Month: June 2007

Predictive vandalism

A Wikipedia vandal inadvertently set off a nationwide conspiracy craze when he edited the entry for Chris Benoit, a pro wrestler who murdered his family. The anonymous vandal coincidentally edited Benoit’s entry to say that Benoit had murdered his family several hours before the news became public, sparking speculation that the murder had been some kind of setup. Now the vandal has confessed, saying that he’d put the murder accusation in as an unfortunately timed joke

wikipedia is definitely mainstream now

Top 10 Science Pop Songs

Love, of course, is what makes the pop song sing, as Thomas Dolby’s She Blinded Me With Science (and thrilled me with technology) makes clear. But on a more neuroscientific level: Does the body rule the mind/or does the mind rule the body?/I dunno, conclude The Smiths. Entering the nature v nurture debate, Girls Aloud proclaim: You can’t mistake my Biology/The way that we talk/The way that we walk/it’s there in our thoughts. Jarvis Cocker sang about parallel dimensions in Quantum Theory, basically a love song, which has been movingly added to Dr Who footage here, and topped only by Air’s Biological. Among the best and strangest science songs are surely the Beastie Boys’ Sounds Of Science, Kool Keith’s version of Ego Trippin’, MC Hawking’s What We Need More Of Is Science, Sweet’s Alexander Graham Bell, Einstein A Go-Go by Landscape and E=MC2 from Big Audio Dynamite. Oh and of course, Monkey vs Robot. But there’s also Kraftwerk’s Computer Love, Big Science by Laurie Anderson, pharmaceutical trial procedure described in Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Placebo Effect, Blur’s Chemical World, Electricity courtesy of Suede (also OMD), Atomic by bombshell Blondie, Genetic Engineering by OMD (and X-Ray Spex), and what list would be complete without Diana Ross’s Chain Reaction (less ably repeated by Steps)?

Recruiter fails

The responses are my personal impressions, communicated to my Microsoft recruiter in the context of a private 1:1 conversation. A few days after I sent my response to the recruiter, I saw an anonymized version floating around and being discussed inside Microsoft. I hadn’t realized at the time that I wrote it that it would be distributed widely within Microsoft so that was a bit of a shock.

sour grapes shared with recruiter -> pwnage
2013-11-18: an acquaintance got the following recruiter spam. with skills like that, no wonder most people can be replaced with a markov chain.

How are you doing today!! Here’s the Contractual Direct Client Requirement for you. Hope you’ll go through this and revert back to me! Looking forward.. It would be very great help for me to fill this position by referring your friends and colleagues who might be interested on this opportunity.

Keep your eyes open for a special blessing from God today

Facebook ended a marriage

A misguided attempt to increase our privacy backfired horribly a few days ago, just weeks ahead of our wedding. My fiance and I unchecked the personal relationship box in Facebook to make our personal lives a little more private. Unwittingly, however, that action sent out a message to our entire social network and news feed saying we were no longer engaged. (Complete with a forlorn broken heart.)

who gets engaged these days, anyway?

Google Maps long tail

Google Maps is a very normal lens, and many of the decisions about what to display and not to display have been made for you. This isn’t all good. For example, I couldn’t not call out the Cape Verde islands at a hurricane-tracking website and still feel that I’d made a site truly devoted to tropical cyclones. And yet this kind of control is missing from the one-size-fits-all solution.

wanting more contextual customization if i understand correctly