April 12, 2007
News, Personal Essay -- It's All the Same Thing
Here's something mind-bogglingly stupid from yesterday's Slate. The piece, by one Jack Shafer, is about allegations that David Sedaris embellished his humorous essays:
Sedaris and company want to erect a penumbra that shields humorists from criticism when they blend fiction into their nonfiction but still insist on calling it nonfiction. The logic behind this is difficult to follow. If writing fiction is the license Sedaris and other nonfiction humorists need to get at "larger truths," why limit this exemption to humorists? Let reporters covering city hall, war, and business to embellish and exaggerate so they can capture "larger truths," too. I'm sure that Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Christopher Newton, and Slate's "monkeyfishing guy" would back this idea, especially if applied retroactively.
Is Shafer for real? Does he really think there's no difference between a humorist writing personal essays and "reporters covering city hall"? That is just a stunning lack of nuance. I am flabbergasted.
And, we now return you to your regularly-scheduled lack of blogging.
Posted by todd at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)
November 29, 2006
Guess Who #[the next]
This person (who should be fairly guessable) once lamented "how can you govern a country in which there are 246 kinds of cheese?"
Posted by tony at 10:30 AM | Comments (1)
July 7, 2006
Toys for the Interwebs
Do me a favor and take a minute to play with this. It's a demo application for a framework called Echo2. This framework "removes the developer from having to think in terms of 'page-based' applications and enables him/her to develop applications using the conventional object-oriented and event-driven paradigm for user interface development."
Basically, it allows a person to create very nice website/applications without having to deal with the usual technologies of the internet. Which is nice, because the sort of people who are capable of designing and implementing complex, elegant applications are all snobs who believe HTML is a pain and javascript is ugly.
When you're done playing with that, tinker with google spreadsheets.
I'm sort of curious as to whether or not people think that these sorts of "internet applications" are good things. There's already a lot being written about this sort of thing, so I doubt we'll have anything new to add, but I'm curious nonetheless.
For my part, I remain curmudgeonly and unconvinced. I like for my applications, my configurations, and my data to live on my hardware. My life would be easier if I could change my mind; I use about five different computers in three different operating systems every week, which means learning a ton of different applications to do the same jobs. Each application on each computer requires its own configurations, and my data becomes spread out, which is a hassle. It seems like I am exactly the sort of person who should jump at these ideas. Nonetheless, I continue to configure Thunderbird to check my GMail account on every operating system on every computer, because the GMail interface simple doesn't do it for me.
Posted by todd at 9:24 AM | Comments (0)
May 30, 2006
Linky Link Link Link
Here are some of the better bits from my RSS feeds over the last few days.
- Six Flags Over Jesus at Mike the Mad Biologist (really DKos, but whatever). Please click through, if only to see an amazing painting featuring Abe Lincoln, George Washington, the Statue of Liberty, Iwo Jima, an American flag, and George W. Bush. Apparently they ran out of room just before they got to the pieta.
- Two year olds ignore instructions presented on TV
In an initial study by Georgene Troseth and colleagues, two-year-olds told face-to-face where a toy was going to be hidden went and found it in the first place they looked 77 per cent of the time, whereas those told by the same researcher via a video-recording found the toy in the first place they looked just 27 per cent of the time.
That's at Cognitive Daily. - GTA, meet LB:EF, via PZ. The people who make those awesome Left Behind books have put together a game which "rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian." Just like Jesus would have wanted. PZ has screen shots.
Posted by todd at 6:09 PM | Comments (0)
May 8, 2006
If You're Worried about "Optical Inches", the Battle is Already Lost
Has everyone seen this Norelco ad that encourages us to "Shave Everywhere"?
Apparently, if I shave my *beep*, *beep*, and *beep* (represented as a pair of kiwi, a peach, and a carrot; the peach I find mystifying) I will gain an "optical inch," and my partner may want to wear my "fruit salad" as a Roman gladiator's mask.
I only wish that someone had told me this earlier. Why didn't the grooming videos we had to watch as part of health and sex ed in middle school involve any mention of shaved kiwis? Surely something important enough to inspire the uses of frozen yogurt suggested in the advertisement was worth mentioning.
Posted by todd at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2006
Artificial Artificial Intelligence
I just learned about Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, which they call "artificial artificial intelligence." Programmers use an MTurk API, which pays people pennies to do "simple tasks that people do better than computers."
