Nailchipper

The political right is going through interesting changes right now. The war hawks from the neoconservative pillar of the political right is crumbling as support for the Iraq War dwindles.
Corruption in the congress has led to the resignation of major figures like Majority Leader Tom Delay. A sex scandal has led to the resignation [...]

Does milk ever go bad anymore? I remember when milk went bad.

this audience is old
forget the milk
can you pick up milk? i’ll pay you back
we’ll rendezvous another time?
weekend was decent - can’t hang out this weekend can i’ll be in la
how was the rest of your weekend?
just kidding!
that’s going to cost $
go in main entrance and turn left
hey.. i think i’ll stay in, i am tired.. [...]

Megan McArdle, over at Jane Galt, used a term that I’ve never heard before, but I really like:
Agnotheist: An agnostic who puts a very, very low –yet non-zero! — P-value on God.
That very small, yet non-zero P-value is as certain as we will ever be to knowing anything about the universe.

This is an interesting chart on how often John Kerry is searched for on Google.

On November 3, 2004, when John Kerry conceded, he became irrelevant almost over night. How sad.

On Monday, Adriene Jenik, who is Associate Professor of Computer & Media Arts at UC San Diego, stopped by for what turned into an interesting discussion on the future of libraries. Adriene is a telecommunications media artist who has experimented extensively in virtual performance with projects like Desktop Theater and SPECFLIC, an ongoing “speculative [...]

Activity on my blog and my company website has been light recently. This means one of two things: I’ve abandoned both projects or I’ve not had time to update either. I am glad to report that it is the latter scenario.
Visudo has hired two new developers to help develop and launch our open source content [...]

Ever imagine what the footage would be like if in films they shot entire scenes of character saying their life stories? You know, the scene where they show the begining and the end of the conversation and suggest that they’ve been speaking for a long time by having them finished a large meal or having [...]

This is interesting spam:
want to see how you want to learn the support in your own code. you have. You know support in your own code. more complex. and why everything
Singleton isn’t as simple as it design problems challenging. Something You want to learn the to do instead). You want will load patterns into your [...]

I’ve said this before, but there is interesting project called Global Text Project, which looks to give text books away.

Education can play a fundamental role in reducing poverty, but high-quality and up-to-date textbooks are often too expensive for most people in developing countries.
[...]
To make education more accessible, a professor in the University of Georgia Terry [...]

For those in power, the abstraction that a television screen or computer screen provides is both necessary and dangerous. It is necessary because it allows us to model increasingly complex devices and accomplish ever sophisticated tasks. Dangerous because the ramifications of these models on the real world are sometimes masked or not apparent.
Autocrats and aristocrats [...]

This is an example of a normal text note

Since i’ve been interested the development of online sitcoms, I plan to build a catalog of these shows to see how they progress. What I find interesting is that many of these online shows have a very distinct feel and pacing to them that is uncommon on traditional sitcoms. They also tend to be self-aware [...]

A technology called Photosynth, developed by Microsoft Research in collaboration with University of Washington, has the potential to change the way we look at maps.

Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.

This is quite possibly one of the most [...]

I read The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil a few months ago, and I found it to be thought provoking book and highly recommend it (I did find Kurzweil’s fascination with living forever somewhat bizarre). One of the most interesting topics I was exposed to was on the movement [...]

Jeff Young, from the The Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote a piece titled Book 2.0: Scholars turn monographs into digital conversations, where he discusses a bit about the work going on at the Institute of Future of the Book . Sadly, it’s a paid service, and the article is not public, but a quote from [...]

I jumped out of a plane two days ago and now I am finally coming to terms with what’s happened to me. I think i’ve had an adrenaline rush that began to wear off only yesterday.
The most nerve racking part of this adventure was the drive the to skydiving ranch, where we nervously joked [...]

I jumped from an airplane this morning…… and I survived.
This picture is of my sister, who jumped right before me.

I could not afford the extra $80 for mid-air pictures (after already spending $185), but here a few more of my sister.

On a very interesting series on PBS, Bill Moyers interviews Mary Gordon.

Author Mary Gordon is widely regarded as one of the leading chroniclers of contemporary Catholic life in America. Her literary oeuvre - novels, short stories, essays, and personal memoirs - paints a rich picture of the complexities of faith, morals, politics, and religious and [...]

A friend sent me a video of a firework factory blowing up. It was interesting at first, but then it appears that the camera is killed by a near by explosion. I then read a bit about the explosion and found out that it was a horrible disaster in the Netherlands where hundreds of people [...]

