Links

Recognising the problems with PageRank. via RobotWisdom

Retire early.

Neat prank on the RIAA. Intruiging, though, about their contact address being hard to find. So I tried the same, by Googling RIAA

First hit: www.riaa.org/index.cfm -> The Page Cannot Be Found
Second hit: www.riaa.org. No contact info on 1st page.
Tried “About us”. No luck.
Searching for “contact” on the site gave 704 useless pages.
Google search for “contact” in www.riaa.org gives www.riaa.org/contact.cfm -> The page cannot be found

I give up. But this guy John Hargrave is good.

NASA is thinking of a space elevator, a la Clarke. On one hand, I think… can’t we save poor children in Somalia? On the other hand, 500 years from now, would you remember this generation for saving children or building a space elevator? Do you remember the Egyptian pyramids or slavery? Then again, to quote Groucho Marx, “Why should I worry about posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?”

I’d build the elevator. It’s cool.

Proce55ing: “context for exploring emerging conceptual space…” Looks like a modern graphic programming language to me. Neat, but not a quantum leap. “The Unbearable Lightness of being a Pixel” is an interesting exhibit, though (for its name, not for content).

Cool. Cold, actually.

In the meantime, I have been up to no good.

I’m at the New York airport. It’s 9/11. The city is having a bout of nostalgia. While I’m watching all this, I wonder: when were the Gujarat earthquakes? Why do I (and the world) remember 9/11 better? Probably because terrorist attacks are more glamorous than natural disasters. Because New York is more top-of-mind than Gujarat. But mostly, because 9/11 became a way of referring to the event and 1/26 did not. Interesting… that what you choose to remember an event by can impact when it’s remembered.

Recent Google goodies: News alerts, Calculator, and the ~ operator. via GoogleBlog

Small world — this project from Columbia University finds that while there are probably less than 6 degrees, the network entertains requests for favours only about a third of the time, and that it’s not as hub-and-spoke as scale-free networks would have us imagine. via NYTimes