in her songs? Or how about those wierd sound effect things? Mmhhm, that's whqat I thought. Keeping that in mind, how could anyone in their right mind say that this Hendrix guy is good. You lozerz obviously now nothing about muzik. Some idiots are calling him the best guitar player ever....? HELLO??? That's like saying MTV doesn't play good muzik!!! If you want good guitar, try Avril Lavigne, or, the masters of Metal, Limp Bizkit.
Does MTV even play music any more?
| Reviews
| Comics | Jack Kirby | Kirby | What If
