Tuesday, December 30, 2003

Gar, why am I still awake?

I guess this time I can blame it on jet lag. I'm still adjusting after a fun-filled vacation in (an admittedly rainy) San Diego. Chargers game, disc golf, climbing, running, bowling, basketball, chilling, Lord of the Rings, the Ali G movie, Matrix Reloaded (finally), Mexican food, chain restaurants, pizza, video games, Legos, chess (haha, Paresh!), Scrabble (damn you, Eric!), poker, shopping, friends, babies, wives. Who knew San Diego could be such fun?

Fun with match.com data

After Martin noticed this article about dating preferences in Yahoo!'s most popular articles, I browsed my way over to match.com's PR site, which informs us that "Although only 43% of singles said they are confident they will start off 2004 with a romantic midnight kiss (with men being more confident of this than women), singles are united in their desire to be kissed gently..." The research area is also pretty interesting.

(On semi-related notes, check out this interesting use of the Amazon API to measure subject popularity and the Times articles linked from the recently updated Metabuzz.)

Friday, December 26, 2003

Why don't they teach you anything this useful in DARE?

Who knew that too much sugar with your liqour makes you sick?

"The sugar load is very problematic because it is very hard for the liver to metabolize a lot of sugar and alcohol at the same time," he said. "Of course, people are drinking more, with all these terror alerts going around. So I tell my patients to be pre-emptive. Drink a lot of water and take a Tylenol before you go out."

Friday, December 19, 2003

Whither Thinkquest?

So, I was looking through the Thinkquest site since my brother was thinking of participating, and I'm left wondering what happened to the poor thing. It's now run by Oracle, the big scholarship prizes are gone, and the whole thing seems to have a little more corporate feel to it than it used to.

On the other hand, it is nice to see that the library is well groomed, with nice descriptions of each entry. And it is good that the thing is still going on. I need to go back and clean out the vulgar comments put into the discussion boards we had in our entires. Teachers keep writing to complain that they can't link to the sites because of all of the crap people have written into them....I wish I had though to build more robust maintenance tools into it, but I always underestimate the number of stupid and immature people on the Internet.

I also took a look at the most recent grand prize winner, which actually has some fun little applets on it. The quiz says I'm 61% left brained and 57% visual.

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

Hehe, cute

just click

(and, from Sarah, this is even worse)

Sunday, December 14, 2003

Amazon to the rescue

I swear I keep finding more interesting things on Amazon's guides and lists every time I look. This time, when Googling ideas for present ideas for an 11-year-old girl (who Suzie paired me with through Operation Santa), I found this and this. Fascinating. Maybe someday Amazon will just pick presents out automatically. I'd pay for that. ;-)

Random culture consumption update

I finally finished American Pastoral. It's a bit on the depressing side. Certainly makes one not want to have kids. (And it is nice to know I wasn't alone in thinking that certain parts dragged. ) I do love Roth, though. He's just so...right. Now to mentally answer the questions in this discussion guide....

Also saw the Matrix in IMAX at the Aquarium. It was better than I'd been lead to believe, although I imagine it would have made more sense if I had bothered to see Reloaded. The IMAXness was fun but not as mind-blowing as I'd hoped...the screen is big and ultra-clear and the sound is good.

Last weekend, saw Last Samurai, which was not as good as the reviews said, though entertaining.

I really need LoTR to come out...it's time for a quality movie.

Tuesday, December 9, 2003

Wow

For anybody who missed it (bad you!) Remail was on Slashdot. Pretty neat. The feedback is surprisingly heartening.

Monday, December 1, 2003

Awesome

Eyeglasses.com has the feature I've always wanted from glasses shopping....virtual trying-on! Actually, I've always thought a regular store could do the real thing with a digital camera and a screen, but virtually placing the frames is extra efficient.... Now to find a picture I can try this out with.

Tuesday, November 25, 2003

An early Christmas

I feel like I'm drowning in fun new stuff.

The headphones showed up today, and they have a very nice crisp sound, though they'll take some getting used to.

