Much like the natural evolution of bulky televisions to flat screens, toast now takes a similar journey down the path of refinement.

The Rollertoaster may only be a concept, but I’m pretty sure this will be the first thing I plug into the dashboard of my flying car, and I expect to see that 1st quarter 2007. I can just see it now, warmly toasting next to my charging iPhone…

Via Engadget

Heiko Kiendl-Müller’s art work is fantastic, on all two levels (possibly more), and occasionally hilarious. I’m biased toward fantastical representations of animals, but still, very cool.

Via Drawn!

Back in the day, my advisor introduced me to the term of “just-in-time (JIT) learning.” We didn’t really have to define or ponder the term, it just made sense. Methods and syntax were secondary: we had to learn them on the fly, to achieve our lofty goals in the time alotted, which on the quarter system was very little. My fellow developers and I would trek out into the universe of docs and tutorials to find the techniques or methods we needed, well, just in time. This notion has grown on me over the years, and much of the work I’ve been called to do has involved some J.I.T. learning.

But while finding that programming silver bullet in online code/discussions/documentation is exciting, losing such gems is incredibly frustrating. I’ve found that refinding cool code tricks is difficult. How can you form a query for that one thing that you do, that allows you to write that script to iterate over that thing…? Yeah. Trudging through my old old code is painful. Googling for these silver bullets is even more painful. As an astute BayCHI lecturer (whose name I’ve forgotten) pointed out, the query term “Java” has been getting less and less valuable over the years, as the volume of Java web resources grows. So even if a slick query gets you that Ruby on Rails trick now, as the Ruby community grows, that link may be harder to find.

So on that note, I’d be thrilled to make this blog a chest in which we can keep these gems.

In python, there is a slick, but simple, technique for list generation:

>>> [word.upper() for word in ['this','is','such','a','great','list!']]
['THIS', 'IS', 'SUCH', 'A', 'GREAT', 'LIST!']
>>>
>>> [i for i in range (5)]
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4]


Thanks Marti!

n8 and ken-ichi simultaneously pointed out this addition to the technique:
>>> text = ['so', 'sayeth', 'thy', 'sweet', 'Lord']
>>> stopwords = ['the', 'thy', 'though']
>>> words = [token.upper() for token in text if token not in stopwords]
>>> words
['SO', 'SAYETH', 'SWEET', 'LORD']
So this has come in pretty handy for me, and I wouldn’t want to lose this gem. The goal for me is to minimize refinding and maximize things that go into my repertoire.

Whatever language or context, if it’s cool, and you think others will find it useful, put it here and tag it “codegem”

Apparently, boy scouts enrolled in Los Angeles troops can now earn MPAA-approved copyright merit badges. I realize this is not recent news, but I find it absolutely hysterical! Clearly, no sash can be complete without it:

( http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061020-8044.html )

Aside from all the laughs, though, the patch does raise some concerns. To quote Nate Anderson, “what’s truly disconcerting about the program is that it’s not designed to teach kids about copyright at all. It’s designed to teach them to ‘respect copyrights.’” To earn the patch, scouts are required to read documents about rules regarding copyrighted works and then present on their contents. Moreover, they are encouraged to run a “Parent File Scan” (which basically lists all file-sharing applications) on their home machines, and then proselytize the scanner to other kids. Scary.

link to track
band’s myspace

Mouthful of Bees is a Miranda July fan, dropping the “))<>((” on their myspace. And by this account, they rock with their hearts, even to a crowd of 10 people. These Minneapolis rockers earn my vote tonight.

via music for robots

buy their new album, “The End”

Found this through Yahoo! News:

http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/21/memory_drug

It’s a 60 Minutes piece on a drug called propranolol that can be used to forget painful memories. A UC Irvine neurobiologist observed that the adrenalin released after stressful situations helps the mind solidify memories. Propranolol apparently blocks adrenalin receptor sites and therefore helps repress memory creation. Apparently, propranolol also helps weaken older traumatic memories as well. According to the 60 Minutes report, the drug is currently in the early stages of testing for the treatment of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Clearly, there are also concerns about the potential for abuse. There are concerns about persons using the drug for trivial reasons: forgetting embarrassing moments, for example. Would avoiding and side-stepping the painful moments inherent in the course of the human experience dull the formation of a person’s identity? On the other hand, some have likened withholding the drug from trauma victims to withholding morphine from patients suffering pain from their injuries. Is treating psychological pain any different than treating physical pain?

