The internet, unhappy with its futile Ron Paul spamming campaign, today launched a large flying object into the sky to spam the heavens themselves with Ron Paul mindshare.
This election is comedy gold.
Side note: this site now uses Google Analytics to maximize profits and achieve goals.
I have one more note related to the presidential speech tag clouds. There are large chunks of American history when “constitution” was a regularly-used word in government address. Now is not one of those times. Here’s a quote:
I have seen nothing since I came here to change my opinion . . . but abundant reason to be convinced that our affairs are in a more distressed, ruinous, and deplorable condition than they have been in since the commencement of the war. By a faithful laborer then in the cause; by a man who is daily injuring his private estate without even the smallest earthly advantage not common to all in case of a favorable issue to the dispute; by one who wishes the prosperity of America most devoutly and sees or thinks he sees it on the brink of ruin, you are beseeched, most earnestly, my dear Colonel Harrison, to exert yourself in endeavoring to rescue your country by (let me add) sending your ablest and best men to Congress. These characters must not slumber nor sleep at home in such times of pressing danger; they must not content themselves in the enjoyment of places of honor or profit in their own country while the common interests of America are moldering and sinking into irretrievable (if a remedy is not soon applied) ruin, in which theirs also must ultimately be involved.If I was to be called upon to draw a picture of the times and of men from what I have seen, heard, and in part know, I should in one word say that idleness, dissipation, and extravagance seems to have laid fast hold of most of them; that speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seems to have got the better of every other consideration and almost of every order of men; that party disputes and personal quarrels are the great business of the day, while the momentous concerns of an empire–a great and accumulated debt, ruined finances, depreciated money, and want of credit (which in their consequences is the want of everything)–are but secondary considerations and postponed from day to day, from week to week, as if our affairs wear the most promising aspect. After drawing this picture, which from my soul I believe to be a true one, I need not repeat to you that I am alarmed and wish to see my countrymen roused.
That was George Washington in 1778. As you go back farther in time, they use more words and more diverse words, and the speeches are so dense that they had to have been given slowly. It’s jarring.
Well, this is a goddamned hell of a good way to get the word out about last.fm:
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That is the most disgusting code I’ve ever seen on anything that you’re supposed to embed on a webpage, ever. It’s really a damn shame because it’s slick. And I will say this station (Buckethead similar) is the best station I’ve found in a while.
The slider on this tag cloud of presidential speeches shows frequency of word usage and obvious trends in big media politics.
The above tag cloud shows the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 – 2007 AD.
Terrorist and Iraq have been the biggest words the past few years (6 years of terrer!), and economy’s been big since the 70s. There’s some very telling things inside these walls of text. It’s like flash cards of four year periods.
Gratuitously overmentioning family for stupid emotional points was invented by Ronald Reagan and crew in 1986! Seriously. It became a buzzword in 1986. It’s only been 20 years. We can overcome the bullshit rhetoric in politics and be real (and still lie about it even). We did it for hundreds of years.
Have a look at Franklin Roosevelt’s third (!) inaugural address (1941) or the social security announcement (1935), or . Those are serious problems. What the fuck do we think we’re doing now? p.s. Those were real speech writers like damn. That shit jerks tears.
(found here)
If you are careful with what you do (especially archives), where you get things, and what you let your computer do:
Virus Status: Safe!
Your computer is free of known threats.22981388328 files scanned, 0 file(s) infected on your disk drives.
No viruses were detected in memory.
Your computer is free of known threats.
You do not need antivirus software, or at least you haven’t for the past two years. Did you have it?
Sarc says 40% of their scans showed a need. I am not convinced.
Today we’ll talking about how to import your bookmarks from browsers and convert your browsing methods to focus on the idea of remembering important things about the links instead of remembering where you put them. When you are considering hundreds of bookmarks, as many people have, this method is necessary for scaling and to prevent incredibly unnecessary limits.
The idea here is that using del.icio.us to do the work for you, it is possible to think about bookmarks, the internet, and navigation in a new way. The old way could be considered a rigid, organizational construct that is a leftover from a few decades of simple, common sense-based professional computing. This new way of approaching it is basically a by-product of the wholesale industry adoption of tagging, which is a construct of a lazy new generation really making computers do the work for them. The sad part is that this time laziness triumphs. Firefox makes it even easier.
If you don’t have a delicious account, go there and sign up, and then in the settings you will want to import or upload your current bookmarks. Don’t feel pressured; it took me about three years to do this.
From here, the flexibility of the system gets pretty insane. You can tag things however you want (for example, I didn’t tag anything old but tag everything new). This contrasts bookmarks in that there was only one place you could put one bookmark without duplicates. Now, you can have one bookmark with an endless amount of ways to organize and find it via infinite tags.
There’s more. You can subscribe to tags and get alerts from fairly specific triggers. You can add people to your network. You can add me and see what I mark. I watch people that I know have an eye for trends and the like. The great downfall of the networking on delicious is that right now (changing in 2.0) there is no simple way of inviting people or adding people; the only way is to visit their profile and hit add.
(Side note: you can bundle tags. This essentially means that you can tag tags. That drives me a little beyond the edge as it’s time to get less organized, not more!)
