omgourpartyisawesome. K7 receives incoming comestibles. The Go Team goes. Germans converse. Alana spies, not so subtly. Neal is Drunknealbot. Ken-ichi is in the stream. He has the Canoe of Consciousness. Ivan contemplates the mysteries of Airtunes. MCD dominates. He is a dominatrix. IN Scrabble. A scrabble of pure speed. He has trix. Hence, Dominatrix. Alana refuses to even play. What does she dominate? Drinks. She rulz them. Daniela … has only one El. So I am told. Scrabble resumes. Scrabble! At a party! What is this?! Kevin searches for the trap door. Hannes finds the secret level. In the kitchen. “Yay, giving up your dignity for the greater good of Man. Neal thrills, or is thrilled. Regardless, he is lurching toward me. In a menacing manner. Google would be proud. What? Who will moonwalk down the stairs. Wait, moonwalking is impossible in the third dimension. So sayeth Neal. If we weren’t blogging we would be at a different party. @learn hannes as chi-mo’er with moves. Hannes wins. Officially. Aaaaannndd I am done. With blogging. For now. YES!

As you might have heard, Queen Mary 2 was in San Francisco this past weekend. QM2 is the tallest ship ever built and for that reason the tallest ship to have ever passed under the Golden Gate. (I suppose this implies that the Golden Gate bridge is tall enough to allow _any_ passenger ship to pass underneath.) Here are a couple of photos.

Check out all the “groupie” boats in the second picture. I got more pictures of this event here if anyone cares to procrastinate more.

I’m supposed to be analyzing a Harvard Business School fable (er, case study) for class tomorrow. But instead, in the last hour:

• I notified a friend that I’ll be working near her this summer, implying we should have lunch, ohhhhh, about 4 months from now.
• I made plans to see an informative talk in 3 weeks.
• I looked at a friend’s photos from his trip to India.
• I ate some eggs and toast.
• I passed word around that Ozzfest is free this year.
• I found out that someone I met this weekend does modelling, and looked up some photos, just for kicks. (HA! no links for you!)
• I referred a friend to a great article about happiness (sorry if you don’t subscribe to the Economist, shortened version here).
• I watched a music video.
• I saw the one thing I missed by skipping the Super Bowl.
• I re-read a part of a book totally unrelated to school.
• I pondered what I could put in a letter to my Congresswoman, but didn’t actually do it.
• And finally, I came upon a clock for procrastinators.
• Well, then I spent 20, well, more like 45, minutes blogging.

So right about here, I was gonna ask some pointed questions about procrastination, but, y’know, maybe later.

OK OK, just one: CAN ANYONE STOP ME FROM PROCRASTINATING!?

I just ran across a series of hilarious Japanese TV clips, any insights to what’s being said would be great, though not necessary to enjoy them.

Live action Pac-man, where you get beat on the head with foam sticks instead of getting eaten by a ghost:

Man Gets Punked by an Alien

Don’t Mess with the Egg or the Chickens Will Beat You Down

100 Person Flashmob Randomly Chasing After People

Last night my cousin and I were stuck in Grand Central Station waiting for our 1:08 AM train to leave. To pass the time we wandered around and noticed two people standing in opposite corners of the room pictured here, which is right next to the Grand Central Station oyster bar.

They were facing the corners as if they were being punished, and were whispering to the wall. I guessed that perhaps the acoustics of the room allowed them to hear each other, although I sort of suspected we were being had.

Being one who is always up for a fun experiment, my cousin and I put ourselves in the same place as the two we had seen and began talking to the wall.

I was absolutely astonished. You can hear even a soft spoken person as if they are right beside you. If you are ever in Grand Central and have five minutes, I highly recommend this. We were lucky that almost all of Grand Central is empty at 1 AM, but I would be curious to find out if it works during normal hours.

