Tech – Page 25

Review: How Sex Works, by Dr. Sharon Moalem

August 13, 2009 by John 3 Comments

My review of this book is now online, over at The Book Book.

Short version:

Non-fiction, written by a neurogeneticist and evolutionary biologist.
Based on fairly current research. Informative. (Especially on the question of what makes you turn your head at someone, or not — at least if they’re within sniffing range.)
Not as provocative as you might imagine, not as clever as the chapter titles might suggest…
…but not bad. Okay.

One issue has already come up, related to my review rather than to the book itself. I wouldn’t mind hearing from others about it. Which is: Did I go too far in using asterisks to hide certain keywords (including the title’s most important word) from the hungry, Google-fed appetites of spammers, link farmers, and so on?

I really don’t know. Thought about it for weeks, in fact — and finally decided to err on the side of caution, mostly since I’m not the unlucky soul who’d be responsible for scrubbing away all the comment spam, and/or turning comment moderation on.

Opinions?

Yeah, You and James Brown

July 28, 2009 by John 2 Comments

It won’t come as news to anybody that blogs — all the “citizen journalist” talk notwithstanding — aren’t where you typically find news. They’re where you find feelings: reactions to news, sure, but also just general reactions to family and work situations, reactions to human behavior, reactions of self-approval and -disillusion, and so on.

Somebody finally decided it was time to weigh all that emotion. (Which, among other things, allows bloggers to record how that information makes them feel.)

Warning: We’re entering time-sink territory here.

Here’s how the folks at We Feel Fine summarize their mission:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day.

You may find this Orwellian. You may find it absurd. You may wonder what this says about the state of the world, the Internet, human nature…

All of which, of course, you should feel free to blog about.

The image at the top of this post shows a partial screen capture from one of WFF‘s “movements.” (Each movement is a different way of representing the underlying data.) Here, the site apparently takes forms of the phrase “I feel” and captures the word which follows. As you can see, as of the time the database was most recently updated, 3,950 bloggers felt strange, and “strange” was the 77th most common feeling. (This is probably a huge undercount; 100% of bloggers seem to feel strange close to 100% of the time, they just tire of writing about it.) At the moment, the project is taking the emotional pulse of over two million blogs.

Incidentally, I learned of WFF from the excellent ResearchBuzz newsletter. (Anyone interested in doing online research will probably faint dead away to learn of its existence.) Specifically, I picked up this item from the @researchbuzz Twitter feed; I don’t see anything about WFF on the ResearchBuzz Web site at the moment. That tweet led me to an article on Newswise, which (among other things) also introduced me to “the optimistic Irish economist Francis Edgeworth[, who] imagined a strange device called a ‘hedonimeter.'”

Which, um, makes me feel pretty good.

Your Favorite Bookish Blogs?

July 20, 2009 by John 2 Comments

I first read about this on Twitter last week, via Travis Erwin: the second annual Book Blogger Appreciation Week, sponsored by Amy Riley of the My Friend Amy blog. Among other details at the site are these raisons d’etre:

WHAT A week where we come together, celebrate the contribution and hard work of book bloggers in promoting a culture of literacy, connecting readers to books and authors, and recognizing the best among us with the Second Annual BBAW Awards. There will be special guest posts, daily blogging themes, and giveaways.

WHY Because books matter. In a world full of options, the people talking about books pour hard work, time, energy, and money into creating a community around the written word. I, Amy, the founder of Book Blogger Appreciation Week love this community of bloggers and want to shower my appreciation on you!

Now, I don’t know what Running After My Hat is, exactly. But it would be a stretch to say it’s “about books.” So I feel perfectly non-conflicted — well, as much as I ever am, anyhow — in recommending that you stop by to (a) nominate your own favorites in any of the many different categories, and (b) register your own blog. (Registering makes you automatically eligible for the BBAW “grand prize,” whatever that is. I went ahead and registered RAMH just in case they use it to validate votes, minimize or eliminate ballot-stuffing, and so on.)

No idea what prizes or giveaways will be offered. And after a grand total of, uh, well, one previous prize year, we’re probably not talking about all-expenses-paid trips to tropical paradises, brand-new hybrid SUVs, kitchen makeovers, and so on.

But hey, who wouldn’t want to recognize and support the best blogs about books? We’ve all got favorites, right? Let ’em know!

