• The Tragedy of the Coffee Shop
  • Nice article about the history of coffee shops as “third places”, inbetween home and work.
• List of cities by time of continuous habitation – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • A remarkable list. Why do some cities die, and others live on? Jericho and Damscus have existed for roughly 10,000 years. As a child I lived briefly in a former goldmining town, whose 1880 population was more than 10,000, but which had dropped to about 200. Many cities initially thrive because they have access to some scarcity (a mine, a beautiful beach, a river); later they thrive because of network effects (you go to the mining town because all the mining companies are already there); presumably what happens is that some exogeneous event (collapse of some market, or depletion of a resource) destroys the value of the networks there.
• Cory Doctorow: Metacrap
  • Cory Doctorow on the semantic web: “If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip.

    A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It’s also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. “

• Edifying Editing (pdf)
  • Stimulating and very well written article about editing an academic journal, by Preston McAfee.
• Wandering Gaia
  • Excellent blog from a science writer who quit her job to go “travelling the world meeting the people, plants and animals that make up our unique living planet.”
• IREvalEtAl: William Webber’s research blog
  • Blog of information retrieval researcher William Webber.
• TotallySynthetic.com » Blog Archive » NaH as an Oxidant – Liveblogging!
  • Liveblogging a chemistry experiment to refute a paper: “an intriguing paper has been published in JACS by Xinbo Wang, Bo Zhang and David Zhigang Wang. In this, they suggest it is possible to oxidise benzylic alcohols to the corresponding ketones using sodium hydride (amongst other chemistry). Given that sodium hydride is, well, a hydride – this is quite something. Does it work? Hard to say without giving it a go, so I am.”

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• Sweet Juniper!
  • Incredible photo montages from Detroit.
• Detroit UnReal Estate Agency
  • An entire city that seems to be dying: “Detroit Unreal Estate Agency will produce, collect and inventory information on the ‘unreal estate’ of Detroit: that is, on the remarkable, distinct, characteristic or subjectively significant sites of urban culture. The project is aimed at new types of urban practices (architecturally, artistically, institutionally, everyday life, etc) that came into existence, creating a new value system in Detroit.”
• Inside Google Books: Barcode your bookshelf with Google Books
  • Matt shows how you can easily add your books from off your bookshelf at home to the My Library feature in Google Books… The real power of this tip? You can then use Google Books-powered search to browse just the books in you own home library. “
• Sealed Abstract » The joy of electronic books
  • Good article on how to move your library onto your computer.
• Letter from the editors | Rejecta Mathematica
  • “Welcome to the inaugural issue of Rejecta Mathematica! … For those unfamiliar with our mission, Rejecta Mathematica is an open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals in the mathematical sciences…. every paper appearing in Rejecta Mathematica includes an open letter from its authors discussing the paper’s original review process, disclosing any known flaws in the paper, and stating the case for the paper’s value to the community…. the questions we’ve been asked most often are “Why are you doing this?” and “Is it a joke?” While we are not above admitting that we have had a few good laughs in this process, we hope that this issue will serve as definitive proof that Rejecta Mathematica is not a joke. Despite the central role that peer review (and even rejection) must play in the scientific process [1], we believe …this project can make a positive and valuable contribution to the mathematical … research community.”
• iCopyright – Associated Press
  • The AP’s attempt to con and intimidate people into paying for their content. If you’re a not-for-profit, for example, and want to re-use just 5 words of their content, they’ll charge you $7.50 for the privilege, although only if your re-use fits their (very narrow) terms of service, e.g., you can’t use it in a derogatory way. I can’t imagine what they’re hoping to achieve, other than a confrontation in the courts, and a massive wave of incredibly negative publicity.
• How Different Groups Spend Their Day – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com
  • “The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.”
• Polymath = user innovation « Jon Udell
  • Jon Udell on the Polymath Project.
• Backreaction: And how open would you want your science?
  • “What I am saying is that all the sharing and openness can actually harm progress. In fact, I think we already share way too much too premature information. The reason is that scientists too are only human. If we hear some colleagues talk who are genuinely excited about a topic, chances are we’ll get interested. If we have an idea in an early stage and bounce it off a lot of people, it will lose its edges because we’ll try to make it fit. If we hear something repeatedly, we are likely to think it’s of some relevance. If we know the opinions of other people, in particular people with a higher social status or more experience, we’ll try to fit in. That’s what humans do. That’s why crowds make dumb decisions. That’s how groupthink starts, that’s where herding comes from, that’s how hypes and bubbles are created.”
• Adding Noughts in Vain: How Hard Would Dramatic Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions Really Be?
  • “domestic water consumption in south-east Queensland was reduced by more than 50% in just three years! … This goes to show that dramatic and permanent efficiency gains are possible if there is the public and political will to make them. You really have to ask yourself if it is that much harder to reduce our dependence on greenhouse gas emissions than it is to reduce water use?” (My favourite idea for reducing consumption of, say, water (or gasoline, or …) is to have a big public competition between cities, with the city making the biggest reduction receiving a large cash prize. Try to drum up interest in the media, and really get people engaged…)
• Joint Statement on sharing of genetic data – President Clinton & Prime Minister Blair
  • From March 14, 2000: “We applaud the decision by scientists working on the Human Genome Project to release raw fundamental information about the human DNA sequence and its variants rapidly into the public domain, and we commend other scientists around the world to adopt this policy.”
• An overview of the Polymath projects so far : Christina’s LIS Rant
  • Christina Pikas on the Polymath Project.
• Keep Music Indie: April Smith Makes a Record — Kickstarter
  • Great experiment in alternate models for making music.

