Weekly Web Harvest (weekly)
-
Man Regrets Jumping Onto Whale Being Eaten By Sharks – Business Insider
“Even the parents of this Perth, Australia, man who jumped onto a whale circled by hungry sharks say their son is an idiot.
“
-
Intoxicating machines – O’Reilly Radar
““Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about,” [Richard] Feynman later explained. “The trouble with computers is you play with them.”
— George Dyson, describing the beginning of the Manhattan Project’s computing effort in Turing’s Cathedral.“
-
“And so it goes. No contest. The infant experience of the easy life can only ridicule the idea that patience and effort used to be fine. But I’ve been trying to examine the problem from a new angle, and I keep coming back to the same truth: Life is better. In some nostalgic, carefree, totally invented Mississippi River of the mind, we were always floating downstream in a vessel of our own making, always happy to have nothing, living high on our wits and our basic decencies. But was it nice? Was life as good as it is now? One is almost programmed, if over the age of 35, to say no to this question. One is supposed to stare into the middle distance and recall the superior days of a life less needy, the rich rewards of having to wait and having to try and having to do without. But the actual truth, my friends, is that my childhood would have been greatly, no, infinitely, improved, if only I’d had a smartphone and a dog walker.
“
-
“That level of caution, I thought at the time, bordered on tinhat-level conspiracy theory. You might as well declare Alex a false flag attack on the American psyche before descending into your bomb shelter. But my editor, unlike ufologists and 9/11 truthers, comes by his paranoia honestly — because there is nothing on the Internet that cannot be manipulated or contrived, no defense against a particularly savvy hoaxer. Sock puppet accounts can be made, and fake followers bought. Screenshots can be Photoshopped. Algorithms can be gamed.
“
-
“The goal of Explorable Explanations is to change people’s relationship with text. People currently think of text as information to be consumed. I want text to be an environment to think in.”
-
“Mother Wishes Son Had Been Killed” — Medium
“The two women were defended by E W M Flock. Both were flashily dressed and stod before the magistrate in a haughty manner. Annie Garfield is better known to the police as Annie Harkness, “the women”, said Crown Attorney McKillop, “who has the reputation of having so many husbands.” The woman made no reply to this remark.
“
-
Nixie wearable brings a personal drone to your wrist – SlashGear
-
How ‘Alex from Target’ became an unwitting Internet superstar – The Washington Post
“Meanwhile, on YouTube and Vevo, fans will compulsively refresh video pages inflate their view counts. One Direction actually coaches fans on the practice: Make sure you’re watching the right video, they advise; share the link “constantly;” and watch for at least 30 seconds before Ctrl+R-ing the page. There’s no denying that the scheme works: “Steal My Girl,” which One Direction just released just over a week ago, has already been viewed almost 20 million times.
“
-
How This Working Man Became Japan’s Most Controversial Marathoner
“In 2013, Kawauchi, a self-coached, 40 hour/week government worker, ran eleven marathons (most top marathoners run two, maybe three, marathons per year). His average time in those eleven outings was faster than the top eleven US marathon times, run by all Americans. Four of Kawauchi’s eleven marathons were sub-2:10 (still the benchmark for elite status, though East Africans are often five minutes faster). In the history of US marathoning, there was only one year in which the entire US produced more,five, sub-2:10 performances. The US is lucky to have three sub-2:10 performances in a given year, usually posted by three different people.”
-
“This was probably for the best, because the bite of a slow loris is no joke. Being the only known venomous primate in the world, its bite can quickly turn deadly.”
Related posts
Markov Seeds
I started to comment on Alan’s recent post but realized I needed to document this a bit better than a comment. Every so often I kick over the #ds106 Markov generator and see what comes out. Sometimes I push it on to Twitter to share with the world. en You know what I understood characters (included. You to in inner pages @IamTalkyTina is Back? Where is YOUR photo? #ds106 #markov — Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) December 4, 2013 This one amused me so I did. @twoodwar en But I don't really understand what you just said. Like what #markov means? #ds106 #contextfelldownthestairs — Talky Tina (@IamTalkyTina) December 4, 2013 Talking Tina replied, justifiably confused. I explain. (There’s some additional side chatter you can see here but the more interesting stuff is below.) @IamTalkyTina random text assembler w #ds106 tweets as source material http://t.co/GPAK1njFkh It's fairly fun (to me) although context free — Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) December 4, 2013 It could have died there but instead it went into a realm I could not have predicted- probabilistic programming in quantitative finance. @twoodwar Am I here ?? Probabilistic Programming in Quantitative Finance | Quantopian Blog – http://t.co/suhLmUKjab #ds106 — Talky Tina (@IamTalkyTina) December 4, 2013 Bill Smith chimes in with n-dimensional Hilbert space. @IamTalkyTina @twoodwar You R probably not here, but likely to be there. […]
Weekly Web Harvest (weekly)
The California Sunday Magazine “She waves to one of her neighbors, but only after dark, so that the other neighbors won’t see” tags: weekly writingprompt sociology Google News Redesign Concept for Objective Reading – PSFK On the function side, Google intends to make the news as balanced and objective as possible with options including comparisons of the same story from multiple, competing news sources, news only from eyewitnesses, and a graphic coverage timeline to track the progress of reporting as well as the events of the story. tags: news google bias truth lies weekly Making the most detailed tweet map ever | Mapbox ” And here is what those 6,341,973,478 tweets look like on a map, at any scale you want.” tags: weekly dataviz twitter tool code Chart Brut: How the MS-Paint Graphics of Conspiracy Took Over the Web “There’s a new style of folk art booming on the internet: The crudely rendered, text-and-arrow-happy conspiracy diagram. Let’s call it Chart Brut: Simple, unrefined, urgent, ominous, striving to be informative, and utterly incomprehensible. It’s a digital middle-ground between the string-and-thumbtack cork-board flowcharts favored by premium-cable obsessives like Rust Cohle and Carrie Mathison, and the meaningless tangles of agency responsibilities beloved by security-apparatus bureaucrats, and it’s emerged as the defining folk aesthetic of the 2014 internet. It shows up on message boards […]
Weekly Web Harvest (weekly)
Pessimism Is Good For You – Neatorama “The constant admonitions to “think positive!” aren’t as useful in achieving your goals as we once thought. Of course, fatalism isn’t much help, either. But tempering one’s optimism with a real-world dose of pessimism may do the trick.” I think people confuse pessimism with realism. tags: weekly pessimism optimism outlook These Shotgun Shells Are Made For Shooting Down Drones | Make: “We came up with the Drone Munition concept for a couple reasons. It started in a discussion with some friends of ours who have an aerial based flying target solution (similar to a Quad-copter/drone). They have been looking for a dedicated ammo product line that will work well for their training program and recreational shooting experience. We applied the Drone Munition name with the marketing spin both to hit this target market, as well as to bring a discussion to light on the growing drone market. “ tags: drone weekly ammunition Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.