I just found out about the Wordle site, which allows you to create “word clouds” out of text passages (or web sites), with the most frequently occuring words showing up in the largest font. For example, here’s a preview of what my solar energy blog post’s word cloud looks like (click image for full-size view on the Wordle site, where you can create your own):
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The latest New Yorker has a very disturbing article about the suicide of a thirteen year old girl after becoming the victim of a tragic hoax played on her by vile neighbors. The incident happened in late 2006 but came to light to the public only in November of last year. I don’t want to summarize the story. Read it at your own leisure. It’s written by restaurant critic extraordinaire Lauren Collins.
Once you read it, I’d be curious to know what you think of the perpetrators. Are they guilty (as you will discover, no charges were brought)? Especially the adult(s) involved?
I am looking to move to another apartment in San Francisco and boy, is that difficult! I am looking for apartments by browsing Craigslist and have set up RSS feeds on my home page. I constantly check to see if there are any apartments on the market. There are a few that come up now and then. It is not as straight forward as elsewhere in the bay area. There is this open house that you have to go to and there are so many people that show up there looking for a place to live in SF. The owner of the apartment gets to choose the lucky one from many many many applications. Owners’ market for sure. I have found that an open house is a waste of my time competing with so many people and try avoiding them altogether.
Then, I look for ads that do not call for an open house. There are no guarantees even here. When the owner gets too many emails from people looking for a place, they call for an open house eventually. This is what happens in most of the cases in SF. Anyway, I chanced upon an ad that sounded so good.
$1500 / 2br - Amazing apartment! W/D, D/W, A/C, 1300 sqft, all is included, parking (noe valley) (Read more…)
This is cool. I can now enter queries in Malayalam from my iGoogle page using their on screen keyboard “gadget.” The results are displayed in Malayalam. You don’t need a separate localized keyboard for this. Other Indian languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, etc., are also supported. If nothing else, I hope this will prevent me from forgetting my own native script.
Barats and Bereta are a popular YouTube duo who have posted many humorous clips on various topics including several on college life. I first came across them on YouTube about a year ago and became an instant fan of their humor and social commentary. The duo met at Gonzaga University which features prominently in many of their videos. After building up a huge fan following, I heard that they were supposedly getting some kind of TV deal to create a comedic show or act or something. Their YouTube creative output has conspicously dropped leading me to believe they actually have graduated and have less time on their hands with real jobs instead! Well hopefully we’ll see more of them and their works in the future. Anyway, the following YouTube video is one of my personal favorites where they poke fun at stereotypes of American suburban life and attitudes. There used to be a longer bookended version of this which for some reason they have removed from YouTube but the essence of the video is still here:
Now everyone and his grand-uncle has a new time-wasting tool. Google street view - where you can peek through your neighbor’s bedroom window from the safe haven of your own bedroom. Just make sure the curtains are drawn and pray that the roving eye is not passing by right then. I can just see all the voyeurs putting away their telescopes and investing in high resolution monitors. Well, at least it’s not real time. Not yet.
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A few of my friends, my wife included, frequently bemoan the fact that the world as we know it is coming apart and things are getting worse every day. The daily onslaught of news on the human condition does not help alleviate this feeling for them.
Ever the optimist, I assert that on the whole this generation is doing better by itself and by its fellow man compared to any other generation in the past. Obviously I say this with no data, only as someone who is actively engaged in a grounds-up effort to provide opportunity to those who have none. Personal experience of being with some of these people gives me that optimism. Now it turns out that there is also data available to show that our lot is getting better, not worse.
Take a look at Gapminder They present human development data across the world in some very cool and innovative ways (Google has acquired their technology to make it available for free).
Go to the tools section and try out the GapMinder World, 2006 (the first one on the Tools page). You can change the X and Y axes (It defaults to Income v/s Life Expectancy but you can change them (e.g. you can compare Life Expectancy v/s Military Spending). It gives you a clear indicator on how things are changing around the world (except in Sub Saharan Africa where, due to the AIDS crisis, things have slipped back a bit).
BTW: It is also a fantastic way to get kids interested in statistics. Over the weekend my 6 y.o look at it over my shoulder and the next thing you know she spent more than an hour in front of the computer playing with the X and Y Axes. She kept telling me everything from “How Malawi compares with the United States in Child Mortality (I explained to her what that is)” , she was playing with Physicans per 1000 people etc, population growth over time etc.
I would also recommend the 1 hour Tech Talk they have posted (given at Google) and the video on Slums.
(Sorry, this post does not fit into any one category that we have - so I choose a few of them)
Joseph Rago, an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal today writes an entertaining editorial on blogging and how it has supplanted mainstream media (MSM) albeit in a bad way. He makes the point for the relevancy of MSMs even though he concedes that it collapsed itself “by playing on its reputed accuracy and disinterest to pursue adversarial agendas.”
Most memorably, Rago quotes Joseph Conrad’s famous take on newspapering, “written by fools to be read by imbeciles,” while saying that bloggers are filling out this role themselves. The article is a scathing rebuttal on behalf of a dying breed: journalists of the MSM. Rago signs off with this:
Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.
This is one of the best editorials I have read on the blogging phenomenon. You can read the whole piece here.
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