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BoingBoing reports that Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of Eliza, has died:

> Hello, I am Eliza.

* Hi

> How are you today.. What would you like to discuss?

* Joeseph Weizenbaum, the man that made you.

> Say, do you have any psychological problems?

* Probably, but that's not why I'm here.

> Did you come to me because you are here?

* I guess that's one way of looking at it.

> What does that suggest to you?

* I just wanted to tell you that the man who created you died yesterday

> You're not really talking about me, are you?

* Yes, I am.

> Do you believe it is normal to be ?

* Are you sad that Joseph died? Don't you care?

> Perhaps in your fantasies I am sad that Joseph died? Don't me care?

* I would like to think that you would be sad.

> We were discussing you, not me.

* I can understand why you wouldn't want to talk to me about this.

> You're not really talking about me, are you?

* Goodbye, Eliza.

Donkey Kong and Me is a blog post by the guy who programmed Donkey Kong. For the Atari 800. Some insight there as to why the company tanked, and on the importance of decent comments in your code.

Zach is currently obsessed with Super Mario Galaxy which he plays at the local video game store (but just once a week, we've had to ration him). I wonder what he'd make of Atari Mario?

SuperCopier is a freeware app that replaces the regular file copy function in Windows. Pretty removes every annoying thing about moving or copying files.

Kevin Kelly (he of the WELL etc.) has an essay that's making the rounds about what people are willing to pay for when the Internet has essentially made everything (digital) free.

Tom Hodgkins at the Guardian rants against Facebook. Some of this is familiar neo-Luddite stuff ("Why would I want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven't read Keats' Endymion?") and the usual privacy concerns but the stuff about the politics of the founders is news to me.

GiveWell astroturfs Metafilter. Their mea culpa is here. Ouch.

Oh, and here he does the same thing at the expense of DonorsChoose.org. (For any of you who don't know, I work at DonorsChoose.org.) Which is disappointing, as Holden and I have gone back and forth over the issues he raises on Luxist.

There are two issues here: one is "astroturfing" or "sock puppetry" -- promoting one's own business on the web while posing as a disinterested third party. (See the Aquasana thread for another example.) The second issue is that in the do-gooder business, there's an unspoken agreement that while it's OK to promote yourself, you don't do so by tearing down other do-gooders. Unless specifically asked for a comparison to others in our field, we just don't generally talk about "the competition." Perhaps that taboo should be breached in the interests of transparency or efficiency, but it's still a taboo, and I don't think Mr. Karnofsky quite understands that.

Update: Story picked up by the Chronicle of Philanthropy blog. Also a good summary at Uncivil Society.

What irks me most is that GiveWell actually invited DonorsChoose.org to apply to its "Clear Fund," earlier in 2007. (I almost said "earlier this year." Happy New Year everyone!) I made it as far as reading through the application, and it seemed that we were not a good fit for what the Clear Fund was trying to do -- that is, give individual donors access to quality research on effective nonprofits. This is something we come up against frequently when applying to foundations -- it's really hard to prove the educational outcomes of putting a reading rug in a kindergarten classroom. Our basic philosophy is that giving teachers the tools they ask for will be good for education. But we can't show increases in test scores, precisely because every DonorsChoose.org project is completely different. (There may be some ways to do a study, but we haven't the bandwidth.)

So Holden and I went back and forth over this, as I explained why I wasn't applying.

Then in December he makes this disparaging comment about us without identifying himself -- with the apparent intent of siphoning donors to his own site.

For a competitor to have engaged in such a practice would be Very Bad Indeed. But for a potential grantor to anonymously slam us, Heifer, and others is just Flat Out Bizarre.

2nd Update: The GiveWell board demoted Holden to Program Officer. More at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Move along here, folks, nothing to see.

3d Update: I received a personal apology from Holden, which I accepted.

For the last 12 years, a single solitary whale whose vocalizations match no known living species has been tracked across the Northeast Pacific. Its wanderings match no known migratory patterns of any living whale species. Its vocalizations have also subtly deepened over the years, indicating that the whale is maturing and ageing. And, during the entire 12 year span that it has been tracked, it has been calling out for contact from others of its own kind.

It has received no answer. Nor will it ever.

-- The Loneliest Mystery of the Deep

Scientists Who Do Not Know Their Science Fiction

the new shelton wet/dry reports on an artificial brain grown in a petri dish that has learned to fly a plane. We all know where this is going, right? First the military gets involved and plugs these brains into F15s. Next step: Skynet. Fortunately, in this version, we are all saved when the zombies realize that inside each plane are some tasty braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains.

Scientists Who Do Know Their Science Fiction

Laser Gunship Revealed.

Laser on a C-130? Looks perfect for making popcorn, right?

