The New York Times has a nice infographic for election results. John Gruber also points to the “programming as journalism” connection.
Category: tech
“A future society will very likely have the technological ability and the motivation to create large numbers of completely realistic historical simulations and be able to overcome any ethical and legal obstacles to doing so. It is thus highly probable that we are a form of artificial intelligence inhabiting one of these simulations. To avoid stacking (i.e. simulations within simulations), the termination of these simulations is likely to be the point in history when the technology to create them first became widely available, (estimated to be 2050). Long range planning beyond this date would therefore be futile.” [via mises]
Phew. I’m glad to see this message again. I had done some tweaking in the background and made a grand mess of things. I swear, sometimes this stuff makes me feel like an ape in a chem lab. But I’m learning.
TEDTalks are weekly presentations by “trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses.” Among the talks already posted are those from Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Tony Robbins, Eve Ensler, and many more… [via nb]
You probably have a certain special someone in your life that just looooooves to forward crap to your e-mail account. Let them know that FWDitOn is a Digg-like service where all those forwarded e-mails can go to be truly appreciated.
Some interesting thoughts on blog readability. Paul Bausch crunched the readability of the most popular blogs using the Gunning and Flesch-Kincaid measures: “My prediction that the most popular blogs would have very good readability scores didn’t quite hold up. I can’t pinpoint a “sweet spot”, but maybe blog readers enjoy more densely layered text. (Think Time instead of Newsweek, but not quite Harvard Law Review.)” A text file of the results is available for your perusal.
Apple is sponsoring the Insomnia Film Festival for students. The goal is a 3-minute film in 24 hours. I always had a good time with the very similar Campus MovieFest, which operates on the 5-minute, 7-day rule. Factor in some healthy procrastination, and the two festivals are about even. Most CMF movies didn’t really get serious until the last 40 hours or so anyway. Might as well be realistic about it.
National security employees have been using a wiki to share and update information. I think it’s notable that that they describe it as not just a pure issue of organizational communication, it also involves generational work trends. There’s a need to pass along old wisdom and adjust to the competencies of a younger workforce:
Not all U.S. intelligence analysts have embraced the new tool, but many younger analysts have, said Michael Wertheimer, DNI’s deputy director of analysis and chief technology officer. Half of all U.S. intelligence analysts have one to five years of experience, he noted. “This is how they do their work,” he said. “This is how they like to work.”
The Americans with Disabilities Act could apply to access to websites. Uh-oh. As if net neutrality and copyrights weren’t enough to worry about. [via findability]
If only everyone knew about research beyond Google. I love the Google but it ain’t always the easiest. One bright and shining day we won’t need to know all these hundreds of unique resources. In the meanwhile, Peter Morville suggests some intrepid soul create a Google Custom Search.
Thank you thank you. I love this stuff. The latest in Rebecca Blood’s Bloggers on Blogging series, an interview with Scott Rosenberg.
Some of the best Lifehacker articles and comments have been freshly collected, edited, and soon available in paperback.
NaBloPoMo is the new NaNoWriMo
I’ll admit that I’ve gotten a bit intimidated by National Novel Writing Month as the start date approaches. Enter my new, slightly less imposing challenge: National Blog Posting Month, where the goal is to write at least a post a day, every day, for one month. I can do that. And there are potential prizes, too! Shweeeeet.
This is exactly the sort of thing where Wikipedia dominates: a fresh, current article on internet phenomena and a list of internet memes. Take that, Britannica!
Photos of computer monitors that look transparent. Windows, indeed. The technique is to photograph what’s behind the monitor and set it as the background on your desktop. There’s also ghost-in-the-machine versions and x-ray monitors.
Some lucid comments at 43 Folders and at Lifehacker on how to make more convenient filenames, so you can avoid mish-mash titles like “thing-2 finalFinal! v3 (with new changes) 05b.psd”.
Thinking out loud on outside.in
Steven Johnson announces the birth of outside.in, “an attempt to collectively build the geographic Web, neighborhood by neighborhood.” It’s in the early stages (may I please have a link to “home”?), but I’m thinking it could be very cool.
Once you spend a decent amount of time online, especially if you’re a blog reader, you realize that there is so much content out there. The shameful thing is that so much of it is just sort of floating in the either. The potential is there for a service like outside.in to add some tethers or anchors to all this information, aggregating all the events, stories, and conversations happening in a community. It’s RSS for where you live.
While the description has something of a present-tense bias, there is the potential for rich juxtaposition of old and new by integrating something like geo-tagged Wikipedia entries. Maybe if you hear a little buzz about the Atlanta Beltline project, you could hop over and learn about it one of the neighborhoods it will cross, like Cabbagetown. What you end up with is a conversation that is not only (gleefully) tied to a physical location, but there is also the history running parallel (or is that perpendicular?).
I wonder if there are any plans for mobile-friendly access? Seems like a cool way for travelers to get acquainted as well. The obvious challenge is getting enough caring people and relevant data in there. I like it, let’s see where it goes.
Mark Larson 
