As a child, I thought looking at things means sending out “search rays” that leave your eye, scan the world and somehow resend that information to your brain. Actually, I have no idea if I really thought that. But it certainly seems plausible. Later I learned that in reality, the light that objects emit or reflect somehow gets caught on the retina and is transformed into an image.

Which means that just by looking at things, you can’t change them.

Remember Googlewhacks? Yeah. What I liked about them was that when you published one, you destroyed it. Does this still fall under the observer effect or does writing about something go beyond observing it?

If the first applies, then writing about an event is in essence the same as talking about it, or for that matter, observing it. Let’s say the event is a search engine query, or an HTTP request of a web page. Even looking at a page in the privacy of your own home and shutting up about it constitutes an act of writing, at least at the level of server logs and browser history.

In the context of sign-in applications, such as blogs, wikis, social networks and so forth, you can safely assume that the data collected goes beyond your IP and user agent string. In fact, some social networking tools such as Xing allow present the user with a “Who’s viewed me” page. On others, like MySpace, figuring this out is left to hackers. In any case, in these environments, looking at something clearly constitutes more than just an act of observation. It sends a message. So let’s try a catchy, important-sounding phrase: “Reading is writing.”

So I think an observation becomes more than just an observation when it is recorded, just like taking a photograph of something produces a new physical artifact that could in turn be photographed again. And there we have it, the resampling dilemma that destroys Googlewhacks.

Amazon has a new service called unspun that crowd sources compilation of various best lists. The idea is get people vote and sort the different categories by votes. Its ajaxified, built using ruby on rails and asks for a login before it lets you vote. I tried to find out if the number of votes has any correlation with the size of its wikipedia article (if thats any measure of popularity).

(Update: Replaced the table with the graph and moved the table to ‘more’)
Clearly, the wikipedia-size curve has spikes like Word, Openoffice, Corel and valleys like notepad and Ultraedit. On the other hand, if the table is sorted by wikipedia-size, textmate is a prominent spike on the vote curve. Well, its the same crowd, does it make sense for these to smoothen out? May be, yes.

There’s probably some alpha-beta user bias in the voting at this point as seen in this favorite subject list or Patrick Stewart (above Marlon Brando) in this list. But that should even out as this service becomes popular. While its easy to normalize and give them a letter grade, I wonder how a letter grade approach would work as opposed to ranking them. I find it hard to rank Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Tom Hanks, Kevin Spacey, Dustin Hoffman in a particular order. Now bring in non-Hollywood actors like Sivaji Ganesan, Amitabh Bachchan, Kamal Hassan or Toshiro Mifune. It only gets harder. I find it lot easier for me to give them a letter grade. Grading may be less mentally taxing than ranking and hence increase participation. On the other hand, grading doesn’t pump up enough adrenalin for most users. Its probably not enough incentive to campaign for a better rank of their favorite item. Anyways, keep exploring and comment some of the interesting lists you stumble upon.

Continue reading ‘Amazon’s unspun’

(For part one of this series, go here)

You gotta hear this one song – it’ll change your life.

-Sam in “Garden State,” as played by Natalie Portman

This single scene, in which the Shins’ song “New Slang” is played, has changed the entire outlook for this Portland-based, Albuquerque-grown pop band.

In the three years since they released their last album, “Chutes Too Narrow”, more and more people have taken to rolling their eyes when the Shins are mentioned. Why? They signed to a big label (Sub Pop), released two great albums and rode the coaster of their mainstream success. Is that “selling out”? And should I join the backlash? How can I root for a band to achieve success without selling out? That sounds like paper football: go far with your success, but don’t you dare go too far, or else you’re dead to me. Am I just hurt because the Shins are now wooing my little sister’s demographic?

I’m confused: 3 years ago, I was happy to declare that the Shins’ albums were among my favorites. Nothing has changed about the music. But now, people giggle at me for making the same declaration. Everyone and their mom has read The Kite Runner, so it’s now a much less appealing book to some, even though nothing about the book changed.

But, Kevin, they played a pool party on “Gilmore Girls” and wrote a song on the “Spongebob Squarepants Movie” soundtrack. And Marty, the band’s keyboardist, has appeared on “America’s Next Top Model”

THEY SOLD OUT.

Or so I’ve been told. Repeatedly. And I have many other examples of sellouts in recent memory (Strokes, Jonathan Safran Foer). But despite the training data, I haven’t figured out what “Selling Out” means… Are we so hellbent on conferring distinction upon ourselves with “indie”? Why should I be so eager to condescend to people who find out about these same bands once they’re in the mainstream? Is this different than “Jumping the Shark“? I always associated Jumping the Shark with something that’s washed up, and that hollowly resorts to tired gimmicks.

Is mainstream success really so bad?

Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and founder of McSweeney’s magazine, was confronted with accusations of sellout by the undergraduate lit editors of the Harvard Advocate. Check it out. His attitude of “saying yes” has molded my last few years.