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• Organizational scar tissue — The Endeavour
  • “When you see a stupid policy, don’t assume a stupid person created it. It may have been the decision of a very intelligent person. It probably sounded like a good idea at the time given the motivating circumstances. Maybe it was a good idea at the time. But the letter lives on after the spirit dies. You can make a game out of this. When you run into a stupid policy, try to imagine circumstances that would have motivated an intelligent person to make such a policy. The more stupid the policy, the more challenging the game.”
• Liveblogging Science 2.0 | Serendipity
  • Steve Easterbrook’s notes on the recent Science 2.0 event in Toronto.
• Open source cognitive science
  • Mark Tovey’s experiment in a blog about open source cognitive science.
• Talking to Tim O’Reilly about the Architecture of Participation – O’Reilly FYI Blog
  • Excellent interview with Tim O’Reilly, discussing leadership, entrepreneurship, collaboration, and many other topics. Anders Noorgard pointed the interview out to me a few months back, and I skimmed it, but now I wish I’d read it in depth earlier.
• Backreaction: Röser’s equation
  • Intriguing, given how poorly understood high temperature superconductivity still seems to be: “Hans-Peter Röser […] found a simple equation relating the geometric structure of a crystal to its jump temperature [i.e., the temperature at which it becomes superconducting].”
• Netflix Competitors Learn the Power of Teamwork – NYTimes.com
  • “The biggest lesson learned, according to members of the two top teams, was the power of collaboration. It was not a single insight, algorithm or concept that allowed both teams to surpass the goal Netflix, the movie rental company, set nearly three years ago: to improve the movie recommendations made by its internal software by at least 10 percent, as measured by predicted versus actual one-through-five-star ratings by customers.

    Instead, they say, the formula for success was to bring together people with complementary skills and combine different methods of problem-solving.”

• 11 Famous People Who Were in the Completely Wrong Career at Age 30 – 11Points.com
  • “At age 30, [Julia] Child wasn’t cooking… she was working for the U.S. government as a spy. She went on clandestine missions to China and Sri Lanka (which, at the time, was called Ceylon) to get intelligence documents to agents in the field. She didn’t enter cooking school until age 36.”
• Pandemic (H1N1) 2009, Influenza Virus Resource
  • The GenBank page for H1N1 (swine flu)
• Microcosm Week: Dreaming of a Complete Solution to Life | The Loom | Discover Magazine
  • Carl Zimmer on Francis Crick’s 1973 call for a “complete solution” to E. Coli, and the difficulty of obtaining such a solution, for any form of life.
• Velocity and the Bottom Line – O’Reilly Radar
  • Matt Mullenweg has an interesting theory of user interfaces that can be applied to many technologies, not just computers: “My theory here is when an interface is faster, you feel good. And ultimately what that comes down to is you feel in control. The web app isn’t controlling me, I’m controlling it. Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone.”
• …My heart’s in Accra » The Polyglot Internet
  • Excellent essay about language and the internet: “Weblog search engine Technorati sees at least as many blogposts in Japanese as in English, and some scholars speculate that there may be as much Chinese content created on sites like Sina and QQ as on all English-language blogs combined… There’s a danger of linguistic isolation in today’s internet… In today’s internet, there’s more opportunity for Portuguese, Chinese, or Arabic speakers to interact with one another, and perhaps less incentive to interact with speakers of other languages. This in turn may fulfill some of the predictions put forth by those who see the Internet acting as an echo-chamber for like-minded voices, not as a powerful tool to encourage interaction and understanding across barriers of nation, language and culture.”
• WorldChanging Canada: The Roots of Resistance 2: Moral Filters
  • “[…] certain kinds of moral reasoning are inappropriate when it comes to reducing physical harm to the environment. In particular, we should be deeply suspicious of arguments from purity. The notion of purity has been extremely useful for creating the in-group ethos of the environmental movement. It’s an attractive tool in the toolkit of climate-change argument. But… If the robber barons turn out to be the ones to solve the climate change problem, we need to get on board with them and applaud their results–not reject them as the “impure” authors of the problem. More generally, if somebody we hate has a solution, we should be willing to deal with them; if a real solution involves something we consider impure (like nuclear power) we need to set aside our prurient distaste and be willing to embrace it. The notion of purity has some use in the climate debate, but it also stands to get in the way if we’re not careful.”
• John Baez: Earth
  • Wonderful essay by John Baez, a big picture history of our planet, focusing an mass catastrophes like the formation of the moon. Lots of very interesting things that were new to me.
• A Bank Run Teaches the ‘Plain People’ About the Risks of Modernity – WSJ.com
  • A tiny part of a thoroughly fascinating article: “In Amish country, a bank run is about as familiar as a Hummer or a flat-screen TV. For decades, the more than 200,000 Amish in the U.S. have largely lived apart from the mainstream, emphasizing humility, simplicity and thrift. Known as “the plain people,” they travel by horse-drawn buggy, wear homemade clothing and live with very little electricity.