And I'm in love with Speakerboxx* (especially "The Way You Move," which I will forever associate with my first night at Toad's...). A guy in line for Toad's Friday (a night on which we were unable to get in...damn them) tried to convince me that The Love Below was the superior album, but I'm always partial to albums that make good running soundtracks.

Speaking of running, I finally went to Marathon Sports, which I should have done a long time ago. The nice man looked at my terribly pronating tendencies and hooked me up with a pair of compensatory Brooks. The difference is amazing.

To round things out, I checked out new books from the library (having finished Kavalier & Clay a while back) and went glasses shopping (I'm being pushed in a rectangular plastic direction) and got most of my hair shaved off.

In any case, I'm off to Columbus...where it is apparently consistently below freezing. I knew I should've gone to Florida.


* Follow this link...it's a pretty cool review aggregator!

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Paris Hilton

The buzz aggregator says that, this week, Paris Hilton was the top query at both Yahoo and Lycos. Sadly, Google hasn't updated Zeitgeist in the past 2 weeks, so we can't tell what's going on there. I just thought this was interesting. Plus, if I put "Paris Hilton" in my blog, there's a chance that desperate, porn-thirsty searchers will end up here instead. Poor things.

New headphones

So, I ordered Shure e2c headphones after my third pair of Sony MDR-A35s in as many years had one ear stop working when the cord got yanked. I'm a little wary about owning a $99 pair of headphones, especially for running (we are talking, after all, about the guy who broke 2 minidisc players and an mp3 player in the past 5 years), and the noise blocking seems to verge on dangerous for running on streets (assuming, of course, my knees are ever up to it again). Maybe I'll get another set of Sony's for running, but recommendations on iPod lounge and Joi Ito's blog (which turned into a fascinating impromptu customer relations forum) have me pretty convinced. Score one for decentralized product reviews....where's my review search engine when I need it? I'll report back on how they work once they turn up. (And Shure turns out to be very good at responding to private queries, too: when I asked about the sweat tolerance of the e2cs via email, they wrote back the next morning explaining "the E2C earphone has been tested extensively in environments where the product is exposed to sweat for extended periods of time. Workout
conditions are actually very similar to live performance conditions.")

Speaking of distributed reviews, Seb points to work on a format for marking up reviews in RSS.

Sunday, November 9, 2003

Why I woke up before 8 on a Saturday

I woke up early Saturday to attend the attend day 2 of the Multiples of 1 conference, and it was well worth it. What a cool conference, although it's sort of tough to describe what it was about. A recurring theme was the difficulty and power of creating an open platform that allows for unexpected uses while providing sufficient constraints. Perspectives included the way conflicts were resolved in the Linux kernel, how Zipcar maintains order with minimal rules, the relationships between people and their electronic devices, how collaborative tools are often subsconsciously effective, how workplaces are changing physically, how wireless networks can scale indefinitely with a cooperative design, how markets are just one way of exchanging data.

Thursday, November 6, 2003

If you thought you were cynical about romance...

...get a load of this article (via danah): "Moreover, dating is often a bloodsport driven by egos and sexual appetites." Of course, watching Average Joe has (surprisingly) convinced me it's true....(and, yes, you read that URL correctly, there is a realitytvworld.com. it's like heaven!)

Wednesday, November 5, 2003

For my adoring fans...

...who were kept in suspense during my authorial delinquency, I ended up being an iPod for Halloween. I printed out big versions of the controls, display and Apple logo and pasted them on not-too-big pieces of posterboard and hung em over my shoulders. It received rave reviews. And some mockery. One person thought I was a condom, but he might have been drunk. Sadly, there are no pictures, but needless to say, it was not as elaborate as this.

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Halloween

So, I'm trying to come up with a Halloween costume (still open to ideas!). Current options include pirate and Vijay Singh. These are already remarkably better than the past few years, which have included: guy-resembling-the-stuffed-penguin-that-resembles-Sarah, guy-in-Naomi's-black-dress, and, my personal favorite, guy-in-orange-shirt-with-purple-stripes-and-black-hat. Mike and I went to Boston Costumes (open till midnight this week! what a scene!) where he was inspired, though I was not (the $600 velvet cape was tempting). The web wasn't much more of a help; I found out that I should not be Spongebob, since that's this site's top costume this year. Hmm. What a pain! Maybe I can just go as an alcoholic candy fiend.