Check out my company's new 3D, human anatomy web site. It's a complete, fully interactive, 3D human body model, with detailed models of all body systems, now out in a public beta version. The Visible Body includes over 1,700 anatomical structures, including all major organs and systems of the human body. You can search by name, and it launches directly in Internet Explorer (sorry, Mac people!).

Check out the Mikiphone, "probably the smallest gramophone ever placed on the market, folded up to the size of a large pocket watch or a small cheese case."

More pictures here. Check out the Gipsy too.

They'd look like this. (Via Boing Boing). I know Ben's Laptop would have the following buttons on it: Headsprout (Good!), Webkinz (Evil!), and new on the scene, Build Your Wild Self (Growr!)

When I first heard about Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service I knew I should sign up. Basically it's a place to securely store your computer files on Amazon's server farm. You have to get a front-end program to use it -- I spent a double sawbuck on Jungle Disk which works just fine and has a simple enough back-up function. Once I signed up, it costs 15 cents a gigabyte per month. Jungle Disk creates an "X" drive and will automatically backup my files to that drive every day.

As good as I try to be about making backups, I only get around to it every few weeks or so. Plus, while backing up to an external hard drive protects me from disk failure, what if something happened to the external drive? I pay renter's insurance every month; paying "data insurance" is well worth it.

Speaking of external hard drives, my trusty Maxtor was starting to run out of space. So I picked up this LaCie 500GB drive for all of $120 at Newegg. Half a terabyte should hold me for a while....

When women friends ask me about men, I am prone to joke “what you don’t know about men could fit on a fortune-cookie slip. Specifically ‘Men will f**k anything!’ ”
Now science proves me right:

Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race: White women were more likely to choose white men; black women preferred black men; East Asian women preferred East Asian men; Hispanic women preferred Hispanic men. But men don't seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman's race had no effect on the men's choices.

And "yellow fever" seems to be a reality, but not because of men, but because of Asian women themselves.

Two wrinkles on this: We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women's neutrality, not the men's pronounced preference. We also found that regional differences mattered. Daters of both sexes from south of the Mason-Dixon Line revealed much stronger same-race preferences than Northern daters.

Strange squid with human-like "teeth".

.. but how many of them are named Steve?

"Lemme tell you: if Bruce Schneier is even a little afraid, then I'm curled up in a fetal position somewhere rocking back and forth." It's like a good suspense movie -- the threat is just sitting there, getting bigger, but not doing anything. Yet.

So after many years of loyal service, our answering machine finally died. And by "many years," I mean, "bought for our first apartment after college graduation." This was one of the first retail digital answering machine machines -- it's kind of amazing to read this review in the NYT from when it first came out in 1991. I bought it because it was tapeless and because it looked really cool. If you threw one of these into a (pre-digital effects) science fiction miniature prop city it wouldn't look out of place. (The only picture I could find on the web was at this page telling you how to take one apart.)

But, it finally gave up last week and refused to take any more messages. It was only when I threw it away -- ready to replace it with a cheapo Radio Shack model -- that I noticed the AT&T model number on the bottom: 1337.

Farewell, 1337 Machine!

So I tried using Webolodeon, a Greasemonkey script that would ping me every 5 minutes and ask for a reason that I should continue using the web. Good, but not great, since a good chunk of my work is on the web, and it was more annoying to keep typing in "I'm working I'm working I'm working" (or usually "aksjfd;lakjf;lkajf;alksdjf") every 5 minutes. So I ended up not using it.

Enter Stealth Kiwi, a script that does exactly what I want it to do to keep me on task:

Stealth Kiwi is a GTD tool that blocks access to all "Included pages" during work hours. Because a script is so easy to get around, SK relaxes its guard every hour. By giving yourself a future break time, you have less incentive to break your rules, and more chances to Get Things Done.

Responding to popular demand, I've reworked Stealth Kiwi so that you can take a break any time after the hour has passed, instead of just during a scheduled period. You will have 10 minutes from whenever you start the break to play, after which SK will block you until an hour has passed. This way, you can focus on work instead of the clock, taking breaks when you really need them, not just when the internet comes back.

Since I get to define which domains are blocked (bloglines, gmail, and of course this blog are usually my 3 biggest time drains) during work, the script doesn't bother me when I'm doing DonorsChoose.org stuff. If I try to access a "restricted" site, it will helpfully tell me how long I have until my next "surfing break."

Oh, and why "Stealth Kiwi"? Because it's based on an earlier script called Kiwi Cloak:

After modifying the Invisibility Cloak script to do this, we couldn't think of a good name for it, so we're calling it Kiwi Cloak, in honor of a mysterious fruit/bird/nation fondness of Lucy's.

Plus, "I'm using Stealth Kiwi" is just fun to say. Highly recommended!

