Dane Carlson's Weblog (original) (raw)

Saturday, January 26, 2002

Behavior of real ants: "It is well-known that the main means used by ants to form and maintain the line is a pheromone trail. Ants deposit a certain amount of pheromone while walking, and each ant probabilistically prefers to follow a direction rich in pheromone rather than a poorer one. This elementary behavior of real ants can be used to explain how they can find the shortest path which reconnects a broken line after the sudden appearance of an unexpected obstacle has interrupted the initial path."

Pic to HTML

Lance Knobel: "Commonplace books arose in the renaissance as a means for learned men to record quotations or observations that seemed important to them."

Hi Gordon. Unfortunately, I don't live in Winnemucca, yet. I live in Central California and am dying to move.

A lame attempt to explore the psychology of weblogs: "Most weblogs are drivel, banal shit..."

Jorn has built a neat page for comparing Bible translations.

Friday, January 25, 2002

You're at a party and see a fabulous girl/guy. They walk up to you and say, "I hear you're fantastic in bed." That's Brand Recognition.

It seems that .info and .biz websites don't show a pagerank in the Google toolbar. Can any find an example where this is not true?

Dave hates WinerLog and WinerLog hates Dave. This we all know, right? Well, why then does Dave continue to let WL use editthispage.com as their weblog host? Doesn't Dave own (or at least run) Userland? Manilasites (of which Editthispage.com is part) is full. Wouldn't Dave rather have someone less vocally critical of him in that last spot? Ok, this is probably way out in left field, but if Dave and I switched places, I would love for their to be a "Dane Carlson sucks" weblog. The exposure would bring me fame beyond my wildest dreams. Of course, Dave and I have our own respective positions in life. If we reversed Radio would never have been developed... So its better this way, but if we did switch, atleast I'd be able to grow a beard.

Blogger Pro is out. Get it, if you like that sort of thing.

Thanks Rebecca for pointing out Home Power Magazine. I'll probably get a promotion if our gonzo marketing deal goes through!

Matt Welch writes in Reason: "Censorship Gravy Train - Oh, to be a seven-figure victim of the New McCarthyism"

I wish we had this when I was in school. QuickMath is an automated service for answering common math problems. Its an online calculator that solves equations and does all sorts of algebra and calculus problems - instantly and automatically!

Verifying a person's gender may be harder than you think. Check out this Flash presentation "Gender Testing of Female Athletes."

Dull Men's Club: "We keep hearing people say, "A watched pot never boils." We have proved that this is not true. We like to watch pots of water boil. We have been doing it for quite a while now. The water always boils. We were going to do a scientific experiment to see whether a watched-pot boils comes to a boil slower than a not-watched-pot. We found that we couldn�t do this. Without watching the pot, we would not be able to see when it starts boiling."

Thursday, January 24, 2002

Google is planning to ban all doorway pages made by WebPosition Gold. "Autopages or "doorway pages" can be generated by such programs, giving prominent placement to certain words and phrases that a Web site operator thinks are likely to be searched for by consumers."

Thomas Wagner spent the night in Winnemucca in 1980 and still that the "largest potatoe field in the US is near there. It was a nicely quiet place back then." Now you know why I love Winnemucca.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that there has been a surge in conversions to Islam since September 11, especially among affluent young white Britons.

Cataloging 5072 blogs. Its Blogrolling.

Kids starting college this fall... The Class of 2005 Mindset List.

US jobless claims fall for third consecutive week: "Jobless claims are now at their lowest level for six months, suggesting a revival in the US economy."

A stolen iMac is recovered by k-rad AppleScript hacking. The machine in question had a copy of the screen-sharing Timbuktu app installed, along with Timbuktu's DynDNS-like nameservice, which meant that the iMac's owner could locate and take control of the machine whenever it was dialled up to the Internet. This is a wonderful account of his battle to get his machine back. At first, he flirts with erasing his machine's drive remotely, but ultimately he solves it in an even sharper way, by reconfiguring the AOL client on the iMac to dial his home number, which gave him a caller ID trace through which he eventually recovered his computer. from Slashdot.

