2009 Mar 25, 4:51The Bad Science guy has a spot on the news on the topic of the poor reporting of science in the news.
science video ben-goldacre mmr media conspiracy immunization 2009 Feb 26, 11:41"Aerosmith has reportedly earned more from 'Guitar Hero : Aerosmith' than from any single album in the band's history." Games are usually more expensive than albums but still impressive stat.
via:ethan_t_hein music guitar-hero videogames copyright art media rock-band ip riaa 2009 Jan 22, 9:43'Behind the press reports, the academic community has been engaged in a hot debate over whether the evidence supports a connection between the violent content of games and any behavioral effects. One
of the researchers who has argued forcefully that it's not is Christopher Ferguson, who has just published a paper that argues that the continued societal focus on games as a causal factor in
violence is an example of what's termed a "moral panic."'
game violence society videogames 2009 Jan 20, 11:40"But, when police searched his computer, they found Google searches from a couple days after the accident like, "auto parts, auto dealers out-of-state; auto glass, Las Vegas; auto glass reporting
requirements to law enforcement, auto theft," according to the prosecutor. The coup de grace? He searched for "hit-and-run," which he followed to a page about the hit-and-run he committed."
privacy google internet crime 2009 Jan 15, 4:57Lovely travel visualization: "We've generated what we call the Personal Annual Report for all our users. It's a unique-to-you PDF of data, visualisations and factoids about your travel in 2008, that
we're delivering over the next week via email to every Dopplr user who travelled in 2008. To give you an example, we thought we'd show you the Personal Annual Report of someone who's had a very busy
2008 - President Elect Barack Obama."
via:mattb visualization blog dopplr obama travel statistics map 2009 Jan 7, 7:02All the appearances Neil deGrasse Tyson has made on The Colbert Report. Especially good are the ep from 08/17/2006 containing planetary trashtalk and 02/13/2008 where Stephen learns how to become an
astrophysicist.
neil-degrasse-tyson colbert-report stephen-colbert science video humor tv astronomy 2008 Dec 29, 2:20"But the most accurate account of the bomb's inner workings-an unnervingly detailed reconstruction, based on old photographs and documents-has been written by a sixty-one-year-old truck driver from
Waukesha, Wisconsin, named John Coster-Mullen, who was once a commercial photographer, and has never received a college degree."
via:swannman bomb atom-bomb atomic-bomb history goverment nuclear physics security research science 2008 Oct 23, 2:18I had no idea lingual prescriptivists vs descriptivists were split in a partisan manner: '... The Secretary [of the Department of Education] released a report that includes dire warnings of impending
doom...The cause of this immanent catastrophe is, of course, those pesky linguists, the libertarian destroyers of good usage who claim that, well, anything goes. According to the report, "the
language problem has now reached the crisis level and we are now experiencing a severe epidemic of bad grammar that will affect the very fiber of our nation." The Secretary added, "an alarming number
of children are suffering from the bad advice given by those socialist, left-wing, atheistic linguists and we just gotta do something about it."'
humor language politics grammar 2008 Sep 16, 7:54
I just upgraded to the Zune 3.0 software which includes games and purchasing music on the Zune via WiFi
and once again I'm thrilled that the new firmware is available for old
Zunes like mine. Rooting around looking at the new features I noticed Zune Badges for
the first time. They're like Xbox Achievements, for example I have a Pixies Silver Artist Power Listener award for listening to the Pixies over 1000 times. I know its ridiculous but I like it, and
now I want achievements for everything.
Achievements everywhere would require more developments in self-tracking. Self-trackers, folks who keep statistics on exactly when and what they eat, when and how much they exercise, anything one
may track about one's self, were the topic of a Kevin Kelly Quantified Self blog post (also check out Cory Doctorow's SF
short story The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away featuring a colony of self-trackers).
For someone like me with a medium length attention span the data collection needs to be completely automatic or I will lose interest and stop collecting within a week. For instance, Nike iPod shoes that keep track of how many steps the wearer takes. I'll also need software to analyze, display, and share this data on a website like
Mycrocosm. I don't want to have to spend extreme amounts of time to create something as wonderful as the Feltron
Report (check out his statistic on how many daily measurements he takes for the report). Once we have the data we can give out achievements for everything!
Achievements for Everyday Life
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Carnivore
Eat at least ten different kinds of animals.
|
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Make Friends
Meet at least 10% of the residents in your home town.
