I only hope he's more accurate in his predictions about global warming than he was in his predictions about the difficulty of his Eternity Puzzle:
In 1999, he created the eternity puzzle, a large dodecagon-shaped boardgame with 209 smaller irregularly shaped polygons. Offering a £1m prize and expecting the puzzle to be solved a few years later (when, hopefully, enough revenue from sales would have been raised), it was solved within 18 months. Although pleased the puzzle had been solved, Monckton was said to have been compelled to sell his £1.5m home, Crimonmogate, in Aberdeenshire, in June 2001, to cover the payout. However, the prize was in fact met by a combination of royalties and prize-indemnity insurance. The 36 room mansion was in the end sold and Monckton and his wife moved to a small estate on the banks of Loch Rannoch which they have painstakingly restored. A second puzzle, ETERNITY II, will be launched in 2007 with a $2 million prize for the first solver.
I loved Electoral-Vote.com during the 2004 election. But it doesn't cover the Congressional races (last I checked). I have to give credit to Old Media here -- I really like the New York Times' election map. It is Flash-based, but impressive and insightful:
I have noticed strange behavior on my blogger blog and have been trying to figure it out all day.
I run both Google analytics and my own php-based (pphlogger) counter on it. I was checking my pphlogger logs just now and noticed that yesterday evening it appears a certain IP address started scraping my blogger site. I who-is'd the IP and it comes up with a server in Isreal.
Before this I was averaging several hundred hits a day. In the hours since then, I've logged only 5 or 6 hits total -- and all list the same IP address as a proxy. I've logged into my pphlogger site and all appears to be running ok.
I've tried to check my Google Analytics stats, but it hasn't updated since yesterday -- though it appears to have counted hits last night that my pphlogger counter had missed.
It struck me as fishy. Think the two are related? (Attempts to get a response from blogger on this have been futile.)
Information wants to be free. But then so does misinformation. Protect your identity by liberally disseminating as much misinformation about yourself as possible.
I think this is a fascinating idea and a great experiment. It will be interesting to look back in a year or so and compare the differences between the two projects.
I expect the two sites will invite a lot of analysis comparing them to each other. How long before comparipedia.org? Scholars and educators, a la economists and the price index, can pick a basket full of major articles of general interest and compare and comment on the two. And it will certainly put James Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds thesis to the test.
Personally, I predict in two years, if citizendium hasn't already withered on the vine, I'll still be using wikipedia as my online wiki encyclopedia of choice. Not because of any great loyalty to it (though I have made couple minor contributions), nor because I have anything against this new project (as I said, Godspeed!), but because it will be the more useful of the two. But if it does flourish, I could see myself referring to this on certain critical subjects. And I would hope that most of the more informed contributions to citizendium will be incorporated back into the wikipedia.
As history illustrates the litigation around this type of cancer can net high returns for lawyers and those seeking damages- however these cases are rare. Thus the cost-per-click (CPC) can range quite a bit on bidding networks seeking these large litigation rewards. The bids may range from $4.00 to $13.00 per click and higher. This makes it a prime target for malware authors and worm writers who setup systems to either force or set-up a system to maximize clicks to these high paying keywords in order to gain their fee split.
Maybe they'll be inspired to stop chasing ambulences -- or, in this case, sufferers of "a rare form of cancer (about 1 in 1,000,000)" -- and start chasing botnet operators.
A couple years ago, my sister was enrolled in a biology class while attending a state college here in Southern California. I asked here, "Cool, so you're finally learning about evolution?" to which she replied, to my utter astonishment, "Yeah, but I don't really buy it." We were brought up more or less secularly -- though she did attend a church school for a couple years in grade school -- and though further to the right than me and wavers between identifying herself as a Democrat or Republican, she is still a class example of the California fiscal conservative/social liberal.
Obviously, I wasn't going to persuade her of the scientific evidence supporting evolution over the course of a family dinner, but I did ask her what she made of the fact that her state-run school, funded with her taxes and backed by almost every expert in the subject both in government agencies and academia at large, accepted as fact the scientific theory she wasn't buying. A conspiracy theory so grand that, as E.O. Wilson suggests, God is in on it? She resisted but I could see this had some impact. She has since adopted a more indifferent view on the matter.
