So, you think you’ve honed the Netflix recommendation engine by rating 1000 movies? That’s nothing, according to the company’s internal statistics. Several 100 Netflix members have rated more than 50k filmed entertainment programs. To watch all those at a pace of 1 movie or TV show per day, it would take 136 years. But those users are just the extreme end of a broader behavioral pattern. 0.07% of Netflix users have rated 20k items. 1% have rated 5k movies. Only 60% of Netflix users rate any movies at all, and the typical person only gives out 200 starred grades.
Month: November 2010
Life aboard the ISS
The onslaught of apparent days and nights would play havoc with astronauts’ body clocks, so a shutters-down and bedtime schedule is imposed by mission controllers. Each of the crew has a closet-like cabin where they can hook a sleeping bag to the wall and settle down for the night. Some strap pillows to their heads to make it feel more like lying down. The lights don’t go out completely, though. People dozing in orbit see streaks and bursts of bright color caused by high-energy cosmic rays painlessly slamming into their retinas. Fans and air filters add to the distractions, so some astronauts wear ear plugs to block out the constant hum.
Interesting story
The city as idea incubator
New York excels at creating those eclectic networks. Subcultures and small businesses generate ideas and skills that inevitably diffuse through society, influencing other groups. As the sociologist Claude Fischer put it in an influential essay on subcultures published in 1975, “The larger the town, the more likely it is to contain, in meaningful numbers and unity, drug addicts, radicals, intellectuals, ‘swingers’, health-food faddists, or whatever; and the more likely they are to influence (as well as offend) the conventional center of the society.”
Nile
Anti Nutjob Chatbot
Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.
good use of nutjobs. like the senate discussing baseball, they won’t do something worse instead.
Phone book lowered friction
The phone itself was a pretty big deal, of course, helping intimacy transcend proximity. But phone books provided a crucial element to the system: intrusiveness. In the beginning of 1880, Shea writes, there were 30K telephone subscribers in the US At the end of the year, that number had grown to 50K, and because of phone books, each one of them was exposed to the others as never before. While many American cities had been compiling databases of their inhabitants well before the phone was invented, listing names, occupations, and addresses, individuals remained fairly insulated from each other. Contacting someone might require a letter of introduction, a facility for charming butlers or secretaries, a long walk.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 