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.

From the Wikipedia page about cyclomatic complexity:

The cyclomatic complexity of a section of source code is the count of the number of linearly independent paths through the source code. For instance, if the source code contained no decision points such as IF statements or FOR loops, the complexity would be 1, since there is only a single path through the code. If the code had a single IF statement containing a single condition there would be two paths through the code, one path where the IF statement is evaluated as TRUE and one path where the IF statement is evaluated as FALSE.

Computer Skills is a piece of performance art by Charles Broskoski.

In December of 2006, I downloaded a torrent (an archive of files distributed by peer-to-peer software) called »O'Reilly Ebook Collection« from a file-sharing site, with no intention of using it.

The archive contained 356 digital books in a variety of formats, all centered around computer programming or computer technology. A few months after downloading the archive, I started reading the books on my computer, as a performance.

It's a nice idea to declare something you do as »performance art«. I might try this with »getting up at 6AM« or »having a swim each day«. That makes ordinary stuff more fun.

Andy Clarke had the idea to design one last stylesheet for the Internet Explorer 6. I don't know what to make of this.

The Male Programmer Privilege Checklist is part humorous, part sad social commentary. (via paragiraffe (nice redesign!))

Lloyd Morgan of Lone Gunman cites an interesting passage from an old article by Joel Spolsky on the topic of procrastination. The main idea:

An object at rest tends to remain at rest. There's something incredible heavy in my brain that is extremely hard to get up to speed, but once it's rolling at full speed, it takes no effort to keep it going.

There's some serious footnote reading coming up this summer, or should I say this Infinite Summer?

The Challenge: Read Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009[.]

That means a thousand pages of David Foster Wallace between June 21st and September 22nd. Count me in!

In October of last year, Big Picture ran a series of aerial photographs by Yann Arthus-Bertrand but was asked to take down most of them because of an upcoming exhibition. Half a year later, they feature a set of Jason Hawkes' pictures.

I especially like #14 which shows a nice example for the concept of desire paths.

For his Interview Project, David Lynch drives through the USA and interviews people he meets along the way. The first episode will be availabe on June 1st.

They are doing roughly the same thing over here on TV for quite some time and it's always inspiring to watch. I'm looking forward to this.

»Concubine« by Clayton Cubitt. The video is not safe for work if your employer has a policy against women in underwear shaving the artist's head.

There are a lot of other good videos on Cubitt's profile page.

The term hypercorrection has different meanings in different subject areas: in the game of golf, hypercorrection occurs when overcorrecting for a potential slice and so creating a hook instead; in language, hypercorrection refers to over-correcting for words or phrases that are actually correct. [Link added, formatting removed.]

Subway systems of the world, presented on the same scale.

Silke Schöner leaves room to breathe in her paintings.

Instead of color-space paintings (associated with emotions), I [Schöner] used empty white spaces to represent the mental/spiritual, whereby the viewer unconsciously adds the »missing information.«

More here. (thx Tim)

...until someone gets their head stuck in a 3,600-year-old Sumerian pot. Oh McSweeney's, what will you think of next.

The intro to the 1997 film Contact, starring Jodie Foster. The choice of radio samples is blatantly obvious (Kennedy assassination) or awful (yes, those are the Spice Girls) at times, but the intro always gives me the creeps nonetheless.

(Also check out Powers of Ten by Ray and Charles Eames.)

37signals' Ryan Singer shows a nice and simple method how to find out which elements of a user interface belong together logically and therefore should be grouped visually.