I'd like to see at least one question addressing a politician's view on evolution in every debate -- starting with presidential debates. (In fact, I'd like to see whole debates between candidates over the subject of evolution and the teaching of biology.) I know neither side has an interest in pursuing this. For Republicans, it puts them on the spot with their fundamentalist base. And for Democrats, it just underlines their lack of "strong moral values" (whatever the hell that means.) But for me it speaks to the core a public official's integrity, honesty, and capacity to make reasoned decision based on evidence (or, if you will, conflicting intelligence data.)
I hope this group can make some headway with the public on such matters.
The biggest nuisance with registering for new sites for me is coming up with and managing new passwords.
I just use mushpup (http://mushpup.org/) for that. If the site has a profile page, all the better. I'll list my password (notationally) there. For instance, my slashdot password:
m{this.site}
Then, yes, if they need more info, just make it all up -- unless it's a site I really trust or like. Don't need to be centralizing all my data with a new startup, thank you.
the data point: sexual behavior data among teenagers identifying themselves as virgins
''We're seeing more evidence of anal sex in cultures with a high value on technical virginity, and it often causes lacerations and microabrasions that can lead to infections,'' said Ms. Alexander of the American Social Health Association. ''You have to worry about AIDS. And we have heard that some girls use muscle relaxants, which can also be risky.''
A joke I realize, but remember when Bush first came to office -- before 9/11 (so you'll really have to think hard) -- and one of the first things he and his spokespeople did was badmouth the economy. They had 2 obvious motives:
1. The economy was slowing down in the wake of dot-com (which was really as much biotech) mania and they wanted to be sure to pin this on Clinton
2. A justification for big top-heavy tax cuts
Then 9/11 came along and solved all those tricky public perception issues (also pre-empted China for a while as the next "Evil Empire to Clash Civilizations with.")
Anyway, to bring this back to topic: now with housing coming back to earth, it looks like a real downturn is in the works. How will this be spun? Maybe Yahoo Ads can take the fall.
Warning: website plug (but relevant to the point here)
I use a similar tiered strategy but would still get an uneasy feeling whenever I used a predictable or common password. So now for "public websites I could give a rats ass about having broken into," I use mushpup, which is just a modified SHA-1 hashing function, but allows you to get a secure password wherever you have web access and recover it easily next time you need it.
mushpup suggests a password strategy similar to the parent post:
I think this is a fascinating idea and a great experiment. It will be interesting to look back in a year or so and compare the differences between the two projects.
I expect the two sites will invite a lot of analysis comparing them to each other. How long before comparipedia.org? Scholars and educators can pick a basket full of major articles of general interest and compare and comment on the two. And it will certainly put James Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds thesis to the test.
Personally, I predict in two years, if citizendium hasn't already withered on the vine, I'll still be using wikipedia as my online wiki encyclopedia of choice. Not because of any great loyalty to it (though I have made couple contributions) but because it will be the more useful of the two. And it seems pretty obvious that most of all the most informed contributions to citizendium will be incorporated back into the wikipedia.
Gmail has changed my concept of email. I don't want a desktop client. I've abandoned Outlook and barely got started with Thunderbird. I want a simple useful interface that allows me to get to my email anywhere I have an internet connection.
Mossberg comments, "[Gmail's] only advantage is its massive free storage, which exceeds what most people will ever need.'" This, however, is significant. I now see my Gmail account as much as an online disk drive (while trying to keep in mind the perils associated with this) as an email account.
Finally, Gmail with its massive storage and effective spam filtering has emboldened me to start posting my email address on the web again. Thus far, the spam filter has held up. (I'd post my email address here to put my money where my mouth is, but Gmail doesn't offer troll filtering.)
So, in sum, I applaud any progress in online service, and I have both Gmail and Yahoo email accounts. But I'm happy enough with Gmail at present that I'm not in a big rush to try out Yahoo's new features.
could you do it without turning the page into a rainbow striped eyesore?
This is where an astute graphic designer or visual artist could be of some assistance. Use paler hues for the majority of the (presumably older) stuff. Have the new stuff stick out like George Michael's day-glo lipstick from that old Wham video. Tweak it until you get it right.