HIT stands for Human Intelligence Task. These are tasks that people are willing to pay you to complete. For example a HIT might ask: "Is there a pizza parlour in this photograph?" Typically these tasks are extraordinarily difficult for computers, but simple for humans to answer.Am I the only person whose first thought was, "This is just dying to be exploited by a sweatshop owner in a third world country"?
Just so you know, the best deal right now appears to be that you can be paid two cents to draw a sheep.
Posted by todd at 2:42 PM | Comments (0)
Expert Blogs
As you may or may not have noticed, I've been bringing to your attention recent, interesting posts from blogs nominated for the Wampum Awards for Best Expert Blog. I've focused only on blogs in biology, evolution, language, or cognitiion. These include Language Log, John Hawks, and Keats' Telescope and Mixing Memory.
There's something disturbing about the blogs nominated for these awards: there are no experts in computer science, software, the internet, or anything of the sort.
To some extent, this is because there aren't as many good candidates. I've been busting my ass trying to find a blog in artificial intelligence as good as Pharyngula, and I'm having no luck.
Dr. Thomas once explained the problem to me thusly: "We were all on ARPANet, when it was cool. Now everyone's doing it, we aren't interested. When we find something else we can hang out on by ourselves, we'll be there."
Still, this represents serious snubbing of electronic experts and bloggers such as Ed Felton, Joel Spolsky, and Jeff Zeldman.
Next year, something well have to be done about this.
Posted by todd at 1:39 PM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2006
Weather on Mars, People in Brazil
- Certain areas of Mars have the same weather every year. (Keats' Telescope)
There are specific times of year and locations on Mars which have experienced the same dust storm patterns every Mars year since we began observing with the first MGS MOC approach image in July 1997.
C'mon, that' s just neat. - At Mixing Memory, a post about cultures with few words for numbers. It summarizes a couple of articles from Science about societies in the Brazilian rainforest where they only have words for "one, two and, many" or "five words for different general numeralities." The Saphir-Wharf hypothesis shows up! That's always fun to see. Also, this, which I thought was awesome. Sven would love it:
The picture I'm trying to paint with these two sets of studies is just how messy research on language and thought really is. [...] Figuring out whether language, as opposed to other cultural and/or environmental variables are responsible for differences in cognition is damn near impossible to do with any certainty. But the research is fun anyway.
Posted by todd at 11:05 PM | Comments (2)
February 11, 2006
Neuroscience Reading List
A reading course in computational neuroscience at Berkeley has a webpage up with a really handy reading list of neuroscience and AI papers, for the most part complete with links. Of course, a lot of the links will be useless from non-campus networks, but many of the papers are probably available from professors' websites nonetheless.
I, for one, will start with the paper that has the best title: Churchland, Ramachandran, and Sejnowski* A Critique of Pure Vision.
[*] Screw you, UCSD, and your "standards."
Posted by todd at 5:19 PM | Comments (0)
February 7, 2006
The guys at the National Review Online's Corner are like butter
... they're on a roll!
Via PZ Myers, who got it from Brad Delong, who got here, Jonah Goldberg knows his history:
Goldberg: "Some say that Native Americans were great environmentalists don't know history. Some think that Indians were like a Disney movie, with Indians talking to bunnies. The great plains used to be a giant forest. The Indians burnt it to the ground to hunt buffalo.FF: Interesting. I am not entirely sure about the latter comment.
Here, "FF" is a Goldberg-sympathizing member of the audience. One wonders what Jonah would have had to have said for him to say, "Interesting. I wonder if Jonah is high, or just stupid?"
Meanwhile, at Crooked Timber, they've announced the death of satire. Again.
John Derbyshire at the the Corner wrote the following:In between our last two posts I went to Drudge to see what was happening in the world. The lead story was about a ship disaster in the Red Sea. From the headline picture, it looked like a cruise ship. I therefore assumed that some people very much like the Americans I went cruising with last year were the victims. I went to the news story. A couple of sentences in, I learned that the ship was in fact a ferry, the victims all Egyptians. I lost interest at once, and stopped reading. I don’t care about Egyptians.Compassionate conservatism anyone?
Good times all around. Meanwhile, anyone who can satisfactorily explain to me how such people get invited to give lectures at colleges will recieve one million dollars, and a pony.
Posted by todd at 11:09 AM | Comments (2)
November 8, 2005
Block View
How is it possible that I'm always the last to hear about neat toys?
Posted by todd at 4:16 PM | Comments (0)
August 1, 2005
A More Somber Note
Via Dr. Myers, a moving interview with the mother of a soldier killed five days after arriving in Iraq.