I’m pretty certain that this has to do with the vaulted ceiling and stone materials in the room, reflecting the sound waves back into the opposite corner, but if anyone has a more technical explanation, do post.

i’ve mentioned cory arcangel’s berkeley talk before, but in it, he talked about trying to do the minimum edit to existing items, in creating “his art.” he implied that any less of an edit than his work, and it wouldn’t be his work. any more of an edit, and it’d be too much work. he simply deemed himself “lazy” (though i found him to be good at implementing his whims).

the other day, i wrote a few words on a piece of stationery (thanks daniela!), and suddenly i felt as if i’d made an original creation (see right)

i didn’t do much, i took a black sharpie and barely took 10 seconds to write a few context-setting words. yet people ask me about “my drawing.” decades ago, a talented illustrator named Martin Provensen spent a significant amount of time and effort developing the character of Tony the Tiger. Isn’t it audacious of me to think that a piece of stationery, bearing both the long-standing icon of Provensen’s success, and my overlaid chicken-scratch, is MINE?

this spurs questions that i thought i’d pose to everyone:

- what constitutes a re-authorship edit? restated, what are the properties of an edit that causes the authorship to be reassigned to the editor?

- what are some examples of tiny tiny edits that re-frame the authorship or the statement of a work?

google scholar’s slogan is an imperative statement: “Stand on the shoulders of giants.” the bulk of “user-created” content on the web is somehow derived from copyrighted content that users find compelling.

- are we just relaxing the once-hard boundaries of originality? should we be worried? is originality less relevant, as overall quality goes up?

UPDATE: it seems that Tony really did have to go through an interview process, and beat out Elmo the Elephant and Newt the Gnu, who never got to be cereal mascots.

I’m a naturalist, and one of my favorite things in the world is finding something in nature that is not only new, but that I can’t even begin to describe. The mystical naturalist might be satisfied with admiring the humbling magnitude of nature’s diversity, but not me. For me, this is the primal information retrieval experience, and since I spend all my time inside in front of a computer, I generally tap the Intarweb when books fail me.

Here’s how I went about it in a few cases I can recall:

Wingless mantis?!

I had only known one kind of praying mantis where I grew up, and I was never particularly concerned with exactly what species it was. When I got out to California and found this little guy, I didn’t know what to think. It was small, wingless, and skittish, very un-mantislike as far as I was concerned. In order to find a list of mantids in the state, I actually had to turn to the Google Books edition of California Insects, a slightly outdated but mostly comprehensive guide to the state’s insects. Searching inside the book for “mantid” brought me to page 74, which describes the female minor ground mantid as sometimes having short wings like this. Still not 100% on the ID, but this was the closest I could get.

Continue reading ‘Personal Biodiversity Information Retrieval’

I am not sure how interesting this would for this audience, but there is a cool map included anyways.

Gmail had this web clip for me:

One of my friends gmailed me that he was going to India next week. The email was not in English but was transliterated in English (like this Telugu sentence ‘nenu india veluthunnanu‘ means ‘i am going to India’). The email doesn’t have the word ‘Bangalore’ in it and I never google searched for cheap tickets. There is no translation engine yet for any of the Indian languages. All that said, Google could still ‘make sense’ of what was going on in the email. But whats a little disappointing is…it didn’t zero-in on the right destination. Bangalore is located in the medium slate blue area in this map, while Telugu is spoken in the region adjacent to it. Both languages have a common ancestor, but Google probably doesn’t use linguistics anyways. Google obviously has a huge corpus of email and web searches to mine things, but as this example shows, thats still not enough statistically. As the corpus grows, one could basically have cheap tickets to anywhere.

… are Washington and the Kremlin are now no farther apart than the speed of light, atleast technically.

Many of you might be familiar with this story, but as somebody who listened to it for the first time, I am totally fascinated by this recap of the first-ever live television broadcast by Walter Cronkite. Every time orbiting Telstar would pass over Atlantic, it would provide an 18 min window of communication between Europe and United States. One of those windows witnessed Kennedy reassuring the dollar to a question that some how got serendipitously squeezed into the window before telstar went down the horizon. Ta-da! The dollar gains strength almost instantaneously! This recap is just awesome!

If anything has changed in the whole story…it is no longer Washington and Kremlin….but New York, San Francisco, London, Shanghai, Tokyo, Singapore, Bangalore….and that’s the way it is. Thursday, December 07, 2006. Good day!

This is the trailer for the 8 Bit film that’s making the rounds at the moment.

That’s in addition to what appears to have been the roaring success of the Blip Festival this weekend in New York.

photo by small ape. See his whole set from the festival here.

As always, check out the originators of the sound the 8 bit peoples with over 65 “releases” on the label. Also check the scene’s tune forum/social network micromusic.