It's not the front page of the NY Times and it's no doubt influenced by the much lamented front-page gaming, but I still usually find one or two interesting things that I hadn't heard about yet.
One point with Wikipedia that seems to get overlooked -- or at least taken for granted -- is the power and ingenuity of the code that runs it. Technology is part of the solution here. If nothing else, Wikimedia deserves credit for putting together a state-of-the-art wiki machine -- an open source state-of-the-art wiki machine. Some of its features are dauntingly obscure and complex but it falls back quite gracefully to allow even the newest user to function with it effectively. I'd argue Wikipedia has succeeded in large part due to the technology.
That said, there seems to be two alternate proposals here in the summary. (1) A karma system and (2) a new color-coded visual feature. I agree that #1 would be vulnerable to all sorts of gaming schemes -- which isn't to say it wouldn't help, but it'd have to be smart. #2 sounds like it would be a more unequivocal benefit.
Both would be interesting innovations and consistent with the progressive user-friendly code behind Wikimedia.
An interesting point and one I greatly sympathize with. Still, I doubt the Ukranian ancien regime had the same church-powered electoral machine that Rove & Co. had put together. The correlation is tantalizing, but I'd like to hear more about the causation.
One tangible difference Democrat control of the House would make: some sorely deserved government funded official investigations of the crap this Administration has been hiding -- or calling "old news" -- for the last 6 years. And we're not just talking blowjobs here. Not that they wouldn't be partisan and politically driven on the media-covered surface of them. But it would be nice to see some sunlight thrown on this Administration, its party, and its practices.
Slashdot Mirror
I loved Electoral-Vote.com during the 2004 election. But it doesn't cover the Congressional races (last I checked). I have to give credit to Old Media here -- I really like the New York Times' election map. It is Flash-based, but impressive and insightful:
N GUIDE.html
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/washington/2006ELECTIO
I have noticed strange behavior on my blogger blog and have been trying to figure it out all day.
I run both Google analytics and my own php-based (pphlogger) counter on it. I was checking my pphlogger logs just now and noticed that yesterday evening it appears a certain IP address started scraping my blogger site. I who-is'd the IP and it comes up with a server in Isreal.
Before this I was averaging several hundred hits a day. In the hours since then, I've logged only 5 or 6 hits total -- and all list the same IP address as a proxy. I've logged into my pphlogger site and all appears to be running ok.
I've tried to check my Google Analytics stats, but it hasn't updated since yesterday -- though it appears to have counted hits last night that my pphlogger counter had missed.
It struck me as fishy. Think the two are related? (Attempts to get a response from blogger on this have been futile.)
Information wants to be free. But then so does misinformation. Protect your identity by liberally disseminating as much misinformation about yourself as possible.
I think this is a fascinating idea and a great experiment. It will be interesting to look back in a year or so and compare the differences between the two projects.
I expect the two sites will invite a lot of analysis comparing them to each other. How long before comparipedia.org? Scholars and educators, a la economists and the price index, can pick a basket full of major articles of general interest and compare and comment on the two. And it will certainly put James Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds thesis to the test.
Personally, I predict in two years, if citizendium hasn't already withered on the vine, I'll still be using wikipedia as my online wiki encyclopedia of choice. Not because of any great loyalty to it (though I have made couple minor contributions), nor because I have anything against this new project (as I said, Godspeed!), but because it will be the more useful of the two. But if it does flourish, I could see myself referring to this on certain critical subjects. And I would hope that most of the more informed contributions to citizendium will be incorporated back into the wikipedia.
More predators, less victims.
Or more sharks for myspace to wave at as it jumps over them -- depending on how you look at it.
As history illustrates the litigation around this type of cancer can net high returns for lawyers and those seeking damages- however these cases are rare. Thus the cost-per-click (CPC) can range quite a bit on bidding networks seeking these large litigation rewards. The bids may range from $4.00 to $13.00 per click and higher. This makes it a prime target for malware authors and worm writers who setup systems to either force or set-up a system to maximize clicks to these high paying keywords in order to gain their fee split.