Cindy Sheehan is founder and President of an organization called "Gold Star Families for Peace." In order to become a member, you have to have lost a family member during war. They are booked for speaking engagements and so forth, and Mrs. Sheehan has apparently been on TV and radio several times.
On the one hand, it's easy to write Mrs. Sheenan's activism off as the natural response of a grieving mother. If the war is just, it's just whether or not it results in grieving mothers; that's what makes it a war. However, it's important for those who support the war to have to look such women in the face and justify their sons' deaths.
Point being, it's worth a read. Except that you will probably cry.
Posted by todd at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)
July 28, 2005
Compelling Arguments
Here are two articles which contain arguments that I found compelling. The first is about teen sex and the other is about latent racism.
Posted by todd at 4:19 PM | Comments (2)
July 21, 2005
Do You Know What RSS Is?
Eszter at CT says that only 9 percent of Internet users answer "Yes" to that question.
I think a person has to be a hard-core blogger to be surprised by that. I think a study of the average person's awareness for how the internet works would be much more interesting than numbers about the latest-and-greatest geek toys. How many people have a genuine working understanding of what, exactly, a "server" is, and how many people know how "IP addresses" work?
Finding out how many people have ever used an RSS feed is like asking how many people have a DVD player. You can gauge the extent to which people are keeping up with new toys, but not a single person has to know what a "Content Scrambling System" is.
And, in general, people don't need to know how CSS works. But as the Internet becomes a bigger and bigger part of people's lives, and as companies and evil-doers become ever more interested in intruding on people's privacy and fair use, it behoves people to acquire a more techinical understanding of their toys.
Some details which are interesting include
Of concern from a privacy/security perspective is that only 29% have a good idea of what “phishing” means, 52% for “Adware”, 68% for “Internet cookies” and 78% for “Spyware”.Yikes. If you don't know what phishing means, look it up. Then ask your parents if they know what it means; if not, instruct them.
Posted by todd at 3:07 PM | Comments (4)
July 14, 2005
Podcast Recommendations
I want some. You've had a few weeks now to try out the new iTunes features, surely you've found one you like.
I've been using iPodder, and I guess I like it. Frankly, I don't need another program running all of the time. I should probably try and find a newsreader for Linux which handles enclosures elegantly, but I've been happy enough with the Thunderbird newsreader that I'm not all that excited about searching for an alternative.
I suppose that I'm obligated to provide recommendations to start. I'm too lazy to go much beyond the Top 50, but here are the three that I like best so far:
- Science Friday -- Adam turned me on to this. It's the Friday version of NPR's Talk of the Nation. The guests are generally very cool, but the callers are consistently annoying.
- ESPN -- I wish I had cable. Since I don't, I get Tony Kornheiser and Woody Paige this way.
- Coffee Geek -- I've only listened to two of these, but the guy who puts it together really likes coffee. Episode five has an interesting discussion of how to get the best coffee-making setup for under $150.
Anyone else have any good ideas? I need more things to listen to while coding at home.
Posted by todd at 5:30 PM | Comments (0)
June 27, 2005
I Need to get Back to Work
I'm working from home today, which means that I'm susceptible to diversion. I was doing well, until Ed Felten brought me a bunch of Grokster links. Dr. Felten is worried, others believe the court simply punted back to the lower courts, and industry lawyers love it.
The Christian Science Monitor doesn't seem to get it:
The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2001 that Napster could be held partly liable for copyright violations by those using its file-sharing program. The court ruled that Napster officials could have policed the illegal downloading activities through the company's centralized servers, but instead ignored the lawbreaking.Right. Not because maintaining central servers is needlessly slow and expensive, but because they're sneaky.
To bypass such legal liability, Grokster and StreamCast decentralized their servers, making it impossible for them to monitor how their file-sharing programs were being used.
Forbes.com has a more encouraging take:
Why not compete with free download services on their own turf? Companies such as Apple Computer, RealNetworks, Napster and others are making a go of selling music online legally. They have a long, long way to before they even come close to the number of pirated downloads, but the early results are encouraging.Leave it up to competition? That makes way too much sense.
Make the media companies compete, and they'll find a way to innovate on their own. Give them an excuse to start suing entrepreneurs with new ideas, and they'll just become more complacent than they already are.
I haven't read the decision yet (I need to get back to work!), and I don't know a lot about the law, but it seems to me that all is not lost for Grokster. My understanding is that this means there will be a trial in the Ninth Circuit, where Grokster will have a chance to show that they did not engage in inducement.
Meanwhile, there was also another relatively important technology decision today.
Posted by todd at 3:39 PM | Comments (0)