»Us« by Regina Spektor. She has quite a voice.

January

• Maria Barbal: »Wie ein Stein im Geröll«
• James Jones: »The Thin Red Line«

This is a really good idea (thx Tim):

The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to »liberate« their products.

Layer 8 is Internet jargon used to refer to the »user« or »political« layer as an extension of the OSI model of computer networking.

»Classic records lost in time and format, re-emerged as Pelican books. Just for fun.« A set on flickr.

Some time ago, IBM published a five part series of articles introducing three major PHP frameworks: Zend, Symfony and CakePHP. The information will be outdated but it might be a good read to get a feeling for the general architecture of each of the frameworks.

Within six years, David Foster Wallace's »Infinite Jest« has been translated into German. A quote from the publisher, Helge Malchow (KiWi): »It's not in the centre of our revenue expectations.«

- The Amazon page shows the cover (of course). I have mixed feelings about it: The overall idea is okay, though nothing special, but the typography has been done very carelessly. How many surely unintentional (?) words can you make out? (Update: This does look ugly, though.)

- An interview with the translator, Ulrich Blumenbach (in German). (thx David)

I am probably the last one to link this. (via praegnanz)

Short syntax reference guides like »Javascript in Ten Minutes« are a pretty useful idea. I quite often think: »Yes, I know how <basic-programming-subject> works, just tell me where I have to put which brackets!«

Wikipedia:

Ironic processing is the psychological process whereby an individual's deliberate attempts to suppress or avoid certain thoughts (thought suppression) render those thoughts more persistent. A classic example is Fyodor Dostoevsky's quote from Winter notes on summer impressions: »Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.«

Another great find by Today and Tomorrow: Sol LeWitt's »Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes«.

There are many reasons why video mashups were invented. This is one of them.

Update: Here's another good one.The guy with the short temper is this Alex Jones by the way.

»Nami«, Japanese for wave, is the title of a photo book by Syoin Kajii. Today and tomorrow shows five beautiful examples.

From a Times Online article about a study by psychologist Richard Wiseman who »lost« a few hundred wallets with different or no pictures in them:

When faced with the photograph of the baby people were far more likely to send the wallet back, the study found. In fact, only one in ten were hard-hearted enough not to do so. With no picture to tug at the emotions, just one in seven were sent back.

(via 3qd)

The »broken windows« theory of urban sociology states that people are significantly less likely to break into houses or throw litter on the sidewalk if everything in the neighbourhood is clean and orderly. As soon as there is one broken window or a piece of litter somewhere, things start to get worse. Results from the theory led to New York City's »zero tolerance« strategy of crime prevention in the 1990's that most certainly helped to drop the crime rates consecutively for years.

The theory is probably able to explain comment spam on the Internet, too.

Don't look now, there's Luke beatin' Mario Bros. – No warps!

This video by Barats & Bereta has got balls.

OT: Why didn't I post for so long, you wonder? Why didn't I read more than five pages of »Infinite Jest«? Good questions.

By the way, I just googled »all good questions« (to check the grammar) and guess what search result #3 is:

Infinite Summer: Is Infinite Jest a New Media Object?

I swear to God, this is purely coincidental. And, come to think about it, somewhat spooky. Guess I'll better start reading.

From the Washington Post article »The Devil Is in the Digits« about a statistical analysis of the Iran election results:

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average – a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another – are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

Apart from that, there seem to be too many adjacent digits (like 23 or 34, but not 61) in the data so that, as the article concludes, it becomes very likely that the figures have been tampered with if both observations are taken together.

I have no idea whether the interpretation of the data is correct, but it always amazes me what seems to be possible using statistics.

Infinite Summer, the collective David Foster Wallace / »Infinite Jest« reading attempt, started... yesterday – which means I'm already one day behind which is not good. Anyway, they got Kottke to write an intro post. No surprises there.

Having failed every single scheduled reading event I participated in (half a dozen or so), I am eager to sit this one through. (Yes, I might be kidding.)

They say it'll be fun.

I have once again madly fallen in love with Shaun Inman. He is a great designer. He is an even better coder. (I wish I could be so pragmatic as to write software with a lower reqs bound of PHP 4.2.3+ and MySQL 3.23+.) He has a sexy voice. – In one word, Shaun Inman is completely overpowered. So go watch the screencast and find yourself a fever.

Okay, to be honest: This is a tool for power users that, as all self-hosted aggregators do, more or less depends on access to cron to update your feeds. So figure it out on your own.

So, Facebook is going to land on the moon in a few hours.

Dave Winer:

But the thing that strikes me as weirdest of all is that after years of insisting that people only use their real names on Facebook, they've now set up a system where it will be virtually impossible for most people to do that, even if they want to.

If I cared more about Facebook, I'd have more to say about this.

I wish this period of the Internet would end, it's so exactly like AOL. I've seen this show before, I know how it ends. Only this time there won't be a Time-Warner to cash them out.

Anil Dash:

June 13, 12:15am: A first wave of »It's alive! Go get your name!« posts go up on various technology blogs, noting that the service is running a little bit slow. None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

Khristian Mendoza's »Transparency« set. What a great idea. (via tat)

The Information Architects like cheeseburgers:

All things have an interface. Shaping interfaces is shaping the character of things. The brand is what transports the character of things. When looking at McDonalds, iPod, Nintendo DS it becomes quite obvious that the interface is the brand.

AAAAAAAAA! AA AA AAAAAAA AA AAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAA AAA AAAAAA A. A AAAA AAAA AA AAAAA AAA AAAAAAA AAAA, AAA AAAA AAA »A« (AA AAA AAAAAAAA).

I just did the Jung Typology Test and ended up as an ENFP (Extraversion, iNtuition, Feeling, Perception; more here and here). They say that's like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Stephen Spielberg or Joan Baez – all of which are/were great computer scientists. The outcome is not a big surprise if you think about it, but I'm kind of surprised nonetheless. Not that I care about this kind of stuff, but GO TAKE THE TEST, it's awesome. (Sorry, trying to stay in character or something.)

From the essay »Ten Things I Have Learned« by Milton Glaser (via lonegunman):

Everyone always talks about confidence in believing what you do. I remember once going to a class in yoga where the teacher said that, spirituality speaking, if you believed that you had achieved enlightenment you have merely arrived at your limitation. I think that is also true in a practical sense. Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable.

Hosanna - Hillsong. Surprisingly few pictures of crosses in the sunset in this one.

– »Embedding disabled by request« seems to be the newest trend in YouTube videos. That's definitely not Two Point Oh, folks.

Think Again: Child Soldiers. »What human rights activists never tell you about young killers.«

Dice-O-Matic, an automatic dice roller.

[Scott] runs gamesbyemail.com. One of his biggest hurdles was producing real random numbers for the games. He had tried various methods like math.random and random.org, but kept getting complaints about the quality of the random numbers. His solution was to build an automatic dice roller.

Elektrochemie LK's »When I Rock« which is not embeddable.

The entire trajectory of technology (and its culture) from about 1970 to the end of the century could be summed up by the phrase »Never underestimate the power of chips.«

For the next 40 years or so it'll be »Never underestimate the web«, says Kevin Kelly.