Hooray for coefficients! Digg is installing a statistically-driven recommendation system similar to what TiVo, Netflix, and Amazon have been doing for a while. Here's Anton, Digg's lead scientist, talking about the new technology.
I find it interesting that Kevin and Anton refer to everything as a "story." Many popular "stories" on Digg are actually photos, videos, and top-10 lists.
Looking for a retro blast from the early 80's? PBS delivers in a big way with the first 26 seconds of the Slim Goodbody show. It nails 6 identifiable details on my 80's retro checklist:
Can anyone point me towards some more 80's inspiration so we can establish the definitive style checklist?
Kudzu is getting serious consideration as a biofuel. It was only a few months ago that Meg lead a dinner conversation about writing a grant proposal to investigate the viability of kudzu as a potential fuel source. I guess this guy has been working on it for a while longer.
Regular coffee drinking (up to 6 cups per day) is not associated with increased deaths in either men or women. In fact, both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee consumption is associated with a somewhat smaller rate of death from heart disease.
Does six cups per day seem like a lot to anyone else? I'm admittedly a lightweight, averaging only about 2 - 4 cups per day. Of course that number would vary wildly depending on how many breakfast meetings with John Warner are scheduled in a given month.
I'm tired of short profound-sounding quotes that don't actually contain any insights.
This great little animated short was created using Blender, an open source 3D content creation suite. It's been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, so you may modify the video however you like, just as long as the credits remain the same. Really impressive and inspiring work from software that anyone can download and use for free.
I've never understood blocking social networking websites from employees (unless it's pornographic). If an employee is spending a majority of their working hours on Facebook, don't block Facebook. Find a better, more inspired, person for the job. Figure out how to motivate that person. See if their Facebook network could provide some sales leads. Or, perhaps, fire them.
Under-talented and over-protective police managers help make large corporations absolutely blood curdling to work for. I'm sure it's 100% legal for employers to restict network access, but I'd argue that it's also 100% un-American. If I wanted my internet freedoms restricted I'd either move to North Korea or back in with my parents.
...the tilde was not meant to be the tilde at all, but rather an odd character called the overline. Presumably to balance out the underline, if indeed those sorts of things require balance. There is balance in the universe, to be sure, but I am less sure that it eminates from my keyboard. No matter. The tilde was the tilde so that Spanish-typing types could type the ñ (now referenced in HTML as the named entity ñ), but somewhere along the line, it morphed into a general-purpose character with all sorts of geeky uses.
I employ the tilde on this site to help denote a clear separation between links or phrases that are inline (on the same line). In other words, we stole the tilde and made it operate as a super-semi-colon. I was afraid it might actually have some established grammatical standard, but it turns out the tilde (~) is just a quirky little squiggly line that only barely made its way onto our American keyboards.
So why not give the tilde a more standard usage in language? Are there some writing or communication situations that could use a special character? Personally, I think the tilde is an under-appreciated symbol that we should try to elevate beyond geekdom.
Last week Bear pointed us to RelocateAmerica's ranking of the best places to live in America. Greenville South Carolina was ranked at #4 (though the validity of such a list is in question). While there are certainly some clear factors that make one city better than another (crime rate, school quality, cost of living), many more factors are subjective. Some people love living in, say, Omaha Nebraska, and who's to argue Chicago or Boston are better?
Today I ran across Paul Graham's essay entitled Cities and Ambition wherein he discusses the importance of a city's message as expressed through the ambitions of its inhabitants:
Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder...
How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time...
But, people don't need to live in cities anymore becuase our civilization's collective nervous system -- the internet -- keeps us connected. Doesn't the internet have the potential to accelerate culture and collaboration across cities and regions? Surely the lonely genius stranded in the hinterlands has the ability to interact with the wider world in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago. Paul continues:
Maybe the Internet will change things further. Maybe one day the most important community you belong to will be a virtual one, and it won't matter where you live physically. But I wouldn't bet on it. The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the ways cities send you messages are quite subtle...
He has a point. The internet isn't the same as real life interaction yet. It's good for many things, but a handshake and eye contact still makes a big difference. Not to mention that sarcasm routinely and dismayingly evaporates on the web.
A friend who moved to Silicon Valley in the late 90s said the worst thing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping. At the time I thought she was being deliberately eccentric. Sure, it can be interesting to eavesdrop on people, but is good quality eavesdropping so important that it would affect where you chose to live? Now I understand what she meant. The conversations you overhear tell you what sort of people you're among
To me this sounds like Paul is identifying some of the tributaries to the concept of culture. Or maybe the messages in ambition are a culture's cardiovascular system, so to speak? It's an interesting observation nonetheless. Inspiration sparking from social contact make location very important. The right mixture of people and opportunity can create magic. Being around diverse people is one thing, but equally important is being around the right culture and the right frames of mind. That's powerful stuff.
Greenville resident and champion of innovation, John Warner, wrote a a blog post over two years ago in which he said "innovation is a contact sport." I don't know if those are his words, but that metaphor has stuck with me.
The challenge for Greenville and the region is to continue growing a culture that has identifiable and compelling ambitions and messages. Funnels should be built around those messages to help attract the best folks to the area. Though I don't believe this process is something you can engineer, you can add momentum through conversations like this... that other people can eavesdrop... through the internet.
So what's Greenville's message?
Thanks to Josh for twittering about Paul's essay last week and asking the same question about Boulder CO. Incidently, Josh is an upstate native and used to live right down the street from me. And congratulations to John Warner for his 10,000th post, which coincidently is quite apropos.