    But the Amish in northern Indiana edged into the conventional economy, lured by the high wages of the recreational-vehicle and modular-homes industries. And they wound up experiencing the same economic whiplash millions of other Americans did.”

• The Happiness Project: Fourteen Tips for Running a Good Meeting.
  • For the most part simple, obvious rules, not widely observed, but in some cases actionable.
• Universities should act while they have the chance « petermr’s blog
  • “Where are the universities changing the face of the world? Where communication is infinitely cheap. Where students are wired up with more power than the whole of the world 30 years ago. Where the Internet is changing democracy – where are the changes in academia? Why, at least, are there few substantial discussions about what education means in a distributed world? It’s too easy to see the reverse where education is simply a branded deliverable contract between a customer (student) and a supplier (university).

    Well, the internet changes that business very quickly. So unless there are some radically new ideas, Universities may find that others are eating their lunch.”

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• Coworking on a super boat
  • I could work there.
• Solving a Hamiltonian Path Problem with a bacterial computer
  • What’s emphasized in the abstract is the NP-completeness, which I think is a pity, because it doesn’t seem to be what’s really interesting here. What’s interesting is that this is another step in using synthetic biology to approach universal computation. It seems that most (or all) of the outputs have been open sourced: “We successfully designed, constructed, and tested a bacterial computer capable of finding a Hamiltonian path in a three node directed graph. This proof-of-concept experiment demonstrates that bacterial computing is a new way to address NP-complete problems using the inherent advantages of genetic systems. The results of our experiments also validate synthetic biology as a valuable approach to biological engineering. We designed and constructed basic parts, devices, and systems using synthetic biology principles of standardization and abstraction. “
• Journalistic narcissism « BuzzMachine
• Lost Garden: Flash Love Letter
  • Excellent article, ostensibly about the economics of making Flash games, but containing many interesting thoughts about online content in general.
• Is AP Run By Idiots? | BNET Technology Blog | BNET
  • There seems to be a lot of evidence that the answer is “yes”.
• Overcoming Bias : Academia’s Function
  • Robin Hanson’s explanation of what academia does: essentially, he argues that it’s all a signalling game, based on impressiveness of affiliation. I disagree on some important points, but it’s a fascinating argument.
• Espresso Map
  • 153 locations where good espresso (according to the site author) can be found in North America. May be useful for desperate Australian / European espresso lovers.
• Speculators ‘R’ Us: The G8 And Energy Prices « The Baseline Scenario
  • Very interesting post explaining some of the factors causing volatility in oil prices.
• ArchivePress » Blog Archive » Which blogs should be preserved?
  • Eventually, all of them (disk is cheap), in my opinion. Comments should be preserved as well. But you could start with some set of the most popular blogs (say the Technorati top 100,000, to pick a more or less random list). Assuming 50 meg per blog, that’s only 5 terabytes of data. The cost in terms of time setting up etc is almost certainly far greater than the storage cost and cost of serving archived copies.