Fictional stories like “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore” illustrate how forcing our minds to forget events do nothing to erase the consequences of events or deal with the ramifications of our past decisions. Science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick wrote tales about how memory defines our humanity and perhaps even couches our very souls. Never mind genetic engineering. If the claims about propranolol are true, I am for the first time truly fearful of what we can do to our minds (and souls) with drugs.

I’m sitting here python swashbuckling, and once in a while I’ll stand up to relieve the cricks in my back. But you can tell when I’m truly in the zone by how hunched I am:

Ken-ichi sports a shirt bearing an image like this, titled “Something, somewhere went terribly wrong”:

When someone (read: my mom) yells at me to get into good working posture, generally I shoot straight up to 90 degrees.

But recently, researchers in Alberta and Aberdeen have suggested that we want a spinal angle that is more than 90 degrees.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6187080.stm

You want to be the guy with the giant checkmark in front of his face.

It’s funny, leaning back has traditionally been the lazy person’s posture, and hunched forward is a sign of diligence. Just think about the word “slacker.” As we spend more and more time in front of computers, we’d be foolish not to think about ergonomics, or our physical health in general.

Good luck on final projects, papers and exams, my fellow students!

This is an old page, but new to me: Zipdecode is a little applet that highlights all the US zip codes matching the numbers you type in. So if you just type in 9 you get all of California, 94 and you get the Bay Area, etc. This is by Ben Fry, the guy who did those excellent blog linkage visualizations for New York Magazine recently.

Thanks V. Lanard!

Kunal Anand has put together a few fun figures showing the lyrics in popular songs as directed graphs where each node is a unique word in the song. The stopwords have a tendency to form hubs, so I wonder how the graphs would look if he had just filtered them out and passed incoming edges onto the next word in sequence? Less connectedness? More semantically relevant hubs? Visualizing the number of incoming and/or outgoing edges by color or size might also be cool.

I found myself reflecting on that tag cloud over on the right hand side of this page. Yeah, that’s big. But YOUTUBE looms large in more than just blog tags. Americans don’t typically think to three significant digits, save Denny’s Grand Slam prices (”$1.99 are you out of your MIND?”). But it isn’t just lucky iSchool-grads-turned-YouTube-employees that can recite that ginormous number. Many of us can recite that magic number, ONE POINT SIX FIVE BILLION. As in DOLLARS that GOOG paid for YouTube. YouGoog is a juggernaut. Bitch.

But it’s sad to see a beautifully-designed site mar its aesthetic by inserting a blurry 425×350 placeholder image from YouTube. Readers of this site are clearly familiar with these images, which display a (seemingly random) frame from an embedded YouTube video. Doesn’t this page make you want to get your eyes checked? This site is pretty well designed, except, yick…

I’m saying nothing of the quality of YouTube videos (save that for another post), and I’m not criticizing YouTube as a source of entertainment. On the contrary, I’ve posted my share of embedded vids, and just tonight my friends and I gathered ’round the YouTube at the local cafe (via my MacBook Pro).

But as we surfed around Cute Overload, and as I let my friends in on this this Olde Blogge, I couldn’t help but notice how much of an eyesore these preview frames are. Even sites like Dabble ( a business that started out in the Berkeley School of Information ) that make their living from online video, syndicate these pixelated, aliased images that often tell us nothing about the video’s content.

What solutions can YouTooble give video syndicators and web-site viewers? Clearly the preview has to be fast-loading, as a blank placeholder for a high-res image is awkward in it’s own way. It’d be great if the solution showed the user key frames from the video (multiple images would be nice, but would a slideshow be too distracting?). Perhaps an image that starts out crappy (as it is now), but gets progressively clearer? People who had modems remember how a jpeg looked as it loaded up on a page. GOOGTube has access to the full res video, so, why can’t they give us a good set of screencaps? After all, that was what Google Video (heh) had intended to do just 18 months (aka one YouTube gestation period) ago!

Starting after this post, I’m going to try to increase the size of some of our other tags. Not gonna call it a YouTube fast necessarily.

I’m going to leave you beautiful people with a crystal clear, crisp preview of a Flickr photo, so you won’t be able to blame me for your next optometrist’s bill.

PS if anyone has any idea what algorithm YouTube uses to pick its preview frame, I’d be interested to hear theories.