Of Double Dactyls, Electric Velocipedes, and Hedgehogs

July 14, 2009 by John 3 Comments

Check out this TED video, of lexicographer Erin McKean (note the “View Subtitles” button — an option I wish were available everywhere, for obvious reasons):

Cool, huh?

Especially given that two years later, her new online super-duper improved version of the dictionary concept is actually online now. It’s called WordNik, and it’s very interesting.

I went to the WordNik site, and entered the word touchstone into the blank field. Here are some of the things I found out:

I got four examples of the word’s use in a sentence, drawn from Project Gutenberg texts of public-domain works. For instance:

To answer this, we must consider the argument for conceivability as the touchstone which is to separate the “Knowable” from the “Unknowable.” The Arena Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891
The original, non-metaphorical meaning (per the American Heritage Dictionary) was: “A hard black stone, such as jasper or basalt, formerly used to test the quality of gold or silver by comparing the streak left on the stone by one of these metals with that of a standard alloy.”
The word had shown up in Twitter tweets twice (ha!) within the previous 20(ish) minutes.
My favorite, this image showing the word’s popularity over time:
(The caption under the image explains, “Bubble size: how much this word was used in a year. Bubble height: unusualness in that year.”)

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. But this sort of thing isn’t just fun and cool; it feels like a leap, y’know?

July 4th: (Momentary) Freedom from Self-Consciousness

July 4, 2009 by John 7 Comments

So there’s this new writerly-blogging trend — not really a dangerous one, but it sure feels like one to a cautious soul like Yours Truly. Which is: throw caution to the winds. Post online something you’ve written, and… ask for feedback.

I think I’m going to try that, and I’ll get to that in a moment. [Whoops — too late!] I’ve tried that, briefly, over the last couple days, and depending on how that works out I may post about the experience later.

But first I want to lay the groundwork. I want to tell you about a sort of breakthrough I had last week, in working on Seems to Fit. (That’s the WIP’s new title — coming up with a final (?) title not the breakthrough I speak of now, although it was a huge weight off my mental shoulders then, and still.)

[Read more…]

Department of Unintended Consequences
(Animals & Technology Division)

June 30, 2009 by John 2 Comments

The Missus and I are not alone in having a dog who barks rabidly during thunderstorms. But alone or not, we do. She may be little, and her bark may be a mere yip! compared to the more conventional woof! of full-size hounds, but she is determined to scare the storm away.

(And you know what? You can’t argue with results. The storm always leaves.)

For the record, she also barks when dogs on TV bark, and she barks when doors slam on TV, and when she’s anxious for dinner, and when someone opens the front door from outside, and she barks when she’s happy and excited about a new toy or t,r,e,a,t being unwrapped.

Still, she was doing this new thing in the last couple of weeks which I couldn’t understand: she’d suddenly start barking for no reason. It was like her storm-barking: frantic, maddened you-better-stay-away-from-my-family barking.

I couldn’t understand it, that is, until the moment over the weekend when I just happened to— well, let me explain.

The Missus and I have new “smart” phones. I don’t know what The Missus is up to with hers, but by default, when my own phone rings it just rings. Oh, I’d done the obvious thing already — downloaded a ringtone, and aren’t I hot stuff for having figured that out?

But then my former boss was telling me about her phone, which is roughly the same model, and she asked if I’d gotten into customizing ringtones: really customizing them.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I set mine up to ring as usual whenever someone calls, and I’ve got a different ringtone for my Mama, and one for my sisters…”

That sounded (ha, no pun intended) pretty cool to me. So I did some research. And then took action.

Now, I haven’t gone as far yet as my ex-boss. But on a lark, I did set the phone up to play my downloaded ringtone whenever a call comes in… and to vibrate whenever an email arrived in the Inbox.

That was it, you see:

Notifications from Facebook: bzzzzzzz, BarkBarkBark!

Spam arriving: bzzzzz, BarkYipBark!

E-newsletter subscriptions: bzzzzz, YipYipYipYip!

In short, the dog was being driven slowly but unambiguously mad by the male human’s flaky experiments in telecommunications.

And all it took for the male human to figure it out was to move the phone from the coffee table to his hip pocket. And then, of course, to make a connection between the bzzzz! against the thigh and the YipYipYip! in the ear. We won’t discuss how long this last step took.

