Too much good stuff on the internets today.
XKCD on Pluto
New British Comedy “No Heroics”
Why I like Joe Biden
Silly? Awesome? Silly andawesome?
Google brings the 21st century
Wordle
The internets are awesome today
Apple’s Burning Ring of Fire
An amazing thing happened to me today. I was sitting at my laptop working when, all of a sudden, the connector for the power cord that plugs into the laptop caught on fire. I yanked the cord immediately. The thing gave off a few thin tendrils of smoke and then died a quiet, peaceful death.
SXSW Panel: Beyond Folksonomies – Knitting Tag Clouds for Grandma
This panel defined folksonomy and the current state of tagging. During the course of the conversation there were a few suggestions on ways to improve upon the current state of affairs, which is what the panel was really about. I wanted to expand on that part of the conversation.
Countdown: One Day to SXSW
SXSW Interactive is just over a day away. It’s my favorite time of the year. Even better than Christmas.
Great article up on Salon right now called I, Nanobot. Definitely worth a read.
I just saw a great Twilight Zone. One of the old black and white ones. Man, I didn’t realize how [...]
The Whitehouse Robots File
A lot of sites have a file called “robots.txt” to tell search engines which directories and files to go into and which ones to leave alone. Typically, you don’t want search engines going through your sensitive data. A lot of sites no longer use the file because, well, it tells everyone where your sensitive data is. For those sites that do still use them, the #1 thing they tell the search engines not to read is the “robots.txt” file. Not the Whitehouse!
21st Century Sea Level
Let’s not even discuss whether global warming contributed to hurricane Katrina’s fury by creating warmer waters in the Gulf or higher sea levels. Let’s instead focus on the fact that sea levels are rising and more and more areas are going to be at or below sea level in the future. What do [...]
Green Engineering
I’m a big fan of environmentalism that doesn’t change the way we live. Mainly because I think it’s just impossible to get the majority of people to make sacrifices for something that they can’t see as tangible. Any effort by the rest of us is pretty meaningless if the majority isn’t joining in.
Riffing on Vista
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a funny, tongue-in-cheeck article about the upcoming Microsoft Vista OS (formerly Longhorn) over at eWeek titled “I’m So Excited by Microsoft Vista. Not.“
Can a Spam Filter Play Chess
Thanks to Kottke for pointing me to this diversion, which effectively prevented me from getting work done this morning. It’s a step-by-step tutorial for teaching your Bayesian spam filter to play chess with analysis on how well it performs. It’s written in plain English (except for the code snippets) so you don’t have to have much programming knowledge to follow along.
The Lonely Apple Repairman?
I’m sure if we were to just stop making new bits and pieces for our computers and just spent all of our time refining what we currently have that we would have much more stable machines. But what a waste that would be. Stability is great, don’t get me wrong. And the software and hardware industries (but especially software) could certainly do a better job of creating more stable products, but there will always be a balancing act with innovation.