Weekly Web Harvest (weekly)
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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.
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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.“
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“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.
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“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.
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“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.”
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“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.
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Nixie wearable brings a personal drone to your wrist – SlashGear
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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.
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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.”
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“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.”
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Internet Detritus #4
Thesis Statements? Makes for an interesting project for any kind of book and maybe an introduction to the concept of a theme/thesis statement. via It’s Okay to be Smart Staying Pure via Boing Boing I’ve posted on the Google Translation idea before but this video adds a decent introductory element (although I’m not sure kids today are familiar with the Fresh Prince). Can you create a sentence that isn’t corrupted by the Google Translation torture test? Who can create the longest sentence that remains pure? The most complex? When do things break down? Why? It might be fun to take the quotes of different authors and see what stays true and what ends up muddled. Then you breakdown why. Endless fun. Added to the Podcasts New to me, via Boing Boing Subscribe here (iTunes link). Words we ought to have in English 8. Tartle (Scots)The nearly onomatopoeic word for that panicky hesitation just before you have to introduce someone whose name you can’t quite remember. via The Week and a number of other people. I’d like to see what words kids would come up with that we need. It’d be a fun way to discuss when we need one word vs many. I’m also betting they’d come up with needed words that already exist in English. Plant Cell Compare to […]
Weekly Web Harvest (weekly)
Falcons imprison live birds to keep them fresh for a later meal | New Scientist tags: falcons birds meal biology weekly Your Speech Is Packed With Misunderstood, Unconscious Messages – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus “designers of synthesized voice systems have begun experimenting with the insertion of naturalistic disfluencies into artificial speech.” tags: future human weekly How to Design A Modern Office Space for Optimism “When you look around an office, nine times out of 10 you can tell if it was designed for fear. How does fear manifest in space? High walls. No windows. Closed spaces. By extracting management from the doers and makers of the company, there’s plausible deniability. When conversation is inhibited by high-walled cubicles, information is controlled. And to effectively instill fear in office culture, you have to control information. You have to make sure teams are segmented into departments, information is transmitted linearly and power is centralized.” tags: spaces learning office design weekly Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
If That, Then What?
The Google spreadsheet passing the information on to this chart, which should be live, is being fed by an IFTTT recipe. For the record it doesn’t seem like you can mess around with the non-used portions of the actual worksheet where data is being written by the recipe. I was able to add another worksheet and use that to run some formulas on the worksheet where the tweets are being written. =len(‘Sheet 1’!C1) is the formula you’d write to access cell C1 of Sheet 1 and count the number of characters. Granted, keeping track of my progress towards perfect 140 character tweets doesn’t have much value (although there’s one that’s 150 characters that’s a little puzzling) but it’s just a proof of concept. I could parse out other elements. I do need to look back at the DS106 hashtag spreadsheet and see how that’s working as I don’t see any working version of that since Twitter killed RSS support. And a random byproduct of some other work I’m doing messing around with The Mother of All Demos. Seriously though, tell your friends. Apply for the job.
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