Monday, October 20, 2003

If you can...

... go see Love Object. It's about this guy who gets a RealDoll (you must, by the way, spend some time on this site...it's fascinating and disturbing, just like the movie) and the, um, interesting effects it has on his real-life romance.

Crap

Just when you thought it was okay to be 5' 5"... (Next thing you know, I'll be masturbating animals for a living!)

Friday, October 17, 2003

Oo neat!

At long last, our big project from this year has a decent web site!

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Leafter is the best medicine

Eddie sent this to me. Can't imagine why.

Monday, October 13, 2003

Back from Aspen (sadly!)

Thanks to Aaron, an incredible weekend in Aspen. Hiked to Crater Lake at the Maroon Bells and biked the Rio Grande Trail and hiked to Grizzy Lake. Beautiful! Exhilirating! Pictures to come.

Yay

I finally found a setlist from the R.E.M. show last Sundayhere:

Begin The Begin / So Fast, So Numb / These Days / Drive / Animal / Fall On Me / All The Way To Reno (You're Gonna Be A Star) / Bad Day / The One I Love / Daysleeper / Electrolite / (Don't Go Back To) Rockville / Orange Crush / Losing My Religion / At My Most Beautiful / She Just Wants To Be / Walk Unafraid / Man On The Moon // Life And How To Live It / Exhuming McCarthy / Final Straw / Imitation Of Life / Permanent Vacation / It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Now if they would just hurry up and release their new album. Harumph.

Monday, October 6, 2003

On the other hand, I love living near Fenway Park

There a bunch of drunken people running down the street. I wonder where they're going? (Postscript: Aaron went and discovered the beginnings of a riot, though he left before things turned ugly.)

Friday, October 3, 2003

Wow, Boston REALLY sucks

So, you, my dear reader, might be wondering, why is Kushal home before bars close in Boston? Well, because Hurricane O'Reilly's decided that it didn't want to let people in after 1. Why? No answer! So stupid! We were following Aaron's cousin to his friend's birthday party, but, alas, the bouncer and manager were far too proud of their power to take our money. This is vaguely analogous to the asshole at the Playwright in New Haven during senior week: "You go to Yale? You should know better than to bring a fake ID to the hottest club in New Haven." I think I would rather be unemployed than be a bouncer. To derive self-worth at the expense of other people's pleasure, that's pathetic.

Wednesday, October 1, 2003

Climbing sticks

NYTimes: "The study, which included a small number of men, found that both men and women were dissatisifed with their social lives. Instead of formal dates, students attend parties in large groups, followed by "hook-ups," which the study described as fleeting, alcohol-fueled sexual encounters. "

This is reminiscent of an 'article' I found when trying to check what the average age someone loses their viriginity is the other day...


In recent years a new term, "hooking up," has sprouted on American college campuses for what used to be called "quickie" sexual interaction. A hookup may involve a range of intimate activities from kissing to forms of sex and usually involves alcohol. It is sex without commitment or emotional involvement, usually between people who know little if anything about each other and expect nothing more from each other than the gratification of that lone encounter.

According to a survey by the Institute for American Values, "40 percent of college women have hooked up at least once, and 10 percent more than six times" (Christian Century, Aug. 15, 2001). The empty ritual leaves many young women feeling used, disillusioned and burdened with emotional confusion.



(although this was more interesting)

It's enough to leave someone Climbing the Stick. (Good find Scott!)

Sunday, September 28, 2003

What I've learned about visiting the Vineyard

Visited the Vineyard Saturday, at Calvin's urging. Awesome! Highly recommended, at least in the off season.

1. If you work for IBM, rent at Enterprise. They waive the (usurious) underage fee. We got a sweet little Volvo. And they're right on Comm Ave.

