Link Banana

Farhed Manjoo accurately captures the latest “Google killer”:

As it kept coming up empty, Wolfram Alpha came to seem less like HAL 9000 and more like a chatbot. It’s been trained to respond to some kinds of queries, but any variations leave it stammering. It’s a savant, smart about a few things but profoundly ignorant about large swaths of human knowledge.

If you manage to input a query that’s it’s well-suited to answer, the results can be deeply interesting — a seach for “weather” and my zip code gave data I’d never seen anywhere — but it’s a very limited tool.

Shirky should be required and regular reading for anyone involved in the transmission of ideas. His latest has a number of good lines. A severely pruned list of the quotes I pulled from it:

“When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

…the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model.

(via Waxy)

I’ve noticed that Google now adds to the search results of some searches a timeline of when that term is mentioned in sources — apparently a combination of newspapers, books, and websites. A few observations made using the tool:

• Many events have peaks in ten-year anniversaries of their first happening. See for example: Hiroshima, Apollo 11.
• Recession seems reasonably well correlated with market feelings.
• The historical usage of some terms in interesting. Try for example, piracy and Black Friday.
• “Apollo 13” got a definite boost when the movie came out.
• Some terms show the tool still has bugs. Mesozoic for example. (The peak at 2000BC, for example appears to be caused by a misinterpretation of a citation.)

Obviously the validity of all of these observations is limited by my limited understanding of how the thing works and its bugs.

Want to send visitors straight to the incessant song in Charlie the Unicorn 2? Now you can:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFCSXr6qnv4#t=3m33s

(via BF)

This is a bit old, but I enjoyed perusing Rob Beschizza’s attempt to highlight the hardware preferences of certain types of people.

Sounds boring and technical until you see this.

(via kottke)

Chipping away at the “to read someday” pile, I found this bit from The Economist.

To be on the right-hand-side of an eye-level selection is often considered the very best place, because most people are right-handed and most people’s eyes drift rightwards. Some supermarkets reserve that for their own-label “premium” goods.

I’m definately going to be thinking about this next time I’m shopping.

Someone’s adding Photoshop pallettes and dialogues to obviously altered advertisements on the Berlin Metro.

(via kottke)

Robin Sloan pens an interesting “think piece” about  how Google may actually be changing our way of processing information. And no, it’s not a “technology will make us stupid” thing.

Also note the very good and thoughtful responses.

UPDATE (1/14/09): Robin clarifies.

That’s apparently the time that internet congestion is the worst. And though I’d take this result with a grain of salt, it makes some sense to me.

An old friend’s first venture into “e-junk” taught me a bit of science and history:

These things are some of the biggest planes ever built. The largest, dubbed the Caspian Sea Monster, was longer than a football field, could move over 1000 tonnes of cargo, and crossed the Caspian at speeds over 250mph. The Soviets kept the project secret, so you can imagine the poor fishermen who undoubtedly found themselves in the path of these speeding behemoths. Keep in mind they never flew more than a few meters above the water.

Hypothetical question: You’re heartsick about global warming, so you’ve just paid $25,000 to put a solar system on the roof of your home. How do you respond to news that it was manufactured with a chemical that is 17,000 times stronger than carbon dioxide as a cause of global warming?

I’d probably say, “Really!? Wow. That sucks. Is there any replacement.” To which the article says nothing.

(via Ideas)

Another reason to like Louis CK.

(via Jack Shedd)

These bits always interesting me. For example, I had no idea that the iPod name came from 2001. (Assuming I’m willing to trust CIO magazine.)

A funny thing happens when you copy and paste the character on this page into a text editor. (via Waxy)

I can’t count then number of times I’ve wished for this to be easy. Saving you from awkward (or overlong) conversations: another reason to love the march of technology.

(via Magnetbox)

Disney’s 57 page EULA before you can watch Sleeping Beauty on Blu-ray is why we should remove any legal force from EULAs. Or ban them outright. Or at least require an executive summary so that people will know what cr*p they’re accepting before they (inevitably) blindly do so.

(via BBG)

Speaking of international figures doing unexpected things, Demitry Medvedev has a video blog.

(via Passport)

If you’re wondering why the world hasn’t ended yet, this may be why. Quoth Slashdot:

“A 30-ton transformer in the Large Hadron Collider malfunctioned, requiring complete replacement on the day the LHC came online. No one at CERN reported any problems, and they only released this data once the Associated Press sent people to investigate rumors of problems. I guess it’s hard to just sweep a 30-ton transformer breaking under the rug.”

The other amazing I hadn’t realized was this: an operating temperature of 4.5 Kelvin was too hot for the thing to work properly.

I would like to nominate this experimental feature of Gmail as the most useful common-sense (and overdue) email improvement ever:

if you mention an attachment in your email and hit send without actually attaching a file, you’ll get a pop-up message asking if you meant to send without the file.

(via Lifehacker)