Maybe they'll be inspired to stop chasing ambulences -- or, in this case, sufferers of "a rare form of cancer (about 1 in 1,000,000)" -- and start chasing botnet operators.
I went into Yakuza expecting something like GTA in Japan
Where can I download the Hot Tea Mod?
A couple years ago, my sister was enrolled in a biology class while attending a state college here in Southern California. I asked here, "Cool, so you're finally learning about evolution?" to which she replied, to my utter astonishment, "Yeah, but I don't really buy it." We were brought up more or less secularly -- though she did attend a church school for a couple years in grade school -- and though further to the right than me and wavers between identifying herself as a Democrat or Republican, she is still a class example of the California fiscal conservative/social liberal.
Obviously, I wasn't going to persuade her of the scientific evidence supporting evolution over the course of a family dinner, but I did ask her what she made of the fact that her state-run school, funded with her taxes and backed by almost every expert in the subject both in government agencies and academia at large, accepted as fact the scientific theory she wasn't buying. A conspiracy theory so grand that, as E.O. Wilson suggests, God is in on it? She resisted but I could see this had some impact. She has since adopted a more indifferent view on the matter.
I'd like to see at least one question addressing a politician's view on evolution in every debate -- starting with presidential debates. (In fact, I'd like to see whole debates between candidates over the subject of evolution and the teaching of biology.) I know neither side has an interest in pursuing this. For Republicans, it puts them on the spot with their fundamentalist base. And for Democrats, it just underlines their lack of "strong moral values" (whatever the hell that means.) But for me it speaks to the core a public official's integrity, honesty, and capacity to make reasoned decision based on evidence (or, if you will, conflicting intelligence data.)
I hope this group can make some headway with the public on such matters.
The biggest nuisance with registering for new sites for me is coming up with and managing new passwords.
I just use mushpup (http://mushpup.org/) for that. If the site has a profile page, all the better. I'll list my password (notationally) there. For instance, my slashdot password:
m{this.site}
Then, yes, if they need more info, just make it all up -- unless it's a site I really trust or like. Don't need to be centralizing all my data with a new startup, thank you.
Tom
It does kinda look like a bread maker.
Tokens probably solve some of these problem. And something like this doesn't hurt:
http://cyberai.com/inputfilter/index.php
Insightful post. A label and another RLE (real life example) to back this:
i on_error
0 6E0D81239F93AA25751C1A9669C8B63&sec=health&pagewan ted=print
the label: fundamental attribution error
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribut
the data point: sexual behavior data among teenagers identifying themselves as virgins
''We're seeing more evidence of anal sex in cultures with a high value on technical virginity, and it often causes lacerations and microabrasions that can lead to infections,'' said Ms. Alexander of the American Social Health Association. ''You have to worry about AIDS. And we have heard that some girls use muscle relaxants, which can also be risky.''
source: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E
A joke I realize, but remember when Bush first came to office -- before 9/11 (so you'll really have to think hard) -- and one of the first things he and his spokespeople did was badmouth the economy. They had 2 obvious motives:
1. The economy was slowing down in the wake of dot-com (which was really as much biotech) mania and they wanted to be sure to pin this on Clinton
2. A justification for big top-heavy tax cuts
Then 9/11 came along and solved all those tricky public perception issues (also pre-empted China for a while as the next "Evil Empire to Clash Civilizations with.")
Anyway, to bring this back to topic: now with housing coming back to earth, it looks like a real downturn is in the works. How will this be spun? Maybe Yahoo Ads can take the fall.
Warning: website plug (but relevant to the point here)
I use a similar tiered strategy but would still get an uneasy feeling whenever I used a predictable or common password. So now for "public websites I could give a rats ass about having broken into," I use mushpup, which is just a modified SHA-1 hashing function, but allows you to get a secure password wherever you have web access and recover it easily next time you need it.
mushpup suggests a password strategy similar to the parent post:
http://mushpup.org/wiki/wikka.php?wakka=Passwords
(Also, if you fell for a phishing attack on one site, all of your other online accounts wouldn't instantly be compromised.)