2. Take 90 (east) to 93 to 24 to 495 to 28 (after the bridge) until you're directed to parking lots near Woods Hole.

3. Try not to barely miss the ferry, although there is a nice bakery near the ferry dock.

4. Ending up at Oak Bluff is good, since that's where the action is. Vineyard Haven is lame, and it's weird that ferries there are more frequent. Oak Bluff has a cool army surplus store and a nice bike rental guy and a hat store and an old ferris wheel and an octagonal church and pretty houses and a little beach.

5. The bike ride to Edgartown is gorgeous, though doing the full loop would be better.

6. Edgartown (or Agerton, as the bike man called it) is supposed to be the center of action, but isn't that exciting, except for the harbor.

7. Black Dog is inexplicable.

8. Try to leave time to visit the cliffs and the nudists. Maybe next time.

9. Taking the ferry back at night is good, because you can see all the stars. And there are tons of them.

Oo, my beliefs on God are logically consistent!

Thanks to Ping, I played Battleground God (which is an excellent example of what I was trying to with my own belief challenging system (results)). I made it through, only biting bullets on questions 6 and 13. How'd you do?

Friday, September 26, 2003

Miscellany

I'm in love. While waiting for a present to be wrapped at the bookstore, I picked up Schott's Original Miscellany. What an awesome book! It's become my booting reading (think bathroom reading, but Windows is the person taking care of business). I've never seen a book so captivating and funny and educational. I think maybe it's because I always think in terms of charts and lists, but the random collections (ranging from Ivy League fight songs to nouns of assemblage (a malapertness of peddlers) to measures of alcohol to notable Canadians to presidential facts (Calvin Coolidge was the last president born on the 4th of July)) are just plain awesome.

Thursday, September 25, 2003

VON the road again

Dropped in on VON the other day, which is going pretty well. It was crazy to see everybody again, and the party was fun as always. RevUp Records is in full swing, and East of Autumn played. If VoIPers are anything like the WWW people, I imagine there will be pictures of the conference posted on their web sites soon enough.

Sarah's Clipping Service Strikes Again

from the Christian Science Monitor:


Formal, school-based messages about the dangers of illegal drugs have long rung hollow to him. He certainly knows that drugs are dangerous, but he also sees a difference between casual experimentation - such as his relatives drinking wine - and addictive behavior, and he knows the lessons about drugs aren't necessarily as black and white as the rhetoric used in class.

Sunday, September 21, 2003

Badi for Governor

Ghazalle's dad is running for governor. Pretty cool. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science and claims to be the first Iranian-American to run for governor. Certainly more appealing than Arnold.

Thursday, September 11, 2003

Kushal @ 14

Okay, this is truly creepy. The Internet Archive has this new Recall search engine (there's a link from Metabuzz). It's quite slick - I'm impressed how quickly it does its thing. In any case, searching for myself turned up this review of my web page from 7 years ago.

Danger in Familiarities

I love propaganda posters.



From the one about dancing:

Conventions are the fences society has built to protect you and the race.

Familiarities arouse dangerous desires. They waste you power for the finest human companionship and love.

Physical attraction alone will never wholly satisfy.

Complete and lasting love is of the mind as well as of the body.

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

More on artificial markets and other things in the world

I just heard from Dave Pennock (as depicted in this nifty ascii picture), which prompted me to check out his web page, and, lo and behold, he had an excellent refutation of the attacks on the terrorist futures market.

Of course, scientists can't be trusted either.

In the good news department, Robin finished his wireless network project in Nepal. And thanks to him, you can help support the schools in Nepal.

Tuesday, September 9, 2003

Recovering

A gorgeous weekend on the Cape at Hayden's in Dennis (thanks Hayden!). Rode in his Jeep to Sundae School, played Kings and Scattergories, ran on the beach, swam in the pool. Paradise. And then I came back to the absolutely unbelievable Springsteen concert at Fenway.

I think weekends like this definitely meet afterglow expectations, though I'm compelled to read more about affective forecasting. (This article about American unhappiness, which is quite Putnamesque, also came out around the same time.)

Monday, September 1, 2003

Jeez

Speaking of conservatives making things bad for the rest of us, The Atlanta Journal Constitution took flack for a picture of Britney Spears kissing Madonna. Give me a break.