With all these benefits, a single notable negative trait, and the potential coming from the next version, not even I could continue to stubbornly insist on using browser-based, tagless, single-computer bookmarks. Thus, I recommend to others to join me in moving on (detailed usage video!).
Footnote: they’re called bookmarks, not favorites. That’s simple, settled, ancient terminology (and not even Microsoft can change it).
If you have the kind of brain aids that makes you constantly need to feed it more things, you might be interested in oddly detailed, guided tours through history. If you’re interested in that or learning how we learned how to learn, you’ll like this:
I know some people could be sensitive and call it dry, but James Burke is a pretty serious cut-up considering his field of study, and I’ve worshiped his books for years. Note that this is part 2 of 5 of episode 1 of 10. This can be a serious fast track to general knowledge of the history of science, and is almost an eerily appropriate primer for skeptical thought and understanding of the scientific process and how it effects history, all under the umbrella of chaos! This is multi-threaded teaching and thinking.
In the closing scenes of The Day the Universe Changed, Burke suggested that a forthcoming revolution in communication and computer technology would allow people all over the world to exchange ideas and opinions instantaneously. Subsequent events seem to have proven him right. His views of the connected nature of history have also been substantiated by recent research in chaos/complexity/network theory.
Essentially anything here is going to be similar or have an even wider berth, but I definitely suggest Connections as it caused a bit of an educational revolution that logically played out to its fullest form on the internet.
I started working on the editing of these response videos I made in reference to the YouTube/CNN Republican debates (as previously discussed here) at 6 PM. It is now 3:45 AM. I have uploaded the entirety of the 160-something megs two and a half times now, and I think I’ve finally gotten the goddamn thing to stick (all after a good three-plus hours cutting out myself making fart jokes).
This is essentially a compilation of my thoughts and reactions to the various things asked and said during these debates. Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here.
I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in film/video and digital media technology. What the hell people? There is no way I should be having this much trouble making this thing; i.e. everyone that regularly makes high-quality videos with the overshoot-and-edit-and-upload model deserves a significantly high five. I don’t really see myself being able to cope with Premiere for that long.
So if you’ve ever wanted to see me actually saying out loud the ridiculous, self-contradicting, political counter-terror-hobbyist rantings I’ve made elsewhere on the internet, here’s your big chance. And hey, I can spew my poisonous propaganda all over the place at the same time.
Winners: Ron Paul, John McCain, Mike Huckabee.
Nintendo America didn’t release Super Mario Bros. 2 in the United States because they didn’t think people would buy a game that looked just like the original, and they thought it was too hard (which it is, unless compared to the second half of the first game). Eventually it came along as the Lost Levels in Mario All-Stars, but was it ever really much more than just a damned sequel? Instead, this acid trip got made into a Mario game:
Familiar music (glad they beefed it up for us)? Assuming the lost levels thing isn’t entirely bullshit hearsay, there are a few problems with either the myth or the actual decision Nintendo made.
If you look at other Nintendo Entertainment System series, you see that sequels became a commonplace way to get more games out, and in many cases just make some cash for garbage. But those sequels generally had a few things in common.
Mario’s a weirdo all because they decided to make his first sequel another goddamn game in disguise.
One of the few major exceptions to this rule, which also follows the “logic” behind the Mario Bro decision, is Zelda. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, looked very little like its predecessor, but maintained Zelda continuity traditions that continue today. Zelda II was, however, insanely difficult.
Zelda stories are like a comic book over the years. The stories come from different places and do different things. Link is a bunch of different dudes. Mario’s just one guy. It seems now that he hasn’t changed at all since Super Mario Bros. 3. Instead, the game engines that drew him did. He’s a brutally minimal example of technological evolution, as are the worlds he lands in. Mario is video games.
Dynamic tracking is the bane of private torrent sites; at the same time, it is a boon to those trying to use crappy public sites, as well as those who are impatient and think more connections means more faster automatically.
DHT (Distributed Hash Table) is an addition to certain BitTorrent clients that allows them to work without a tracker. What this means is that your client will be able to find peers even when the tracker is down, or doesn’t even exist anymore. It allows the swarm to continue as normal without a tracker. You can also host torrents without a tracker.
I can remember a few times that dynamic tracking has helped me finish something that would have been absolutely unfinishable otherwise. An average example would be a decent quality vhs rip of rare as hell, out of print shit, scraped together at 1.9k/sec from one dude wherever over a week.
With so many big trackers disappearing, the idea that DHT is helping hundreds of thousands of people finish torrents they couldn’t have otherwise is not only hilarious, but it also sort of makes you have to reconsider laws that can no longer be enforced.
This is hot shit.
This is my listening history (via) from the last two years (November 2005 to 2007) of my last.fm records. If you look at the full size version you can see how my phases shift and mutate, and you can see new huge trends like the introduction of a huge variety of post-punk and yacht rock, as well as the Pendulum/Future Prophecies drum and bass explosion.
For this particular graph, red is old things that I have been listening to for a very long time, and the cooler the colors get, the more recently I’ve been playing it. For example, green and beyond is things I’ve started listening to since May of 2006 (when I got the job), the blue stuff basically starts in 2007 after the promotion, and purple things sprout up a couple months ago.
The internet seems to be caving in on itself in a good way. Eventually I will be able to start my college that specializes in study and manipulation of metadata.