Nailchipper is going through a redesign, so expect things to look strange in the next few days. The top navigation wont work until the end of the week (except the “weblog” link) and some of the font sizes will be a bit funky while I play with the stylesheets. I asked Dylan Knight Rogers create [...]

The following was a comment I wrote in Future of the Book, in the post Rosenzweig on Wikipedia.
While some people think that finding an error in Wikipedia is a sign of its weakness, I am reassured that this is Wikipedia’s greatest strength.
I found this quote in the essay particularly interesting:

The limited audience for subscription-based [...]

The New York Times had an article called “Growing Wikipedia Revises Its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy“, which I found fairly interesting, but was bothered by some of the quotes I read, especially those of Nicholas Carr.

Ideals always expire in clotted, bureaucratic prose. It distances the killer from the killing.
–Nicholas Carr

Poetic, but has little to do [...]

I found a very interesting essay in the New York Times, called “The End of Authorship” by John Updike, and then realized that it was being discussed on the Future of the Book.
While Ben Vershbow was critical of the essay because he thought Updike is a “nostaligic elitist”, I thought I’d defend the essay’s sentiment, [...]

From Wikipedia:

This page highlights images that we find beautiful, shocking, impressive and informing. It is the visual equivalent to featured articles and, as such, even more subjective.

This is a featured picture, which means that community consensus has identified it as one of the finest images on the English Wikipedia, adding significantly to its accompanying article.

The [...]

I found the best oranges in the world and they are located right……. here. It’s in the local c-town, town, town, town, town, town…

I’ve been a real busy bee recently. I moved to Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, a few days ago and so far it’s been great! I am in the tip of Brooklyn and I’ve been exploring the old factory buildings and parks that are near by. In the next few days I plan on walking over to [...]

Call me an apoligist for the iPod pop culture (apoligist because I don’t have an iPod), but I think this anti-ipod campaign by SanDisk is horribly disengenous. It plays into a common sentiment that not having an iPod is somehow rebellious, because it resists some pressure to conform. SanDisk now offers those people [...]

I worked on a project for the Institute for the Future of the Book called Gamer Theory. It’s looking at the idea of giving books a life of their own and allowing books to become a dynamic forum of discussion of new ideas instead of a static read-only forum. I will write more about this [...]

In an era when companies are opening up their technologies to the public, Apple takes a step backwards and closes it’s kernel, out of fear of Mac OS pirates and Mac clones. Although Apple often does not shy away from properitary formats and does not open its technologies to competitors, Apple has been able to [...]

Here is a video of a cool technology that turns water into a flame that can burn through many metals.

Some of the prominent characteristic and unique properties thought to be achieved are: no oxidation of the weld; no heat slag; no weld joint inclusions; ability to weld dissimilar materials (i.e. glass to steel, etc.); and [...]

Today marks the day of everything that was horrible, is horrible, and will continue to be horrible being a bit less horrible.
Thank goodness for that!

London is launching a new program to help people “Fight crime from [their] sofa.” The first thing I thought was:

“The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was [...]

To continue my series on Internet Television, I encourage everyone to check out duder to understand my next point. Duder was created by my very talented housemate, Matt Kirsch, who wrote and edited everything almost single handedly. He even had the obligatory freak out when he thought he erased the entire project after it was [...]

From a wikipedia entry about bubbles
A bubble can exist because the surface layer of a liquid (usually water) has a certain surface tension, which causes the layer to behave somewhat like an elastic sheet. However, a bubble made with a pure liquid alone is not stable and a dissolved surfactant such as soap is needed [...]

I’ve written previously about how people watch movies and television programs on their computer, and about a few cool tools that might lead the way in helping us move away from television. But as clear as the path seems, there was no visible commercial effort to for movies what iTunes has done for music, and [...]

Is it just me or is technorati slow? It’s a great service, but I think they might have some scaling issues. I’ve been surprised to see technorati links in popular magazines like the nation.

Check out this segment of “New Rules” in Bill Maher’s “Real Time”. The first part of the clip is fairly typical Maher. He makes fun of Anna Nicole Smith, mocks “metro-sexuals”, makes a joke about the recent immigration protests and finally mocks religion.
But after all that, Maher focuses on the Americans and the “American Dream”. [...]

A few months ago my brother told me to watch a PBS documentary called “Commanding Heights“. I did. And I enjoyed it. The documentary begins at the dawn of the 20th century, when Europe first attempted globalization through colonization and the foundations of macroeconomics were being laid by John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek.
The [...]

Yesterday I found the “New” Napster. I quickly signed up and gave it a shot. And to my surprise it was not bad; bordering good. The deal is that you can listen to the entire Napster music collection, for free. The catch is that for free accounts the music is streaming only and you’re [...]