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Globetrotter
Visit a city in every country.
|
|
You're Old
Survive at least 80 years of life.
|
Of course none of the above is practical yet, but how about Delicious achievements based on the public Delicious feeds? That should be doable...
self-tracking data achievements 2008 Sep 16, 4:25I'd seen the previous year's Feltron Annual Report but not the rest of the portfolio. Great stuff.
blog art visualization statistics data portfolio design 2008 Sep 8, 11:40"Up and Then Down: The lives of elevators. by Nick Paumgarten". A story on elevators, the people behind them, elevator mishaps, etc. Interesting article.
article elevator history design newyorker 2008 Jul 30, 10:45"Reporters Without Borders therefore offers the following practical advice to foreign journalists to help them cover the human rights situation in China." Install Tor, use PGP and other interesting
things.
censorship china internet privacy olympics journalism 2008 Jul 22, 10:58"ICANN Generic Names Supporting Organisation - Final Report: Introduction of New Generic Top-Level Domains"
icann tld dns reference 2008 Jul 9, 10:11"I, Sam the Eagle, present a musical salute to America." Seems appropriate for Colbert Report.
via:kris.kowal humor muppets video youtube parody 2008 Jun 12, 2:33NPR show 'Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!' talks to Neil Tyson about Pluto, impending asteroid impact, and then quizes him on the "long-delayed Guns and Roses album, Chinese Democracy". Did you see him on
TDS or Colbert Report? He does fun interviews!
npr audio quiz guns-and-roses neil-degrasse-tyson astrophysicist pluto asteroid humor 2008 Jun 6, 3:03
My GPS was stolen last night or this morning and I'm missing it already. For instance when I drove to Novus glass repair to get my front passenger window replaced I drove down the wrong road for a
while.
When I got out of my apartment this morning there was a police car sitting in my parking lot and the officer asked me: "David? ... What'd you leave in your car?". My face must have changed a lot
when I had the following sequence of realizations: (a) a police officer is asking for me by name, (b) I'm not in trouble, (c) my car must have been burgled, and (d) my GPS must be stolen.
The officer was waiting outside my complex because someone had reported my car's broken window to the police in the morning. The officer was very courteous and upon taking my date of birth noted
that we were born on exactly the same day. The window's safety glass was shattered and lying in tons of tiny pieces all over the passenger seat, my glove box was open and the middle armrest where I
keep my CDs was open. Nothing appears to be missing other than the GPS, the GPS power cable, and the GPS dash mount. Adding insult to theft, the their scattered my CDs throughout my car and didn't
take any of them, insulting my taste in music.
My car's window should be repaired now and hopefully the rain that came in through the broken window until I covered it with plastic bags (classy!) didn't do any permanent damage.
gps theft personal nontechnical 2008 Jun 6, 2:41"After finding him responsible for 27 separate instances of professional misconduct, the Florida Bar has requested that controversial Miami attorney and anti-gaming activist Jack Thompson be
disbarred for 10 years, reports GamePolitics."
game news wired jack-thompson justice finally awesome legal law 2008 May 30, 10:52'"Richard Feynman reporting for duty. OK, boss, what's my assignment?" The assembled group of not-quite-graduated MIT students was astounded.... So we sent him out to buy some office supplies.'
history richard-feynman programming computer article essay technology physics science via:swannman 2008 Mar 14, 2:39FTA: "We rated 18 movies based on how many laws of physics they mangled, and here's our report card."
science physics tv movie fiction scifi humor 2008 Jan 31, 10:47
![[Many books in large bookcase. Photo creator http://flickr.com/people/babblingdweeb/]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/18/23816128_d4acb70b2d_m_d.jpg)
I use my recently added
books feed from LibraryThing, a site I've mentioned before where you track, review, recommend, and share your books, and I put the recently added
books on my page. I thought it might be nice to include the book covers so I suggested adding book covers to RSS feeds in
LibraryThings 'Recommend Site Improvements' group. The next day I had a response from the founder and lead developer Tim Spalding who
had started implementing the feature. I noticed a few bugs, reported them on the same thread, and he fixed them soon after. Fantastic! It makes me want to upgrade to a paying account.
Incidentally, if you notice the Ghost in the Shell book appear multiple times in my RSS feed its due to the previously mentioned iterative bug fixes. The same item appeared multiple times slightly
differently with each bug fix and your RSS aggregator may have picked them up as distinct items.
tim-spalding librarything rss homepage
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