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• The Perfect Storm, but wait… What’s that? – YouTube
  • My hat is off to the unknown surfer.
• Traders Profit With Computers Set at High Speed – NYTimes.com
  • Highly recommended. Big data and Wall Street.
• Charter Cities: Blog
  • Paul Romer’s new blog – Romer is an economist who developed endogeneous growth theory. The blog is apparently going to mostly be about cities.
• Selberg’s limit theorem for the Riemann zeta function on the critical line « What’s new
  • A beautiful sketch of Selberg’s limit theorem.
• Sequencing a Genome a Week – O’Reilly Radar
  • Very interesting (albeit highly personal) discussion of the current state of genomics.
• citizen engineer – HD video, comic book/zine & kit
• David Byrne Journal: 06.28.09: The King Is Gone
  • David Byrne on Michael Jackson: “A life in the pill bottle tied Michael to Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and too many more. The surreal chemical universe these stars create for themselves is hard for me to fathom — when I have some success (at least recently), I’m very happy about it. Of course, my success is nowhere near what theirs was — I can live a normal life and buy toilet paper and OJ at the corner deli. In a way it seems a retreat to origins, to the womb of poor beginnings in Gary, Indiana or Tupelo, Mississippi — where, in a kind of weird link between distant galaxies, poor folks also pop painkillers like OxyContin if and when they can.”
• Official Google Research Blog: Predicting Initial Claims for Unemployment Benefits
  • “We applied the methodology outlined in our earlier paper [i.e., using Google trends data to predict real world events], building a model to forecast initial claims using the past values of the time series, and then added the Google Trends variables to see how much they improved the forecast. We found a 15.74% reduction in mean absolute error for one-week ahead out, of sample forecasts. Most economists would consider this to be a significant boost. “
• The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » The Long Book
  • What types of things are easy to do over 50 years that are are hard to do over 2 or over 10? “Good things can be done over long times. Oxford University, with its multi-century history and perspective, is one of the few institutions to support very long-term projects. Oxford University Press will this year release a book that has taken almost 45 years to finish. It’s the world’s largest thesaurus — and includes almost the entire vocabulary of English. The project was begun in 1965. “
• Geeking with Greg: Time effects in recommendations
  • Yehuda Koren: “Collaborative Filtering with Temporal Dynamics”: little benefit comes from discounting aged data on user preferences; no day-of-the-week effect. A commented jumps in to say that Netflix does show a day of the week effect (and seasonal variation); presumably they controlled for different variables.
• Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor — PNAS
  • Correlation doesn’t imply causation [*], but still very interesting: “Little is known about the role of the endocrine system in financial risk taking… We found that a trader’s morning testosterone level predicts his day’s profitability. We also found that a trader’s cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. Our results suggest that higher testosterone may contribute to economic return, whereas cortisol is increased by risk. Our results point to a further possibility: testosterone and cortisol are known to have cognitive and behavioral effects, so if the acutely elevated steroids we observed were to persist or increase as volatility rises, they may shift risk preferences and even affect a trader’s ability to engage in rational choice. ” [*] I always think it amusing that this leaves unsaid what does imply causation…
• 650 Million Years In 1:20 Min.
• PhysMath Central Blog : Why machine-readable data should matter to you
  • “One of the things we do here at PhysMath Central (and our sister companies BioMed and Chemistry Central) which not all publishers do is format our full-text articles in freely-available XML and MathML. From a production point of view it makes sense as we can generate html and pdf versions of the article from the same source, but beyond that there are a plethora of possibilities that anyone could exploit due to their machine-readability. “
• Therac-25 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • Sad story about a software bug in a radiation therapy machine that killed multiple people. It’s difficult to draw firm conclusions (and I won’t try in a delicious.com note!), but one wonders about the use of more open code vetting procedures to help prevent this kind of thing.
• The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity
  • A new talk from Michael Wesch, at the Personal Democracy Forum.
• The Long Now Blog » Ancient Cities in 3-D
• IMO 2009 Q6 mini-polymath project: impressions, reflections, analysis « What’s new
  • Thread for reflections on Terry Tao’s recent mini-polymath project.
• FiveThirtyEight: A Challenge to Climate Change Skeptics
  • Cute. The exact details are a bit of a stunt, but the general idea – getting people to put their money where their mouth is – is a good one.
• The Polynomial Hirsch Conjecture: A proposal for Polymath3 « Combinatorics and more
  • Gil Kalai’s thinking about running a Polymath Project around the Hirsch Conjecture.
• More polymath projects « Algorithmic Game Theory
  • Noam Nisan on the possibility of a polymath project in algorithmic game theory.
• Marginal Revolution: Inequality and consistency
  • A typical stimulating Tyler Cowen post: “Today many an upper middle class person is plausibly happier than many a billionaire. Yet most self-made billionaires work very hard to get to that position, which creates a possible tension between cardinal and “observed choice” or “ordinal” metrics of welfare. Why work so hard for so little? Presumably many of these billionaires really want to “be there,” even if they are only marginally better off or in some cases worse off.”
• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule
• IMO 2009 Q6 as a mini-polymath project « What’s new
  • Terry Tao has just run a mini-polymath project.
• Official Google Research Blog: Predicting the Present with Google Trends
• Clowns Kicked KKK Asses – Neatorama
  • ““White Power!” the Nazi’s shouted, “White Flour?” the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.