John Robb has noticed that there are a lot of great Estonian Radio Weblogs out there. I wonder how much Estonian my mother-in-law remembers from her childhood?

Yesterday my site was crawled by "googlebot-enterprise (Enterprise; DEVEL-00036;sylvie@google.com)". What is it? Has anyone else seen it? The Google experts at Webmaster World have no idea either.

Wednesday, January 23, 2002

Yahoo introduces a Premium Document Search. According to the site, Yahoo plans to charge consumers between 1and1 and 1and4 to retrieve files from a specialized database of some 25 million research documents culled from 7,100 publications, including academic periodicals. Yahoo also expects to offer a "Premium Discount Search" option of 50 documents a month for $4.95.

Make Voice Mail Work for You: Treat your voice-mail system like a personal assistant, particularly if you're away from the office during the day.

Solar energy is an abundant source of power for spacecraft navigating the inner solar system. But how far away from our star can photovoltaics work?

Bowling Together: Robert Putnam on how Americans are no longer bowling alone as much after 9/11.

In praise of bad habits: This is the outline of a lecture by Peter Marsh to the Institute for Cultural Research in London, November 2001. "In the Western world we live in an age that is, by all objective criteria, the safest that our species has ever experienced...[yet] we have, ironically, come to fear the world around us as never before. In the absence of real risks, we invent new and often quite fanciful ones." He talks about the rise of 'coercive healthism' we find around us, and the religion of health.

The end of men: "Scientists at the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago have devised a way to create "artificial sperm" from any cell in [the] body which can be used to fertilise another woman's egg."

Tuesday, January 22, 2002

Women attracted to men who smell like dad: "A T-shirt sniffing test has revealed that women unwittingly prefer the smell of men who have similar genes to their dads. But this is no Freudian Oedipal complex." Will we then find the scent our fantasies under our own arms? Wait, does this only work for females? from AntiPixel.

Businesses: Think twice before re-designing your website.

The word on the street is that Google will soon be introducting a pay-per-click product that will replace the current CPM-based AdWords on the right hand side of the results page.

The Case Against Knowledge Management: "At a company where I worked many years ago, circulating correspondence was an everyday practice. It was also one of the simplest and best knowledge management techniques I've ever seen."

How the Wayback Machine Works: "the Wayback Machine, currently there are 10 billion Web pages, collected over five years. That amounts to 100 terabytes, which is 100 million megabytes. So if a book is a megabyte, which is about what it is, and the Library of Congress has 20 million books, that's 20 terabytes. This is 100 terabytes. At that size, this is the largest database ever built. It's larger than Walmart's, American Express', the IRS. It's the largest database ever built. And it's receiving queries -- because every page request when people are surfing around is a query to this database -- at the rate of 200 queries per second. It's a fairly fast database engine. And it's built on commodity PCs, so we can do this cost-effectively."

Jon Katz reviews Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.

AOL in Negotiations to Buy Red Hat Linux. Cam says, "Think about how easy it would be for AOL to distribute an AOL-customized version of Linux with an AOL-customized version of Mozilla (Netscape 6) all on a single CD, along with a mail client (an AOL-customized version of Netscape Mail) and AOL Instant Messenger. All of a sudden, AOL is free of Microsoft's tentacles. By shipping a unified OS, web browser, email client and IM client, AOL is going down the same path Microsoft has been going down for some time now."

AP: Amazon.com Posts First-Ever Profit

U.S. Surname Distribution: "Enter a surname into the form and you'll get a map of the United States showing the distribution of people with this surname within the 50 United States."

Monday, January 21, 2002

"Worldwide Pinhole Photography Dayis being held on April 28, 2002. Information about how to participate is at the site. Maybe it's time for me to eat some oatmeal, build my own pinhole camera, and take some photographs." from subterranean notes.

Check out 10 things Google has found to be true. "A terrific set of operating principles." from JD.

I get everything fixed and then I get busy... Oh, what a life.

I am so happy I got my weblog working again!

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. "People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd."

Sunday, January 20, 2002

Is Radio working now?

Dane Carlson's Weblog

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