Public-Service Announcement: From Behind, Footsteps

June 16, 2009 by John 7 Comments

Strange days…

The Employer announced last week that they’d be blocking access to Facebook and MySpace, due to some unspecified virus activity. That took effect immediately. Can’t speak for MySpace, but Facebook access seems to have been restored yesterday (haven’t checked yet today).

This morning, a strange combination of “Personal and Social Networking Sites” are also blocked, with no warning.

Included are Flickr, any site hosted at wordpress.org (some sites merely powered by WordPress software), and blogger.com — but not blogspot.com. (Or maybe vice-versa, hard to tell.)

Still, during the workday — so far — I can see all your blog postings via Google Reader. (Even though I can’t see any images from the blocked sites.)

But I can’t actually get to (i.e., comment at) many of them.

(Aside: If your blog posts use those little “– more –” gizmos which restrict viewing to just the first portion of a post, Google Reader likewise will show me only the first portion: I can’t click through to read what follows.)

Anyhow, please don’t be alarmed (or insulted) if I seem to have gone all silent and unidirectional all of a sudden. If the blockade continues, I’ll try to figure out a way to visit more during off-hours

The Interwebs are our Precious. We hates the nasty hobbitses downstairs, we do — nasty hobbitses who steals from us the Precious.

Update: Nope, the doors are locked to Facebook, too. Also Twitter. I experimented a little last week with something called Posterous.com, which would allow me to update FB/Twitter status… but not to read/comment on anyone else’s status, which (for me) is 80% of the attraction. Sigh.

There Are Some Cures for Pre-Summertime Blues

June 3, 2009 by John 5 Comments

Wanted to draw your attention to a couple of recent donations to the “life is complex and frustrating, so let’s go have some fun!” cause.

First, you can generally look to the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog for a pick-me-up. (And before breakfast, say researchers, is when 99% of the populace most needs picking up. (The other 1% need it most while they’re sitting on barstools and fantasizing about Mr. or Ms. Right, as the case may be.))

But today’s post, “Some Cartoons for You,” just made me grin from ear to ear. (It might even have made the grin wrap around to the back of my neck — an alarming sight, no doubt, for the people behind me in the elevator this morning.) As is usually the case at 7-Imp, the focus is on children’s books and illustrators — specifically, in this case, illustrators who favor a cartoon-like style of art.

It’s pretty darned hard for me to look at this without smiling, and it’s not even the whole image (from “Mr.” [Tom] Warburton’s 1000 Times No — see a reproduction of the entire page at the 7-Imp site):

[Read more…]

It Is a Tweet Universally Acknowledged…

May 21, 2009 by John 5 Comments

Truly brilliant stuff. Very brief excerpt:

TheRealJaneAusten:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife.

MrsB:
A Mr Bingley–worth 50,000 followers a year–has joined Twitter! He’s brought a friend, Mr Darcy–worth 100,000 followers a year! Pls RT

MrsB:
@JaneB @LizzyB @MaryBsaphorisms @KittyB @LydiaB I will have one of you girls married into internet fame yet. Just you wait.

LizzyB:
@MrsB But mother, I think we can pull ourselves up by our dooce-straps just fine.

MrsB:
Blogcasting: How to find husbands for your daughters: http://tinyurl/momblog Now with free giveaway from our Etsy embroidery shop. Pls RT

LizzieB:
@JaneB If I could love a man who would love me enough to take me for a mere 50 followers, I should be well pleased…

LizzieB:
@JaneB …but such a man wouldn’t be sensible & I could never love a man who was out of his twits. LOL

JaneB:
Oh @LizzyB, it is my ardent wish to marry 4 love. Love, respect AND dual laptops would be most agreeable. #iamdullbutpretty

…and it gets much, much better. I am in awe.

[Hat tip to Maggie, Dammit.]

[Aside to self: In any week when you really need to use the Web for productive reasons, do not allow Google Reader to open, under any circumstances.]

Damned Radiograph

May 16, 2009 by John 4 Comments

From the start of a recently deleted sp*m comment here at RAMH:

Whereas feelings are not viewed as ethical(that is, not judged to be good or bad), behaviors are . The radiograph will show you how many puppies she is having . Value your partner as your sexual friend and be an intimate team.

The hell with that, I say. If she’s having even a single puppy she’s got a lot of explaining to do… and you can safely strike the phrase “intimate team” from our implied contract, starting now.