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[Some good and some very very bad advice.]
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“A community that, most importantly, is willing to express their concerns, frustrations, hopes and successes, online, loud and proud, through words and images and film.”
Ty Burr on ‘10,000 BC’: Yabba-dabba-don’t
Ty Burr is great.
Link: Yabba-dabba-don’t – The Boston Globe:
How can a film that features a poorly shot attack by giant tree-climbing killer chickens be said to be good? Which rippeth off the ending of ‘‘Apocalypto,’’ pyramid and all, such that the great shaman Mel Gibson could sue?
And I saith to you, verily, it is a bad movie, with foolish racial politics, and indeed it may someday be spoken of as the worst of the year 2008. But I also saith to you that I had a strangely good time, and whether that is from laughing at ‘‘10,000 B.C.’’ or laughing with it I knoweth not, although I strongly suspect the former.
And it should be pointed out that Roland of the clan of Emmerich, who hath fashioned this tale, hath not ascended once more to the level of ‘‘Independence Day’’ but hath instead settled comfortably in the Valley of the Saturday Matinee B-Movie, a land once inhabited by giants named Roger Corman and 1950s special-effects magician Ray Harryhausen, whom the giant killer chickens doth seem to honor in their stop-motion jerkiness.
So, yea, it is a stinker. But it is prophesied that in six months time you shall come across ‘‘10,000 B.C.’’ in the land of Pay-Per-View. And you shall say: ‘‘Pass the popcorn.’’
links for 2008-03-06
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“A wild Eastern gray wolf roamed Western Massachusetts last fall before being shot to death on a farm, federal and state officials said yesterday. It was the first wolf confirmed in the state since hunters drove the species out more than 160 years ago.”
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[Invites are welcome] “ireEagle, which is built entirely on Ruby on Rails, was originally inspired by Yahoo’s ZoneTag research product. It is a platform for controlling people’s location information.”
links for 2008-03-05
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“These days, designing a new mobile phone can seem like something out of an episode of “Dr. Phil.””
‘Facebook fatigue’?
While I am part of the Facebook bashers (well, bashers of the current Facebook craze), I always feel that I am dead wrong, since so many folks are still signing up and using it.
But recent reports (link below) are hoping to sound the death-knell for Facebook and other social networking services.*
Eh, I’m an impartial skeptic and will only believe any slow-down after a few months, no matter how well the indictor (remember, only one indicator in one country) might support any of my arguments.
But, speaking of other indicators, Google has click-through issues with AdSense and MySpace also is showing a UK slowdown (see link below). Is this the bursting Bubble 2.0 (funny video) everyone loves to speculate about?
Nah. If anything, just the natural flow of users from network to network.
Link: ‘Facebook fatigue’ hits networking website | Business | The Guardian:
British internet users are falling out of love with Facebook and the social-networking site has shed 400,000 visitors between December and January, the website’s first decline in users.
Facebook remains the UK’s most popular social-networking site with 8.5 million unique users at the end of January, according to new figures from Nielsen Online. But that is down from 8.9 million in December.
*Indeed, we’ve seen in our research, already early last year, early-adopter burnout. Hence my harping about the rise of Vox and Twitter and Jaiku, closed circle social networking. I’m just wondering what’s next (and I have my ideas).
Twitter Stats: Relationship Distribution
Finally found out that Twitter has been publishing a few stats on usage.* Pretty interesting.
One that got me was the distribution of how many people per user if followed or following:
So, if you have about 10 followers and you’re following about 10 people then you’re Twittering away with a solid 50% of others like you using Twitter. If have more than 80 followers and you’re following more than 70 people then you are in the Twitter minority—about 10%.
Ok, I wished that had given some indication of active versus non-active. Right? I bet a ton of the non-active accounts are 10 and under follow(ed/ers).
Oh, just realized that this was indeed for active users. Cool.
*They’ve started this stats section with the Twitter stats on the Superbowl. Yup, I was definitely one of the twitterers that night. Alas, one of the sadder ones at the end.
links for 2008-03-04
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[simply brilliant] “Award winning personalized storybooks Create magical memories with just 1 photo in 5 minutes”
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“Myxer accounts are free. Myxer is not a subscription service. If we are ever going to charge you for anything it will be very obvious. Making your own ringtones and wallpapers is free. Whether you upload songs and images from the make page, or you use th
Well, what do you know? Craig Venter going to Harvard as a visiting scholar
My wife pointed out, once more, a link to something on Venter (link below to blurb). I wonder if she wants me to work with him. [Nope, irrelevant inference.] And she has no idea I made another reference to him already today. Do I tell her?
This group he’s going to work with is cool.* This whole thing is cool. Could have been cooler is I were still there. It’s not at the medical school where I worked at in Boston, but the main university in Cambridge. But, I still would have gone out of my way to see him speak.
Link: J. Craig Venter named visiting scholar | HarvardScience:
J. Craig Venter, the visionary biologist and intellectual entrepreneur who was a leading figure in the decoding of the human genome, will join Harvard University as a visiting scholar at the University’s Origins of Life Initiative.
*As usual, I’ve met a few of the people where he’s going to work.
links for 2008-03-03
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[the key is to relax]
Entropy is over-rated. Long live Complexity! (Bonus: The Venter)
Does everything tend towards Entropy?
One of the first things we learn in chemistry is that everything tends towards entropy.
How can that be? Whereas Steven Johnson calls it the Long Zoom (in that you can zoom up and down levels of complexity) we constantly are seeing lower-order networks yielding a new level that itself begets new levels.
I lost my notes long ago, but I remember trying to grapple with the way sub-atomic particles glommed on to form atoms to form molecules to form auto-catalytic systems to form cells to form organisms to form societies to form <ad infinitum>. I tried to recapture that thought in an earlier essay, but there are a ton of other folks like Steven Johnson and the folks at the Santa Fé Institute who are also trying to understand the properties of complex systems.
But if all tends towards Entropy, how to we form these complex emergent systems in the first place? Do we have to Zoom all the way down to the fabric of the Universe to understand that single simple little principle that allowed a slight formation of a complex network that caused the domino effect that leads to today, a little principle that has been at War with Entropy since the formation of Everything?
Ufa!
A lot to think of. And I know I am way over simplifying somehow.
Bonus! The Unit of Measurement for Complexity
I don’t know if it exists (but I am sure Hugo can find it), but, in the course of writing a script for a graphic novel set in the far future (which I am set to overhaul under the ‘show-don’t-tell’ principle), I started thinking about how reductionist we are and that we have no way for describing complexity in a system (that I know of).
And, as you probably know my fascination (fanboi?) with Craig Venter, I thought he’d be an appropriate label for the measurement of Complexity – he’s re-written the books on the Genomic Age so many times and has ushers in the Age of Meta-Genomics.
Venters (Vn), a logarithmic scale of biological complexity. A virus is 3Vn, bacteria 3-10vn, fungi 10-30Vn, single cell 10-20Vn, complex 20-50Vn, planaria+ 50-100Vn, social arthropods 100-500Vn, reptiles, birds, fish, mammals, social networks…
My original thought was that the Venter would be a logarithmic scale of _biological_ complexity. But I suppose it could be a measure of complexity in general. Complexity can be measured by nested levels of networks, levels of connections between networks, and level of energy to maintain network (the inverse of Entropy, I suppose).
The symbol for Venters would be Vn, as V is widely used and taken for Voltage or Volume.
Any takers?
Heh, really being a geek.