The nerds giveth and the nerds taketh away
Posted: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 1:07 AM by Will Femia
It was nearly one of those heartwarming stories of the cooperation of an online community bring two people together.
This fellow used
photos of himself holding signs to ask a girl to prom and asked Digg to raise the profile of his offer so she'd see it. Thousands supported his cause, elevating it to the front page of the popular social site. But no answer was forthcoming.
A clue on the suspected profile of the girl in question has led some to suspect that she had already turned him down once. The same fellow was later
beseeching the community to take back what had been done, apparently at the request of the object of his affection (whose name, address, Facebook and more were eventually revealed in the thread of hundreds of comments).
Tech nerds may be impressed by the power and enthusiasm of instant viral digital mobs - especially ones as skilled and savvy as the Digg community - but teenage potential prom dates, perhaps not so much. The lesson for our well-meaning Romeo: with great power comes great responsibility.
Speaking of the power of the lovin', I'm still trying to make sense of this page on which a woman named Tania Derveaux
offers to have sex with every virgin (male, I guess) who defends the Internet by tangibly supporting net neutrality. Apparently she was also involved in some kind of political ad in which she
offered oral sex to tens of thousands in exchange for their vote. The joke was a play on the more traditional political promise of "jobs." Given that, I'm wondering if the joke with the virginity offer has to do with how screwed the average Web user is if net neutrality is outlawed.
NOTE: No nudity but she's naked from the waist up holding a relatively small sign, covering her dangerous bits with her arm.
Speaking of nerd love,
Nerd rings. Pretty impractical. I like the idea of rings that fit Wonder Twins style though. I'll have to think if there's a more subtle connector.
A smart man compares the local TV weather forecasts with the actual weather conditions as recorded by his school-age daughter.
Care to guess the result? The most laughable part is that no forecaster in the study was better (or much better) than simply assuming it won't rain, no matter what. Maybe this is all an unfair challenge but I've always thought the weather report should include a look back at whether the previous forecasting had actually been accurate. Instead of bragging about the size of one's Doppler, how about bragging about the accuracy of one's record. Why does no newscast advertise itself as "the most accurate weather reporting in the area"? (One point I have to concede is that when a station has a wide broadcast radius they can sometimes be dealing with a wide range of weather conditions depending on where their viewers live. It's definitely the case that I get different weather in Brooklyn than the folks in northern New Jersey even though we're both served by the local WNBC station's weather so who are they talking to when they say it's going to rain tomorrow?)
New Nokia ad uses a familiar video technique to cool effect. In the middle is a Breakout video game.
Surgeons give hope to blind with
successful 'bionic eye' operations - No Geordi stuff yet but still cool that it's real.
Uncartooning Jessica Rabbit - I don't know if anyone even knows who Jessica Rabbit is anymore but the point is that photographic human textures were added to a cartoon to give it a weird real-but-obviously-not quality. Don't miss the Homer rendering.
There's also a video showing in time lapse how it was done, basically using elements of Angelina Jolie and other actresses.
Speaking of photo manipulation,
The Impossible Art of Li Wei. That's a bit of a link jack but the actual
artist site is hard to navigate.
It would definitely never occur to me that a sports car might perform better
with six wheels.
Download the new Gnarls Barkley for free... um...
and backward. (But if you bothered to download that Audacity program I mentioned I've been using to produce the Voices in my Head series, it has a "reverse" effect that basically puts it forward again.)
Speaking of free albums,
the new Portishead can be heard as a free stream on Last FM.
NOTE: Autoplay. Volume check first.
Speaking of free stuff online, I put in today for
free access
to the online version of the encyclopedia Britannica. They have a
strange program whereby they're giving free access to "Web publishers"
which includes bloggers. They also have a way to allow these Web
publishers to offer links to Britannica content to non-Web-publishers
that allow specific access to the linked content but not the general
access Web publishers will have. That'll be an interesting trick.
A lot of folks were entertained by the idea of a
mini computer in a hamster ball as a pet.
What's more, the idea that it could use that Web cam as an eye is pretty close to true. Check out this video of a
mobile visual search engine on the Apple iPhone. (The actual site for the product is
here.) It's funny to think we were just talking about QR codes and putting these odd bar codes on everything that could then be translated by special software on your cell phone. But why bother when you phone can be programmed to recognize actual real images?
Speaking of search engines, green search engine
Ecocho: "For every 1000 searches that users make on ecocho.com, up to two trees will be grown to offset carbon pollution emissions." It's getting hit pretty hard but I found that if I got a "too many connections" error I could hit refresh and get through on the second try. Also comes in less-energy using black version. (Is this how that
rice site worked?)
Speaking of rice,
this article about food rationing coming to America feels like the one we saw recently about tent cities forming because of people losing their houses. Is this total crap or do I just not realize what's going on because I don't buy rice by the sack?
I'm gonna git you SpammaCool map of where news breaks - As the blogger anticipates, my first reaction was that this is really then just a map of population because people = news. "But even allowing for population, some locations account for a disproportionately high number of news items."
My Commuter Click today was
The Reality of Depending on True Fans. I really liked the idea of the
1,000 True Fan theory that says that in order to make a living in your niche you need to be a microcelebrity to a thousand True Fans. I especially like that it addresses the broader problem of trying to put online numbers in context. How many is a lot online? How many hate mails means you're hated? How many page views means you're popular? How much is "viral"? The personal immediacy of online communication makes it difficult to be objective about the size of a crowd. Have you ever been in a chat room with 3000 people? It's mayhem. Have you ever tried to put a positive spin on a memo to an NBC executive about a live online event that only drew 3000 people when even bad TV ratings are measured in millions? The True Fan idea, though not specifically about Web traffic, at least begins to offer some meaning to the numbers. Anyway, the Commuter Click is a follow-up in which a guy who actually has a thousand True Fans talks about what their worth is in his particular niche (ambient music). Turns out you probably need a few more than a thousand True Fans to make a living.
