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Entries for October 2005
Brian Greene on Einstein’s most famous equation,
Brian Greene on Einstein’s most famous equation, E =mc^2. When he finally gets around to it in the middle of the article, Greene’s got a pretty good layman’s explanation of what the formula actually means.
September sales of SUVs were down sharply
September sales of SUVs were down sharply from last year. “Sales of F-Series pickup trucks plunged 30 percent. Sales of Ford’s large SUVs, including the Ford Explorer and Expedition and the Lincoln Navigator, sank by more than 55 percent each. At GM, overall sales of trucks, minivans and SUVs dropped 30 percent.” Most blame the $1/gal difference in gas prices from a year ago, but auto execs blame poor inventory after summer sales. Perhaps everyone went to the movies instead of car shopping.
Morfik seems to be working towards a
Morfik seems to be working towards a WebOS like I wrote about in August…web apps that run on the desktop: “[Morfik’s] technology combined with its tight integration of the browser, a database and web server, uniquely offers developers the opportunity to create web applications that run on the desktop after being unplugged from the web.” They have a Gmail clone that works offline…keen to see how that works, exactly. (thx mike)
I know you’ve always wanted to play
I know you’ve always wanted to play Memory with pictures of me from Flickr and now you can. Memry works with any Flickr tag.
Spam Stock Tracker tracked a bunch of
Spam Stock Tracker tracked a bunch of penny stocks hyped by spammers to see how you would do if you bought them. Looks like a ~50% loss since May.
Friendster has a new feature…you can
Friendster has a new feature…you can tell who has looked at your profile (feature is on by default and you can turn it off…if you’re even aware of it in the first place). If I still used Friendster (not that I ever really did), I’m not sure how I would feel about this. On the one hand, you can tell if someone’s interested in you (that guy you just met at the bar found your page as soon as he got home), but on the other hand, you might not want the girl you have a crush on to know you’re obsessively reloading her page to check for updates. (Also, imagine if they added this to LiveJournal…)
Sweethearting, part 2
Got quite a few emails in response to my post on sweethearting/pinging. Several people mentioned pranking[1] as a current implementation of this idea, a trick I remember using as a kid. You call someone and hang up after one ring…”prank me when you’re outside my apartment and I’ll come down”. Pranking is typically driven by economics…you don’t pay for a phone call that doesn’t connect.
Gen Kanai asks: “why can’t SMS do this?” It certainly can; if I were implementing sweethearting, I would piggyback it on SMS. But what I’m really concerned with (as usual) is the user experience. To send a blank text message to a specific recipient with my phone takes at least 6-10 keystrokes. I want to do it in two keystrokes and (in time) without looking.
[1] I received reports of pranking being used all over the world. It’s called one-belling (or pranking) in England, people send “toques” (roughly “touches”) or “sting” each other in Spain, Italians “fare uno squillo” (which Google translates as “to make one blast”), and in Finland it’s called “bombing”.
Update: In South Africa, they call it a “Scotch call”.
Mark does the math for his mom:
Mark does the math for his mom: cable modem + Vonage is cheaper than local phone + long distance + dialup internet. Bottom line: switch to VoIP and get broadband internet access for free.
Andy Baio sells Upcoming.org to Yahoo!
Andy Baio sells Upcoming.org to Yahoo! Congrats! I can’t wait to see what he, Leonard, and Gordon do with the site on a full-time basis. And Yahoo! keeps swallowing my friends…
Regrading this: Summer Movies Other Than March
Regrading this: Summer Movies Other Than March of the Penguins That Conservatives Are Rallying Behind. “The Dukes of Hazzard: Not once is the word ‘evolution’ used in this movie. Many pundits proclaim this to be a tacit endorsement of intelligent design.”
AirTroductions is a social networking/dating site for frequent flyers.
AirTroductions is a social networking/dating site for frequent flyers.
Joy-to-stuff ratio: “The time a person has
Joy-to-stuff ratio: “The time a person has to enjoy life versus the time a person spends accumulating material goods.” (via a.whole)
Freeman Dyson on his friend and colleague
Freeman Dyson on his friend and colleague Richard Feynman for The New York Review of Books.
The Matthew effect
Nick Paumgarten’s Talk of the Town piece opens with an anecdote about the doorman’s role in elevating the social status of their building’s tenants:
When Peter Bearman, a professor of sociology, moved from North Carolina to New York, seven years ago, to take a post at Columbia, he found his new colleagues unusually arrogant and difficult, even for the Ivy League. After considering other factors, he laid the blame on the doormen in their apartment buildings. He reasoned that the doormen had an interest in elevating the status of their tenants in order to enhance their own status, and so they treated the professors like big shots — for example, by addressing them as “professor” — until the professors came to believe that they really were big shots. Bearman felt that he had discovered a previously unobserved variant of the Matthew effect, Robert K. Merton’s theory concerning the compounding of iniquity among prominent and marginal individuals — the rich getting richer, and so forth.
