December 2007
70 posts
Traffic Zoology →
There is a secret zoo that runs encaged along the roads.
They are liquid, semi-visible goliaths that rage through the streams and chunks of ordinary traffic, with the effervescent tendrils of mile-long tails whipping behind them like Chinese dragons. Though composed of hundreds of pounds of steel, glass and plastic, they are able to pass through solid objects. They are bound by the laws of the...
Things Done on Christmas Break
… an incomplete list.
Given presents
Received presents
Made plum pudding
Eaten plum pudding
Sat in the sun
Sat watching son
Chased chickens with son
Slept in
Slept on couch
Read on couch
Read good books
Caught up with old friends
Yes, life is pretty good.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure...”
– Albert Einstein
Gaze heuristic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia →
The gaze heuristic is a heuristic employed by people when trying to catch a ball. Experimental studies have shown that people do not act as though they were solving a system of differential equations that describe the forces acting on the ball while it is in the air and then run to the place at which the ball is predicted to hit the ground. Instead they fixate the ball with their eyes and move so...
TransLink - is go card for me? →
That’s go card. The italics seem compulsory.
go card is a new paperless TransLink ticketing option being introduced across South East Queensland. Daily, weekly and monthly tickets will still be available, however the go card will make catching public transport easier and more convenient - passengers simply touch on at the beginning of their journey and touch off at the end. No more fumbling...
Book review: The Upside of Down →
My friend Ricky reviews The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, by Thomas Homer-Dixon.
Australia copper thieves loot cemeteries →
“We are even seeing problems at cemeteries with the stealing of copper” from grave sites.” But not just cemeteries. One suspect was almost killed as he tried to cut an 11,000-volt copper power cable in Sydney. It was just on the late news. It fused the cable-cutters to the wire.
Rising copper prices lead to railway overhead... →
Police say a rise in the price of scrap copper has led to people stealing overhead wires from Melbourne’s railway network. “What we believe is happening is that they’re stealing the copper wire and selling it at various scrap metal dealers for money.”
“A mangelwurzel hurling championship was revived in the north Wiltshire village...”
– Yes. Indeed. The Norman. (via wikipedia; reblogged from Sideways Dave’s Ad Hoc)
Shawn Blanc →
Shawn has a gorgeous website.
The Ultimate Mac Buying Experience
It was 3am and raining outside. Jed had been up all day (all right, since 2pm) agonising over the final purchase decision on his new 24” iMac. Was the 1TB hard drive worth the extra money? Sure, he could buy a standard-issue iMac and get a larger drive fitted by a third party, but there was something, well, pure, about ordering an ungrade direct from Apple. Of course, he was shunning the...
“There were some old men with bloodshot eyes who looked as if they had been...”
– But other people did. An Asian woman who wanted a haiku; A Princeton doctoral candidate who wanted a love poem, not to anyone, or for anyone but “Just love”; and a wedding poem for Wesley, an engineer, and Lisa, a patent examiner from Hawaii. (The American Scholar - Poetry Stand - By...
“Pooh looked at his two paws. He knew that one of them was the right, and he knew...”
– Pooh Quotes!
“Nice book...dumbass” →
A photoset on flickr.
“Nano”. From the Greek. Meaning; “give me lots of research...”
– ElderDave. Totally. Also, as Dave mentions, “sustainability”, “social networks”, “citizen {journalism|created content|*}”, “bio-{tech|fuel}”. It doesn’t hurt to be at a big established university, and it doesn’t hurt to be in the applied...
WatchThe shocking truth finally revealed. Apple makes fun of Microsoft in its promotional videos.
Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer's →
Dammit.
I know it’s a very human thing to say ‘Is there anything I can do’, but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry
“The adoption of “context-aware” as the metaphor du jour for technology is an...”
– Tom Erickson. Calling something “context aware” when it has an impoverished understanding of “context” and is no more “aware” than a toaster does a great disservice to what is otherwise an enormously complex, interesting and potentially world-changing technology. (quote and my commentary tumbled...
“How would they spark an intergroup conflict to investigate? Well, the 22 boys...”
– The Robbers Cave Experiment, like that famous blue-eyes brown-eyes social division “game” shows just how easy it is to assign someone, anyone, to the status of “other” and dismiss them as being beneath you.
My business card is a ball of putty →
Ahahahahahahahahahaha.
— plsj I concur. Ahahahahahahahaha.
Constructivist Foundations →
Constructivists want to do science without reference to reality:
Constructivist approaches entertain an agnostic relationship with reality, which is considered beyond our cognitive horizon; any reference to it should be refrained from;
Finally, constructivist approaches ask for an open and less dogmatic approach to science in order to generate the flexibility that is needed to cope with...
“The coffee house must not be dismissed with a cursory mention.”
– Pepys went to a coffee house, an important social institution. I’m strongly tempted to follow Pepys sterling example and go and sit at my local coffee house and get some work done.
The Perpetual Super-Novice →
A perpetual super-novice is someone who “stop[s] learning about a digital product—whether it’s an operating system, desktop application, Web site, or hardware device”. The phenomenon of the perpetual super-novice is presented as a problem which assumes that everyone should become expert.
This assumption is wrong.
Why should users of digital products have to become experts? As a...
In praise of original content
Everybody wants to be Jason Kottke or John Gruber.
The best way to start a post about the desirability of original content if, of course, to mention a few a-listers who have high-traffic link-logs. The thing about Gruber and Kottke is that they really do write great original content, too.
So, today, a change here at TGB, precipitated by the daily meh’s post about the perceived lack of...
“I’m editor of the internet. That’s pretty cool, I think.”
– Daily Meh. That is cool. I’m editor of the internet too.
“This is the end of desktop software - Solitaire was the final frontier.”
– Steven Garrity on World of Solitaire
“Sometimes a design decision is what you don’t put in, as opposed to what you put...”
– John Gruber, quoted in Shawn Blanc » Why Daring Fireball is comment free
“The whole movie felt exactly like being in Off Topic and not being able to leave”
– Dr Dave, on Idiocracy.
“People ask what I do for a living, and I say: I type. I type and I have coffee....”
– Merlin Mann
Are they really out to get you?
Or is it just paranoia?
I can’t decide whether to be outraged about facebook’s recent exploits (ha!, geddit?) or remain ambivalent and unsurprised at a corporation partnering with other corporations to make more money.
Of course, it didn’t stop me radically rationalising my profile. Yes, I know they still have my data anyway.
digg labs →
Cool visualisations of stories on digg. Not that I actually use digg. But the visualisations are very pretty.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood...”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Antisocial networking →
Adam Greenfield on the inherent badness of large scale social networking services.