    “White Power!” the Nazi’s angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.

    “White Power!” the Nazi’s tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, “ohhhhhh!” the clowns yelled “Tight Shower!” and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan’s directions.

    … One last time they screamed “White Power!”

    The clown women thought they finally understood what the Klan was trying to say. “Ohhhhh…” the women clowns said. “Now we understand…”, “WIFE POWER!” they lifted the letters up in the air, grabbed the nearest male clowns and lifted them in their arms and ran about merrily chanting “WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER!””

• The Project for Non-Academic Science : Uncertain Principles
  • Great idea, and the first few interviews are now up: “I plan to post a series of short interviews with people who have science degrees, but are not working in academia. The idea here is to provide information on career options for scientists and science majors beyond the “go to grad school, do a post-doc, get a faculty position” track that is too often assumed to be the default. Accordingly, I’ve sent each of the volunteers ten questions about their careers, and I’ll be posting their answers to those questions over the next several days.”
• Edge: THE UNIVERSAL LIBRARY By George Dyson
  • I like this line: “Even in the Age of Search, we still need authors to find the meaningful books! “
• Open and Shut?: Open Access: Rethinking Harvard
  • Some thoughts on what the Harvard open access policy means in practice.
• Luis von Blog: Hollywood-Style Lectures
• …My heart’s in Accra » Tim O’Reilly on Government 2.0
  • Interesting to ponder the truth of this: “Complex systems built from scratch never work. You need to build a simple system and let it grow… Complex problems paradoxically require simple answers.” To the extent this is true, it’s largely a consequence of Shirky’s Law – for a network service to extract maximal value from the network, all users must have a shared mental model, which usually means a simple mental model.
• …My heart’s in Accra » John Hagel on serendipity
  • How to increase serendipity in discovery; moving organizations to a focus on knowledge flow, rather than knowledge; cities as centers of serendipity creation – frequent serendipity is essentially a form of wealth; the art of making serendipitous connections in online communities. Jon Udell’s notion of manufactured serendipity may be as relevant to urban planners and policy folks as it is to the designers of online communities.
• …My heart’s in Accra » Jason Clay and measuring the environmental impact of agriculture
  • Notes on a superb talk from Jason Clay.
• LICRA v. Yahoo! – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • Fascinating case about who has jurisdiction online: “LICRA complained that Yahoo! were allowing their online auction service to be used for the sale of memorabilia from the Nazi period, contrary to Article R645-1 of the French Criminal Code (Code pénal). These facts were not contended during the case.

    The defense rested on the fact that these auctions were conducted under the jurisdiction of the United States. It was claimed that there were no technical means to prevent French residents from participating in these auctions, at least without placing the company in financial difficulty and compromising the existence of the Internet.

    The defendants noted

    1. that their servers were located on US territory,
    2. that their services were primarily aimed at US residents,
    3. that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and expression…

    As such, they contended that the French court was incompetent to hear the case.”

• …My heart’s in Accra » Accra, fifteen years later
  • “I’m too late to drag those I know and love to Accra to see the place I fell in love with in 1993. It’s a happy coicidence that I find the Accra of 2009 inspiring, challenging, welcoming and beautiful, or this would have been an alienating two days, instead of inspiring ones.”
• Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line
  • Andrew Jaffe’s astrophysics-oriented blog.
• Targeted Development of Registries of Biological Parts
  • Analysis of patterns of part reuse in the (open source) MIT Registry of Biological Parts.

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• Microspotting | You can go to the bathroom whenever you want at Microsoft
  • Great story about the background of the principal developer for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.
• Institute for OneWorld Health – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • Nonprofit pharmaceutical company: “The Institute for OneWorld Health is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit pharmaceutical company founded in 2000 to develop safe, effective, and affordable new medicines for people with infectious diseases in the developing countries.”
• Scientific WebPlus
  • Scientific search engine from Thomson.
• Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others – NYTimes.com
  • The publisher of “1984” apparently changed their mind about wanting a Kindle edition. Amazon caved, and automagically deleted copies, refunding the price of purchase. You can’t make this stuff up…
• When I died

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