I’d never heard of the Matthew effect before, so I looked it up in Wikipedia:
In sociology, Matthew effect was a term coined by Robert K. Merton to describe how, among other things, eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher even if their work is similar; it also means that credit will usually be given to researchers that are already famous…
Here is Merton’s original paper.
Three weeks in, I’m quite enjoying Chris
Three weeks in, I’m quite enjoying Chris Ware’s contribution to the NY Times Magazine The Funny Pages, Building Stories (pt 1, pt 2), maybe because I often imagine inanimate objects like buildings having personalities.
New York City, redemption, and the 2005 New
New York City, redemption, and the 2005 New York Yankees. “Jason [Giambi] was redeemed, and his legend is assured now as the star who wanted more, who lost everything to greed and arrogance, and who recovered his glory, which is now vastly more appealing for the fact that it’s tarnished. It’s a real New York kind of story.”
Ning is a platform on which you
Ning is a platform on which you can build your own social software…your own craigslist or del.icio.us. We were just talking about something like this the other day at Eyebeam, a MMORPG in which you write applications to adventure together or fight each other in a world instead of characters. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft should be kicking themselves that they didn’t think of this…this is the perfect WebOS app, like Dashboard, Konfabulator, and Desktop, but multi-user and on the web. (via waxy)
Steven Johnson’s thoughts on Web 2.0. He compares
Steven Johnson’s thoughts on Web 2.0. He compares it to a rain forest, with the information flow through the web being analogous to the efficient nutrient flow through a forest. “Essentially, the Web is shifting from an international library of interlinked pages to an information ecosystem, where data circulate like nutrients in a rain forest.” Compare with Tim O’Reilly’s recent thoughts on the subject.
A rare interview with Stephen Hawking about
A rare interview with Stephen Hawking about his remix of A Brief History of Time. The interview’s a bit weird…the interviewer doesn’t seem to know a whole lot about science.
Tim Gasparak captured JJ Thomas catching same
Tim Gasparak captured JJ Thomas catching same air over the streets of San Francisco on a snowboard. SF recently played host to extreme skiers and snowboarders flying down Fillmore Street on several tons of trucked-in snow. Tim’s got more photos of the event on Flickr.
Some technical notes on how Tim Burton’s
Some technical notes on how Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride was shot and edited. They shot it with a Canon dSLR; they originally wanted to use a Nikon D2H, but the darks were too noisy. More Apple-specific info here. (via df)
Sweethearting
Here’s a feature I would like on my mobile phone: the ability to “ping” someone with 2 or less keypresses (something that takes around a second to do), even if the keypad is locked. The idea is that when I press a couple of buttons on my phone (say, 1#), a tiny content-less message is sent to the person corresponding to that key combination. On their end, they see something like “Jason pinged you at 7:34pm” with the option to ping right back. You’d have to set up what pings mean beforehand, stuff like “I’m leaving work now” or “remember to pick up milk at the store”.
Pings would be perfect for situations when texting or a phone call is too time consuming, distracting, or takes you out of the flow of your present experience. If you call your husband on the way home from work every night and say the same thing each time, perhaps a ping would be better…you wouldn’t have to call and your husband wouldn’t have to stop what he was doing to answer the phone. You could even call it the “sweetheart ping” or “sweethearting”…in the absence of a prearraged “ping me when you’re leaving”, you could ping someone to let them know you’re thinking about them.
This reminds me a bit of Matt Webb’s Glancing project: I’m Ok, you’re Ok. I guess you could think of pinging as eye contact via mobile phone…just enough information is conveyed to be useful, but not so much that it disrupts what you’re already doing. Webb cites Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs:
Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs gives a good example of text messaging being used for this. He talked about kids in Sweden after a party. Say you’ve seen someone you quite liked and you’d like to see them again, but don’t know if the feeling’s shared. You’d send them a blank text message, or maybe just a really bland one like “hey, good party”. If they reply, ask for a date. The first message is almost entirely expressive communication: tentative, deniable.
Matt does a fine job explaining why this stripped-down style of communication is sometimes preferable to more robust alternatives.
Steven Levy profiles Tim O’Reilly for Wired.
Steven Levy profiles Tim O’Reilly for Wired. Kind of ironic since O’Reilly Media has put itself in the middle of what’s happening on the web, a position that perhaps should have been occupied by Wired, had they not sold all their online properties several years ago.
Fun bunch of Flickr photos from mleak
Fun bunch of Flickr photos from mleak depicting bugs and slugs shilling for the man: Pepsi Ladybug, Nike Water Strider, FedEx Grasshopper, Coke Slug, and Adidas Spider. (via bb)
John Gruber is asking folks to renew
John Gruber is asking folks to renew their Daring Fireball memberships. Money well spent, I say.
Interview with Boards of Canada on the
Interview with Boards of Canada on the eve of the release of their new album, The Campfire Headphase. Their Geogaddi is one of my favorite albums of the last 20 years. (thx, lots of people)
With attendance up in September, the movie
With attendance up in September, the movie studios are beginning to admit that, gosh, maybe crappy movies are to blame for this summer’s poor box office performance.
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