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February 27, 2007

65,536 Bytes of Madness

Robin says,

New blog entry up over at Current with a video that's worth watching -- it's one of these demoscene videos generated by a teeny-tiny computer program, just 64K big. And it melts your face.

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 2:56 PM

February 26, 2007

OpenCongress

Robin says,

Super awesome new site from the makers of the Democracy Player. What's interesting is that all of this information was already available online -- it was just obfuscated. Eet eez ze power of design...

Comments (3) | Permasnark | Posted: 10:33 AM

February 25, 2007

The Restaurant Game

Matt says,

Another awesome idea passed along by Grand Text Auto: The MIT Media Lab has created a lightweight multiplayer restaurant simulation. You can play as a waitron or as a diner, and all your interactions with other players will be recorded and used to train an AI system. The resulting AI will power a single-player game, to be released next year.

Comments (1) | Permasnark | Posted: 12:05 PM

February 24, 2007

Flash-Based Epidemiologic Strategy Game

Matt says,

My high score in Virus 2 is 43441. I got down to 25 attempts, and my fastest growth time was 23.

I think I'd wager that the number of games invented in the last 10 years and spread around the world outweighs the number invented in the last 10,000.

Comments (5) | Permasnark | Posted: 1:20 PM

The Magician Turned the Whale Into a Flower

Matt says,

Yeondoo Jung has created a gallery containing drawings by children reimagined as photographs. My favorite thing about it is seeing how literally he translates some portions of the images (e.g. the triangular pigtail in "Television was so funny"). Divining the artistic intents of a 4-year-old = solid gold.

(Planetdandy.)

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 11:45 AM

The Wisdom... or Something... of Crowds

Robin says,

An interesting thing happened at Jim Romenesko's Starbucks Gossip site recently: Somebody slipped Romenesko what appeared to be an internal email from Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz. Romenesko posted it, with the caveat: I have no idea if this is real.

Soon after, its legitimacy was confirmed, and now it's been covered by the big guys. (It's actually a pretty interesting story -- Schultz is warning that Starbucks has lost its way.)

But before that happened, Starbucks Gossip readers were hashing out the likely legitimacy of the email on their own. If you read some of the long comment thread, you get an awfully good snapshot of web-ified group discussion today: smart; informed (most of the commenters are Starbucks baristas!); opinionated; and, er, often wrong.

No specific conclusions from me (maybe you have some?) but I just thought it was a data point interesting enough to share.

(Starbucks Gossip is great, by the way -- I think I might read it with more excitement than I do the other one these days.)

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 10:17 AM

February 23, 2007

Fields of Vision

Robin says,

What would you display in your multi-screen war room data hub thing?

I'm thinking... something like this mixed with something like this.

(P.S. Does Pruned find great images or what?)

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 6:44 PM

February 22, 2007

Free Multimillion-Dollar Startup Idea of the Day

Matt says,

A mashup that allows users to create Pop-Up Videos out of YouTube videos. You'd get acquired by Google for $25MM, easy. And it would be soooooo hott.

Comments (4) | Permasnark | Posted: 8:32 PM

February 21, 2007

Random Race-Related Reflections

Matt says,

The "Society/Culture" category on Snarkmarket is getting ridiculous.

1) This one really isn't about race, per se, but it's about Barack Obama, for whom race will be the designated press narrative pretty much through the duration of the 2008 election. And it's less a reflection than a question: I know Timothy Noah's been doing the Obama Messiah Watch, tracking Obama hype through the pressosphere, but is anyone doing an Obama backlash watch? I feel like every campaign reporter in America has gotta want to be the author of the Obama Controversy. Someone with a sharper attention span than me should totally be keeping track of the attempts. Wonkette, meanwhile, has a list of valid reasons for a Baracklash.

2) I'm slowly catching up on the first season of the Boondocks, and it's super-smart. Much higher and more consistent quality than the strip. The cast of characters is just brilliant -- unconventional configurations of familiar racial archetypes. And I love the texture of the show, like the recurrent 'Gangstalicious' single "Thuggin' Luv" you hear from episode to episode. Favorite moments?
- The alternate-history Martin Luther King, Jr., episode, where he survives his assassination and awakes from a 40-year coma to witness 9/11. When his response includes an appeal to non-violence, civic leaders immediately distance themselves from the legend, saying, "That's not the Martin Luther King, Jr., I know!"
- The courtroom party at the end of the R. Kelly episode.
- The news footage of the Gangstalicious fight at the Grammys.

Comments (2) | Permasnark | Posted: 7:17 PM

PR via YouTube

Matt says,

BrandFlakesForBreakfast is right. JetBlue earns +10 humanity points for posting a YouTube video from its CEO instead of the standard press release on its website.

Comments (2) | Permasnark | Posted: 1:01 PM

Philosophers and Webcams

Robin says,

Have you seen BloggingHeads.tv? It's a vlog show that's sort of defiantly lo-fi, and spectacularly weird and cerebral -- but often too inside-baseball for me. I really enjoyed bits of two recent episodes, though: Robert Wright's chat with Francis Fukuyama (Francis Fukuyama!) and with Joshua Cohen. Fukuyama you know; Cohen is a prof at Stanford and editor of the awesome Boston Review.

P.S. Did you know Fukuyama has a blog? I love 2007.

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 12:24 AM

February 19, 2007

Tim's thoughts: Ah, that link to the codex video is broken. But <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFAWR6hzZ... >>

Perplexing DaVinci

Riffing on an Arthur C. Clarke idea about the unpredictability of science, Kevin Kelly is musing about expected and unexpected inventions (via Infocult). Clarke actually created a chart of inventions or discoveries most scientists could have foreseen before they came about (e.g. automobiles, flying machines, telephones), and ones they couldn't have predicted (e.g. sound recording, relativity, atomic clocks). Kelly does the same thing, putting organ transplants, the cell phone, and the test tube baby in the realm of the expected, and DNA fingerprinting, radar, and artificial sweeteners in the unexpected camp.

The criterion, Kelly explains, is the "perplex the ancient" test. If Da Vinci were brought back to life, would he be utterly mystified by the technology, or would he grasp the concepts behind it?

For instance, genetically modified crops would surprise no one, because the technique is simply breeding by another means. On the other hand, the underlying concepts of DNA fingerprinting would be mysterious, magical, problematic, and take great lengths to explain. The World Wide Web is the long sought after universal library and answer machine. But virtual reality doesn