April 2010
1 post
Catastrophic cascade of failures in... →
A fundamental property of interdependent networks is that failure of nodes in one network may lead to failure of dependent nodes in other networks. This may happen recursively and can lead to a cascade of failures.
March 2010
2 posts
Online games, superempowerment, and a better world →
For active online gamers real life is broken. It doesn’t make any sense. Effort isn’t connected to reward. The path forward is confused, convoluted, and contradictory. Worse, there’s a growing sense that the entire game is being corrupted to ensure failure. So, why play it?
February 2010
7 posts
The Mismeasure of Man →
The Mismeasure of Man is a 1981 book written by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002). The book is a history and critique of the methods and motivations underlying biological determinism, the belief that “the social and economic differences between human groups — primarily races, classes, and sexes — arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this...
Triumph of the Golden Rule →
We live in a world with other people. Almost every decision we make involves someone else in one way or another, and we face a constant choice regarding just how much we’re going to trust the person on the other side of this decision. Should we take advantage of them, go for the quick score and hope we never see them again – or should we settle for a more reasonable reward, co-operating in...
David Cope’s software creates beautiful, original... →
Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every...
How to cut off Google Buzz completely
Turning Buzz off
If you don’t want to use Buzz, you can disable it. To completely remove all of your participation in Buzz, follow all of these steps in order:
Delete your Google profile. Here’s how.
Block all of the people following you. Here’s how.
Turn off Buzz at the bottom of Gmail. Here’s how.
New Russian botnet tries to kill rival →
The feature, called “Kill Zeus,” apparently removes the Zeus software from the victim’s PC, giving Spy Eye exclusive access to usernames and passwords.
How FarmVille Scales to Harvest 75 Million Players... →
How did FarmVille scale a web application to handle 75 million players a month? Fortunately FarmVille’s Luke Rajlich has agreed to let us in on a few their challenges and secrets. Here’s what Luke has to say…
A model of the history of human misery →
For most of the human history we’ve been hunter-gatherers. But over the past 10,000 years there was a switch in lifestyle, farming has emerged independently in several locations, and filled in all the territory in between. One truism of modern cultural anthropology is that this was a big mistake, that hunter-gatherer lifestyles were superior to those of peasant farmers, less miserable...
January 2010
14 posts
The Universe as a Hologram →
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn’t matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing.
Game theory shows evolution follows most... →
Scientists set up a model where human players engage with each other and compete for resources, and can change their strategies for doing so in various ways. They found that as more rounds of the game were played, the human players developed a tendency to imitate the best player, causing the players as a group to tend to play the game the same way.
“Socialism has nothing to do with government or command economy. That’s just the...”
– http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/ah3wc/his_single_known_mathematical_failure_was_not/
BBC - The Secret Life of Chaos (2010) →
Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand. It turns out that chaos theory answers a question that mankind has asked for millennia - how did we get here? In this documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to...
Monkey controlling robotic arm with brain →
In a ground-breaking 5 year experiment, scientists hook up a robotic arm controlled by a computer game to a monkey’s brain. In training the monkey to move the arm by ‘playing’ the game with a joystick. Researchers wanted to learn more about the output of the brain and the individual brain-cell signals. However the monkey was about to do something that would make history and...
Green sea slug makes chlorophyll like a plant →
Scientists from the University of South Florida in Tampa have found a green sea slug is able to synthesize chlorophyll like a plant, which makes it the first animal known to be capable of the feat.
NGiNX_HTTP_Push_Module →
This module turns Nginx into an adept HTTP Push and Comet server. It takes care of all the connection juggling, and exposes a simple interface to broadcast messages to clients via plain old HTTP requests. This lets you write live-updating asynchronous web applications as easily as their oldschool classic counterparts, since your code does not need to manage requests with delayed responses.
Anomie →
Anomie, in contemporary English language, is a sociological term which may most simply be described as a personal condition resulting from a lack of norms. For Émile Durkheim, a lack of social ethic produces moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspirations.
Has Amazon EC2 become over subscribed? →
Amazon has been telling conferences and anyone that cares to listen that they can handle anything we throw at them. They have always been cagey to say the least, about revealing any sort of scaling numbers and when asked just how many instances they can spin up, they never really give a straight answer.
After 3 years of production usage what we can tell you is this .. Amazon do have a breaking...
MQL, Prolog, and the future of Semantic Web... →
Metaweb has this Semantic Web database, Freebase, employing an incredibly cool query language called MQL (Metaweb Query Language). The core idea of the database is that you represent knowledge as a massive object graph — objects represent things that you want to store information on.
'Lifeless' prion proteins are 'capable of... →
Scientists have shown for the first time that “lifeless” prion proteins, devoid of all genetic material, can evolve just like higher forms of life. The Scripps Research Institute in the US says the prions can change to suit their environment and go on to develop drug resistance.