Also interesting are this story of Microsoft malfeasance and an essay about height-increasing drugs. "Short men, in particular, are paid less than tall men." To say nothing of the Maxim survey that said almost no women prefer short men. ;-) (I wish I could find it! Though all sorts of other interesting surveys turn up when you search the maxim site for "survey".)

A fun weekend (but a little blue)

(trying to ditch caps again...) thanks to mike and rox, an excellent weekend at tanglewood. saw cassandra wilson (incredible percussion!) and kenny baron's canta brasil, and drank wine and ate cheese and crackers and grapes from nejaime's and sandwiches from loeb's. watched the sunset, saw the stars and mars, played scrabble. saw the norman rockwell museum (with a special exhibit on the berenstain bears!). lunched at betty's pizza shack, brunched at carol's. lenox was a bit confusing...navigation was easier after we found a map. a bit on the chilly side.

sunday, folks came over and i finally watched zoolander, which was everything i was told it would be.

though, were it not for suz's handy contribution of amstel lights, i would have only had mgd to ply people with.... this led to the usual conversation about blue laws, and i did some googling. i hadn't realized connecticut and new york and flordia and delaware were relaxing their blue laws as a way of increasing revenues. weirdly, liqour store owners are not eager to keep their stores open longer. in 1961, the supreme court said such laws were not a violation of church/state separation.

it's hard to understand how any self-respecting government could preserve some of these asinine and idiosyncratic rules with a straight face. case in point: "The Wal-Mart in York, S.C., can sell groceries on Sunday morning but can't sell clothing and hundreds of other items until 1:30 p.m. That means barricading part of the store for more than 13 hours every Sunday."

Thursday, August 28, 2003

Dasypygal

Wednesday's word of the day was dasypygal, which the Google dictionary doesn't recognize, but which produces 107 results. What does it mean? Hairy buttocks. Apparently "[From Greek dasy- (hairy, dense) + pyge (buttocks).]" A related word is "callipygian, having a beautiful behind."

Today's fun link: Hall of Technical Documentation weirdness

Friendster update: 0 friends. I think they have some sort of bug. ;-)

Hey, look, it's me in Budapest!

Just when you thought looking through your referrer log was getting old, check out what I found. I find it very weird that Seb and I have communicated in public forums several times since then but haven't exchanged email. Blogs really have changed things.

The peanut gallery paper continues to be a popular source of visits, by the way. (And Metabuzz, though I should update it more....) I think I will always give my papers distinct names, since being able to search for "Mining the Peanut Gallery" in Google is quite fun. (And I found my first citations! Relatedly, I've noticed that Citeseer's citation detection is kind of weak...The excellent Cornell paper on movie review classification still shows no citations.)

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

OpenCourseWhere?

With another school year starting, higher education is back on the minds of journalists, and there were two interesting articles recently. One was the Times mag article on Summers. This was particularly interesting since the whole West thing broke while I was at the Herald and I had spent some time learning about Af-Am Studies. (As an aside, the Globe also covered a controversial academic leader this week, Jordi's old boss.) Anyway, I thought the ideas of teaching more knowledge and fewer ways of knowing, and of teaching more quantitative reasoning were both excellent (and similar to Yale's findings). I also liked their description of Summers who argues with people to sound out their ideas, and not because he disrespects them, something I'm also guilty of.

The other article was in Wired about OpenCourseWare. OCW is an awesome idea and I think it's sad that more schools don't make more content available for free. This was the sentiment behind Thinkquest, and it's an important one. The article had some fun tidbits, like the fact that most popular class is one in philosophy and that the top user is Canada. America wasn't even in the top 10. (Speaking of rankings, Yale was third again but tied for second in the eyes of America.)