I think this is a fascinating idea and a great experiment. It will be interesting to look back in a year or so and compare the differences between the two projects.
I expect the two sites will invite a lot of analysis comparing them to each other. How long before comparipedia.org? Scholars and educators can pick a basket full of major articles of general interest and compare and comment on the two. And it will certainly put James Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds thesis to the test.
Personally, I predict in two years, if citizendium hasn't already withered on the vine, I'll still be using wikipedia as my online wiki encyclopedia of choice. Not because of any great loyalty to it (though I have made couple contributions) but because it will be the more useful of the two. And it seems pretty obvious that most of all the most informed contributions to citizendium will be incorporated back into the wikipedia.
Resistance is afoot:
http://code.google.com/p/moshi/
Agreed.
Gmail has changed my concept of email. I don't want a desktop client. I've abandoned Outlook and barely got started with Thunderbird. I want a simple useful interface that allows me to get to my email anywhere I have an internet connection.
Mossberg comments, "[Gmail's] only advantage is its massive free storage, which exceeds what most people will ever need.'" This, however, is significant. I now see my Gmail account as much as an online disk drive (while trying to keep in mind the perils associated with this) as an email account.
Finally, Gmail with its massive storage and effective spam filtering has emboldened me to start posting my email address on the web again. Thus far, the spam filter has held up. (I'd post my email address here to put my money where my mouth is, but Gmail doesn't offer troll filtering.)
So, in sum, I applaud any progress in online service, and I have both Gmail and Yahoo email accounts. But I'm happy enough with Gmail at present that I'm not in a big rush to try out Yahoo's new features.
Tom
could you do it without turning the page into a rainbow striped eyesore?
This is where an astute graphic designer or visual artist could be of some assistance. Use paler hues for the majority of the (presumably older) stuff. Have the new stuff stick out like George Michael's day-glo lipstick from that old Wham video. Tweak it until you get it right.
And, naturally, make it optional.
I ignore the home page and just check out the day's most popular page once or twice a day:
http://digg.com/view/technology/popular/today
It's not the front page of the NY Times and it's no doubt influenced by the much lamented front-page gaming, but I still usually find one or two interesting things that I hadn't heard about yet.
One point with Wikipedia that seems to get overlooked -- or at least taken for granted -- is the power and ingenuity of the code that runs it. Technology is part of the solution here. If nothing else, Wikimedia deserves credit for putting together a state-of-the-art wiki machine -- an open source state-of-the-art wiki machine. Some of its features are dauntingly obscure and complex but it falls back quite gracefully to allow even the newest user to function with it effectively. I'd argue Wikipedia has succeeded in large part due to the technology.
That said, there seems to be two alternate proposals here in the summary. (1) A karma system and (2) a new color-coded visual feature. I agree that #1 would be vulnerable to all sorts of gaming schemes -- which isn't to say it wouldn't help, but it'd have to be smart. #2 sounds like it would be a more unequivocal benefit.
Both would be interesting innovations and consistent with the progressive user-friendly code behind Wikimedia.
I love www.electoral-vote.com, but I think the New York Times deserves a lot of credit for their Flash-based election guide:
N GUIDE.html
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/washington/2006ELECTIO
The by-population version is insightful in a very Edward Tufte-esque sort of way.
An interesting point and one I greatly sympathize with. Still, I doubt the Ukranian ancien regime had the same church-powered electoral machine that Rove & Co. had put together. The correlation is tantalizing, but I'd like to hear more about the causation.
One tangible difference Democrat control of the House would make: some sorely deserved government funded official investigations of the crap this Administration has been hiding -- or calling "old news" -- for the last 6 years. And we're not just talking blowjobs here. Not that they wouldn't be partisan and politically driven on the media-covered surface of them. But it would be nice to see some sunlight thrown on this Administration, its party, and its practices.
The most fun was programming the robots. It felt like giving life to lifeless bodies.
Thus spoke J.F. Sebastian. At least Blade Runner remains under budget and ahead of schedule.
Is this the end then of Blogger's proprietary <$TAG$> markup? And just when I started getting the hang of it.
First they deprecate <font>. Now this. What's next? Myspace formatting its profile pages with no more than three layers of nested tables?