April 2012
44 posts
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Somewhere Over the Rainbow: from deep inside the...
Gabi and I watched Meet Joe Black last night—her for the first time, me for the second (or third). The first song in the closing credits is Israel Kamakawiwoʻole’s ukulele version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. The song reminded me of the version of the song in the video below that Gabi and I performed for the Franciscan University talent show back in college before we were married,...
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AI is not about replicating human intelligence →
It’s about a new kind of intelligence.
The AI community is beginning to question whether we should be so obsessed with recreating human intelligence. That intelligence is a product of millions of years of evolution and it is possible that it is something that will be very difficult to reverse engineer without going through a similar process. The emphasis is now shifting towards creating...
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Truthful Logos
This collection of images by freelance design artist Viktor Hertz gives a whole new meaning to truth in advertising.
Here is my favorite:
It’s a good representation of what the collection is all about.
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Happy Birthday David
I’m really getting excited for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus movie after seeing this second promo video.
The first one I saw was great too. It’s set to look like a TED talk from 2023.
I always find sci-fi prequels strange though since everything looks so much more futuristic than the movies that follow them in cronology but proceed them in release date (e.g. Star...
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What I'm reading
Here is a list of the last 100 things I’ve read (courtesy of Instapaper). This list has items that consists of things I’ve read since March 30, 2012. A few of these things I’ve already linked to or blogged about but most are just things that grabbed my attention long enough to read from beginning to end (which is saying a lot for links on the Internet).
Gladwell reveals writing...
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1940 vs 2010 Census: Key Comparisons Between the... →
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Robot Love →
Scott Adams worries about different things than the rest of us.
My prediction is that robots will eradicate humankind with love, not laser cannons.
When technological companionship beats real human interactions, the species is doomed…
Why Xanax is the Most Popular Anti-Anxiety Drug in... →
Interesting article about the ways legal drug use follows the cultural mood.
Just as teenage rebellion flourishes in environments of safety and plenty, depression as a cultural pose works only in tandem with a private confidence that the grown-ups in charge are reliably succeeding on everyone’s behalf.
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ZOMBIES, RUN! →
I am severely tempted to buy an iPhone just to try this app that recreates the sensation of being chased by Zombies. Apparently, you are less likely to slow down or stop if there is a risk of your brains being eaten.
You tie your shoes, put on your headphones, take your first steps outside. You’ve barely covered 100 yards when you hear them. They must be close. You can hear every guttural...
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Text From Dog →
Profane but hilarious, this Tumblr, textfromdog.tumblr.com, is a collection of text message exchanges between a man and his loving canine companion.
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Show this chart to the next person that says the... →
The act of reading books is alive and well. Radio didn’t kill it. Television didn’t kill it. The Internet didn’t Kill it.
Alexis Madrigal muses about Golden age of reading:
Remember the good old days when everyone read really good books, like, maybe in the post-war years when everyone appreciated a good use of the semi-colon? Everyone’s favorite book was by Faulkner...
Hammerforum.com →
This forum thread is a parody of any camera (or your tech hobby of choice) gear discussion.
Thread Title: Nails for Stiletto TB15?
Hammeruser: I’ve saved up for months and just got my Stiletto TB15SS titanium hammer. At $220 they’re pricey but with the replaceable stainless steel face, ultra light weight handle, and excellent balance I can see myself using this for many years. I’ve had it 3...
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Stupid games →
Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja—they own real estate in pockets and minds around the world. Sam Anderson:
Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s — it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at...
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The Book of the Future →
This isn’t the book of the future, but the cartoon is still imaginative.
Jet-pack friendly reading material is important. Maybe books will go here, and we’ll have to deal the distracted flying issues.
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Baseball Is Life →
I’m mostly indifferent to baseball, but Tim Sidell’s new view of the “life is a lot like baseball” cliche helps me understand the appeal of the game.
Count me among those who believe, quite strongly, that baseball transcends the world of sport. It’s more than just a game of ingenious design, measured not by the artificial and cruel limits of a clock, but by equal...
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Rear Window Timelapse →
Jeff Desom made this incredible time lapse video created from clips of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window. In the video, the whole story unfolds in order, but the only thing you see is the panoramic view from the window. The movement of the small figures in the distance let you know where to direct your attention. The video is set to a great soundtrack, Brahms’ Hungarian...
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Bad Opinion Generator →
Hindsight is 20/20.
A random sampling of history’s most clueless predictions — from faulty scientific forecasts to sweeping political statements
Some gems:
“Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop — because women like to get out of the house, like to handle merchandise, like to be able to change their minds.” —TIME, offering predictions for the year 2000,...
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Give people time to act honestly →
The Economist explores the psychology of morality by reporting on a dice rolling experiment:
The researchers had no way of knowing what numbers participants actually rolled, of course. But they knew, statistically, that the average roll, if people reported honestly, should have been 3.5. This gave them a baseline from which to calculate participants’ honesty. Those forced to enter their results...
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Seeing the world through “The Collective Snapshot” →
Spanish photographer Pep Ventosa‘s layered snapshots are shizophrenic, to say the least. The photographs, part of a series entitled “The Collective Snapshot”, are comprised of multiple images of several landmarks, ranging from the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge to Stonehenge and the Taj Mahal, layered on top of the other and rendered with varying degrees of opacities that constitute a...
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The Birth Of Silicon Valley →
NPR published an interesting interactive timeline of the development of Silicon Valley. It is as much history of the conditions that made venture capital possible as it is about the development of technology.
(It’s in Flash, FYI.)
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Could Wikipedia write itself? →
Rebecca J. Rosen reports in The Atlantic on an effort to automate more of the updates in Wikipedia through the new project called Wikidata.
The current plans are for the project to roll out in three phases over the next year. The first phase, set to be completed by this August, is the centralization of all the different points of data in Wikipedia across languages whose updates could be...
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Quantify: Creativity →
Google’s Think Quarterly has a series of data nuggets about the vast amount of creative output is published to the web every day.
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A map of my home town in watercolor
You can make your own.
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User Experience vs. User Interface →
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Type Connection →
Type Connection is a dating game for typefaces. To win you have to pair up a typeface with it’s most compatible mate. Yes, that’s geeky. Yes, there are good explanations and aesthetic objectivity in which typefaces work together well.
Start by choosing a typeface to pair. Like a conventional dating website, Type Connection presents you with potential “dates” for each main...
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The HTML5 Gendered Advertising Video Remixer →
Weird. This site mashes up the sound from a boys toy ad of your choice with the video of a girls toy ad of your choice (or vice versa) with startling results.
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Comic Sans for famous brands →
The Comic Sans Project shows us how would the world look like if Comic Sans wasn’t hated into oblivion. See famous brands re-imagined with this non-popular type face.
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Animals as the alphabet →
Casey Girar’s Alphabet Animals on the Behance Network.
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Pentametron →
Writing in verse in not dead, apparently. Pentametron collects Tweets inadvertently written in iambic pentameter.
With algorithms subtle and discrete I seek iambic writings to retweet.
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Newspaper April Fools’ hoaxes →
These are classic.
Ferrets lay cable for Virgin Media. “Our decision to use them is due to their strong nesting instinct, their long, lean build and inquisitive nature, and for their ability to get down holes,” project manager Jon James told The Telegraphin 2010.
The Guardian becomes a Twitter-only publication. Most of its fellow publications,the paper notedin 2009, “now offer Twitter feeds...
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