Continue reading ‘The Shins and Selling Out, Part 2: Selling Out’

This may not be that interesting to some, but Python provides a pretty compact way to do some custom list sorting. Here’s how you could sort a list of strings by length using the builtin len() method:

>>> txt = 'a man a plan a canal panama'.split()
>>> txt.sort(key=len)
>>> print txt
['a', 'a', 'a', 'man', 'plan', 'canal', 'panama']

Fake Your Space is a service that will help you seem popular on online social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace. Fake “hot” people will post comments to your profile for only $.99 per month! (I’m not implying all hot people are fake) Witness how quickly the faker social technology space is evolving: just four months ago, Popularity Dialer debuted, and allowed you to fake one measly phone call to seem popular. Now your fake awesomeness can be broadcast asynchronously everywhere.

Oh wait, there’s already legal trouble a-brewing. They’re likely seeing the same threats that took down SingleStat.us, a service that would send notification when someone on your MySpace crush list went from “taken” to “single.”

It seems the big corporate social networks have a stake in keeping their popularity markets free from weirdness and fakesters. Is this a good idea? The iSchool’s danah boyd has a few comments on social networks needing more “benevolent dictators” who foster kids’ in their disruptive (creative) behaviors. She has composed an entire essay on the Friendster/MySpace longevity question. Speaking of that dinosaur Friendster, Fake Your Space doesn’t support faking it there.

Photo "Imaginary Friend" by Flickr user: drive by shooter

(via New Scientist)

We Feel Fine has an interesting flash visualization which grabs moods and feelings along with other statistical data from several major blog providers, using some mild NLP techniques. They also have an api that you can use to ping their dataset. Yey!

The end.

The Shins have a new song.

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photo by anil sharma


For part two of this series, go here

Today I received a letter that looked kinda important, perhaps a bill, a check, or some notice… I opened it faster than you can say “galvanic skin response.”

The envelope (click for larger image):

The letter (click for larger image):

DRAT! This was an ADVERTISEMENT! From a company that had nothing to do with me. Words like “phishing” and “those bastards” came to mind. I’m sure if I would’ve called them, I’d be stepping into a financial hard-sell trap. But on another level, I was impressed with the cognition-focused engineering they’d done.

Here are some of the interesting (and certainly intentionally designed) facets of this mailing that made it particularly sneaky:

1. The envelope – very “bill” looking, no logos or fanfare on the outside, window, my name on a form with some numbers visible. “I better open this, it looks important.”
2. The pink color – since grade school, report cards and other scary things have come in this pink hue, along with its carbon copy cousins, pastel green and pastel yellow. “this looks kinda official.”
3. The long digit strings – these look like account numbers, or record IDs which make the reader feel like the sender is an agency where their account already exists. “I guess I just forgot my loan with this company.”
4. ALL CAPS – sure, this is an indicator of spam, but it also makes me a little NERVOUS WHEN I’M READING SOMETHING IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. “Whoa, this is a big, nerve-wracking announcement.”
5. “PLEASE CONTACT US AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE, TOLL-FREE AT 877…” – The hint that it is urgent, and requires immediate phone contact with a representative. “Whoa, they want me to call? This isn’t a minor thing!”
6. “REGARDING YOUR STUDENT LOANS” – Owing money is scary per se. “Yikes, DEBT!”
7. “THIS IS NOT A LATE PAYMENT NOTICE” – mentioning by not mentioning, a la Lakoff’s “don’t think of an elephant” example. Simply the mention of a late payment of a big loan FREAKS people out. “WHOA, have I been paying my loans off???!!!”

Continue reading ‘evil opportunistic spam: advancing even on the snailmail front, not forsaking the highly-educated’

I don’t often frequent Slashdot, but I happened to stop by today and noticed a research article showing how a genetically modified blood protein could be used to create hydrogen from water by capturing light energy.

Human serum albumin, part of the protein complex used in the study:

I won’t jump to any conclusions here, protein synthesis is difficult, and efficiency of chemical reactions is often a very sensitive process. If refined though, this technology could provide an environmentally friendly, and exceedingly simple way of creating hydrogen as fuel.

Here’s the direct link to the abstract for the paper.

It always bothers me when people witness some seemingly “complex” or “advanced” behavior and casually throw out their willingness to understand (or at least conjecture) what’s going on. I’m not saying everyone should be interested in every bit of knowledge they come upon, it’s just that it seems to me that complex systems are often composed of incredibly basic, simple parts or concepts. Understanding that knowledge is modular wipes away a lot of the anxiety of learning (at least for me). No one is interested in everything, nor should they be, but stubborn unwillingness to learn because of a predisposition that one cannot even attempt to understand seems like a silly excuse.

I’m ranting about this, because of this interesting article I found on digg about Metroid level design for the original 8-bit NES. What really struck me was how simple the overall architecture was for implementing such a lengthy and complex a game as Metroid, using little memory. It turns out it’s not as complex as you might thing. The author in this article explains how each room sits on a grid within the NES cartridge’s memory, and that grid looks surprisingly like the overall Metroid level layout:

They go on to explain the how each graphic is stored and how the visual components of the game are put together at runtime. Lots of geekery, but the moral of the story is that the complexity of the game is an illusion. It’s all much simpler than it seems.