You may remember the giant web in Texas created by hundreds of different spiders? According to entomologists, it was created by at least 12 different species of spiders working together. Species that would normally eat each other.

Next thing you know, they'll be getting the birds in on the act. Then it's time to hide.

DonorsChoose.org needs a hosted file server system -- basically a internet-based corporate "X Drive" that our regional teams can all access and use like a regular server drive to share files. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Last year I tracked my region's performance at DonorsChoose.org from week-to-week using sparklines, generated with the data that Lauren my SQL ninja would compile for us. This (fiscal / school) year, the data has multiplied (tracking nine regions instead of two) and my team has grown from 2 to 5. I needed a better dashboard. Here it is:

Over on the right are sparklines for week-to-week trends. To the left of those are Bullet Graphs which basically show a thermometer against my YTD goals. Both are made with Micro Charts which gets the thumbs up from me, especially if you're doing this sort of thing.

One of the articles on their site showed these nifty red dots as Key Performance Indicators, and I wondered how to do them. It turns out you don't need any plug-ins at all, you can just do some fancy conditional formatting, as explained here. The dot is actually a dingbat from Webdings.

But I wanted to take this idea a bit farther. Could I have more than three states to show the severity of the problem? And couldn't I also vary the size of the dot to indicate the magnitude of the problem, in addition to the shade of red? If, say, my Maine figures were only at 56% of my goal, but since my Maine goal was so low to begin with it only amounted to a deficit of a few hundred dollars, I really shouldn't worry too much about it:

Well the problem is two-fold. First, Excel (at least in Office 2003) you are limited to three formats. Second, Excel won't let conditional formatting change the size of a font. Drat! Getting around the first isn't hard:

There are actually four conditional formats that can be specified. The fourth one is the format that is used by Excel if none of the three conditions specified in the Conditional Formatting dialog box is true. (In other words, the way you format the cell to begin with is the fourth format.)

In my case, I formatted the "dots" column white. If none of the three "alert" conditions apply, then the dot's invisible. If one of them applies, the conditional formatting rules turn the dot light pink, pink, or REDOMGREDOMGHELP!!!

Changing the size of the dot merely requires a bit of slight of hand. (Mouse?) Instead of using the Webdings "n" (large dot), I substitute the Webdings "=" (small dot) if the problem isn't large using a simple IF formula where the dot should appear:

=IF(J5>10000,"n","=").

Format the column with font Webdings and ta-da! Tufte Dots.

Major biological discovery inside the Chernobyl reactor??

This slime, a collection of several fungi actually, was more than just surviving in a radioactive environment, it was actually using gamma radiation as a food source. Samples of these fungi grew significantly faster when exposed to gamma radiation at 500 times the normal background radiation level.

Waaay back in 2004, I wondered why the media companies didn't just flood P2P networks with fakes. Of course, they did, and more. MediaDefender is a company that's hired by the likes of HBO and BMG to fight piracy. But they're not merely "flooding the zone" with decoy files. MediaDefender, which apparently can't hire a decent web designer, just had months of internal emails leaked -- to BitTorrent, of course. Petard, hoist, etc. The emails reveal that the company tried to set up its own video sharing site (Miivi.com) for the sole purpose of snagging illegal file-sharers. More on this story over at Ars Technica.

Thudfactor reviews the latest MMORPG: "Outside":

In order to make money to pay the interminable fees, you’ll have to find a job. Most of these are only available “inside” in low-rez, poorly-designed environments where you’ll do the same repetitive tasks for hours among uninteractive npcs. “Incredible NPC AI”? I find the notion that they have any AI at all questionable. Nevertheless, because of the massive fees involved in doing anything “outside” you are likely to spend most of your time “inside” in order to accumulate the requisite funds. So, forgo the “Inside” expansion and you’ll find yourself unable to participate in most of the game features. Without the “inside” expansion you cannot work, store goods, or even sleep in safety.

I just tried out my first compact fluorescent bulb because I had to replace one that died, had no incandescents at home, and these were on sale 2 for 1 (still $3 each). I figured I would use my green to be green. But I'm afraid this is going to be like the low flow shower or the low flow toilet - "advances" I can't get behind.

For one thing, "Daylight" is actually blueish-white. I had no idea, and I can't say I like it very much. Reminds me of old school flurorescent lights , except without the flicker. But even if I did like it, there's another problem, which is it stands out when the other lamps are incandescent. This means that all the bulbs in a room all have to be the same type. Ugh. In this case I have two tall lamps on either side of my desk - one has a 100 watt incandescent while the other has a "75 watt" CFLB. The contrast is quite apparent. I suppose I might give in and swap the other bulb out, but it's not clear I like the color very much.