Problems with PageRank
Recognising the problems with PageRank. via RobotWisdom
Recognising the problems with PageRank. via RobotWisdom
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