10 years from now I am a scientist working at the... →
There is going to be an accident at the LHC facility, and I will-be-was caught in the effect. I am now being trapped in a temporal hysteresis loop and I hope to escape some time in the past. In the meantime I will answer your questions. Not only are you about to AMA but I will, in fact, be answering your questions before you ask them. Since it will appear that I am answering your questions before...
Male Chromosome May Evolve Fastest →
A new look at the human Y chromosome has overturned longstanding ideas about its evolutionary history. Far from being in a state of decay, the Y chromosome is the fastest-changing part of the human genome and is constantly renewing itself.
Victorian Hallucinogens →
Appealing primarily to vision, which was commonly understood to be the most intellectual of the senses, and generating sensations of omniscience and self-reflexivity, these drugs became the occasion for their writers’ fantasies of intellectual transcendence and concomitant disembodiment. These fantasies tacitly promoted the imperial, raced, classed, and gendered power of the elite hallucinogenic...
September 2009
4 posts
10 Irrational Human Behaviors and How to Leverage... →
It’s a fascinating look into the surprisingly predictable psychology that powers human actions and reactions, and I think there are some definitive lessons we can take away from the piece and apply to web marketing.
What does your soul look like? →
I’m trying to create a piece of interactive art. Can you help by drawing something? It should only take 5 minutes.
I’d like you to draw a picture of your soul. How you imagine it to look.
Emotionally Vague →
How do you ask a stranger (not necessarily fluent in English) to recall and describe their private emotions? A survey was developed and tested over a number of weeks.
Web hooks →
Web hooks are user-defined callbacks over HTTP. Conceptually, web applications only have a request-based “input” mechanism: web APIs. They lack an event-based output mechanism, and this is the role of web hooks.
August 2009
12 posts
The Little Secret of Web Startups
Consumer startups are tough. You have two basic choices: A paid offering or a free offering (or freemium). If you charge people a penny, you’ll turn off the bulk of your visitors. If you offer free services, you might grow to be the next YouTube, Wordpress or Facebook. Most entrepreneurs are not risk-averse and the dream of being big is just too appealing and the majority of us take the...
Fire And Motion
by Joel Spolsky
Sometimes I just can’t get anything done.
Sure, I come into the office, putter around, check my email every ten seconds, read the web, even do a few brainless tasks like paying the American Express bill. But getting back into the flow of writing code just doesn’t happen.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
The Iceberg Secret, Revealed
by Joel Spolsky
“I don’t know what’s wrong with my development team,” the CEO thinks to himself. “Things were going so well when we started this project. For the first couple of weeks, the team cranked like crazy and got a great prototype working. But since then, things seem to have slowed to a crawl. They’re just not working hard any more.”
...
How did the web lose faith in charging for stuff?
It seems that the web has been so thoroughly infected by the memes of “the future is free”, “we’ll all live from ads”, “VC money will get us there”, and “acquisition is nirvana” that it has almost lost its faith in the simpler ways.
It’s depressing and it’s wrong, but I also think it’s going to change. I think the days of the traditional San Francisco startup approach are numbered. It’ll be...
Freelancing Dot Ro - Plantatia cu creativi
Articol scris de Alex Cristache acum ceva timp pe un blog care nu mai exista, il notez aici ca sa nu se piarda.
Dupa ani si ani de angajat full-time am revenit la statutul de freelancer, de curand. Singura diferenta este ca de data asta am lectia invatata. Ei bine, tocmai acesta lectie, precum si discutiile cu diversi colegi de breasla m-au facut sa scriu acest post, dedicat freelancing-ului in...
Real Time Content Can Easily Become Real Time Mobs
The Internet has proven to be a frighteningly efficient tool to create virtual mobs. But we note two trends that suggest a bleak future: the increase in non-anonymous mob participation and the evolution of online services towards ever more efficient and real time communication platforms that facilitate mob creation and growth like never before.
Things are changing online way too fast for society...
The Capital-Raising Ladder
The amount of capital you will need depends on what kind of venture you plan to build. You may need to go no further than the first rung of the ladder. You might be able to build a very good business that meets all of your financial needs without raising a dime from anybody. You might also strike it lucky and get phenomenal growth without needing capital. But being under-capitalized is a big...
Burnout
Web professionals are often expected to be “always on”—always working, absorbing information, and honing new skills. Unless our work and personal lives are carefully balanced, however, the physical and mental effects of an “always on” life can be debilitating.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/burnout/
Pitching Power Insight
When you pitch, by prioritizing the problem, you help people focus on a human truth: everyone’s suffered. Everyone may identify with a desire, a need, a frustration, or a fear. They get it because they’ve been there.
If you only focus on solution, you run into another truth: Everyone thinks they have the answer. Or at the very least, they don’t have to like yours. Focus on solution too soon, and...