Something or brother

I'm still recovering from my my brother's visit. Doing the tourist thing was exhausting but fun....we hit the Freedom Trail first, wandering around graveyards (particularly fascinating after having spent all that time on the death web site) and climbing the Bunker Hill memorial and whatnot. Then we barely managed to get across the Big Dig (near the Bunker Hill Community College stop) to the Museum of Science. The Museum was way cooler than I'd expected, and I particularly enjoyed the math part and the van de Graaf generator. We had lots of fun playing and then we watched the fairly unenlightening IMAX movie Top Speed. The next day we watched the Sox win in the burning (literally) sun (unlike, say, their performance today) for only $40 per scalped bleacher ticket, thanks to a home run by Millar undoubtedly the result of watching himself dance to Bruce Springsteen as a teenager on the Jumbotron. Sunday we wandered around Cambridge and found a street fair and checked out the Gehry building at MIT (site includes cool time-lapse videos!). We also rented 25th Hour, which was filled with ambiguous Sept. 11 references but had some great performances and cinematography, and Drumline, which was just plain fun.

Thursday, August 21, 2003

PrettyWiki

Martin and Fernanda's visualizations of wiki authorship are now up on a web site! You don't get the full impact without being able to use the program, but the results are beautiful and fascinating. It's neat to watch little arguments happen (much easier to grok than paging through histories or even trying to read threaded discussions), and it's really suprising how little vandalism there is. Clay gives it a thorough analysis.

Monday, August 18, 2003

Some thought-provokers

So, yeah, I've been a bit AWOL lately, but the interns are on the way out and I'm slowly returning to not having much of a life (I'll miss you, interns!)...

But, I have been doing some interesting reading. For example, in Wired, there were a few gems in the letters to the editor. One was a suggestion that we send convicts into space as our first inter-planetary travellers. And another was that international corporations represented useful global organizations if only they could be harnassed to solve global problems.

Meanwhile, David Brooks starts with an interesting premise and devolves into his usual over-generalization and self-importance. Diversity seems to keep coming up these days, though. Mark sent me this link about white kids growing up in black neighborhoods. And at brunch we talked about the suit against Abercrombie. At the sociable media reading group this week, we talked about Watts's study. It was a pretty interesting discussion, thinking about what one might hope to gain from a well-structured social network study, and how even though we can contact lots of people directly, we use introductions in order to help catch the other person's attention (and trust). It's almost a sort of reintermediation. Heck, even The OC (great show!) is at its heart a story about combatting insularity.

Random fun link: List of speed traps.

Friendster update: 295,195 through 31. (and the stuff about Friendster being blocked in offices made it into danah's blog. Yay danah!)

Tuesday, August 5, 2003

Strange survey results

Interesting survey by the Horatio Alger Association reported in CNN finds that 47 percent of high school students have confidence in Congress, and only 26 percent in the media. Even weirder, 75 percent of students get along very well with their parents. "Asked how they'd like to spend more time, more teens said they would rather be with their families than hang out with friends, play sports, listen to music or do anything else."

Sunday, August 3, 2003

AmeriCorps

If Andrea and David Eggers are both spreading the word about something, it must be important. In this case, it's AmeriCorps. So, I signed the petition to save it, and you should, too.

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

Oh well

So the DARPA idea market isn't happening, says the FT. Bummer. I thought it was a neat idea.

Monday, July 28, 2003

Life's but a walking shadow

Requisite weekend wrap-up:

Went to Tia's. Fun scene. Excellent night.

Saw Macbeth on the Common. Sort of overwrought, favoring pyrotechnics over good acting, and nothing so interesting about the directing. Maybe that's what it takes to put up shows on the Common - after all, they did Carmen in English. But I talked to a lot of people who didn't even bother to sit through the whole thing.

Went to the Cape with folks from work and met up with some cute vets-in-training. Highlight was definitely the police in the town of Sandwich, or, as the sign said, the Sandwich Police. How cool is that? "Sir, don't put that mayo on your sandwich!" "Who do you think you are, the Sandwich Police?" "Why, yes I am."

Friday, July 25, 2003

More political stuff

Sébastien picked up the Googlearchy link and put it in one of my favorite blogs! So, on the off chance that some traffic finds its way here, I figured I'd try to drum up support for Mike's idea of the Blogger Voter list. In order to avoid duplication of efforts, get in touch with Mike if you're game.

Thursday, July 24, 2003

Googlearchy!

A fun word and interesting idea comes from Matt Hindman, who I met once and hope to hang out with again... Googlearchy. He writes about the impact of power law distributions of links on politics in both a paper and the paper.