More links…

Franco is still dead, and Stanford B School researchers say that who you know dominates who get’s the job (abstract); now with improved with social networking.

Very fun screen cast of about the Java Script library known as Mochi.

Cool winter weather browser shows snow cover, percipitation, tempurature, elevation, etc. etc. etc. Those guys at the national weather service? They Rule!

A nice complement to my attempt to estimate the cost/mile of driving the car; here’s an attempt to estimate cost/mile of shoes.

And from that same source hiding images in sound.

I gather that the president of U of Chicago said:

A university is “an aggregation of sovereignties connected by a common heating plant.”

The internet is a aggregation of sovereignties connected by a common search engine? The general pattern here is that if you drop down Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs sooner or later a point to rendezvous your common cause will emerge.

This blog is totally on a roll!

For example this wonderful example of how one metric could lead you to entirely the wrong conclusions.

What, if anything, can be drawn from any of this? Not to put too fine a point on it, but people are scandal-mongers in private and they are helpful prudes in public.

Of course this morning my questions is: while a snarky blog about silly patterns in the world of business is certainly able to attract an audience can Google’s ad placement AI find a group of advertisers that actually garner click thru? I’ll admit I was slightly tempted to click on the link offering to let me start my own hedge fund.

Decayed Machinery

I have a rule of thumb about signs. They send signals about the past. Once upon a time, someting didn’t go quite right. They got a sign.

I’ve been messing around with mt.el (an emac mode for blog editing MovableType blogs) but currently it’s not working out just right. It appears that posting works, but when it retrieves the postings all the open angle brackets are converted to <. It appears that movable type is sending the postings back with converted like that and the xml.el or xml-rpc.el that I’m using aren’t in synch with that behavior.

I have been getting some nice help from the author of mt.el though.

Now I’m playing with ecto. It doesn’t like the unusual characters that appear in some of my postings. Those are a gift of Microsoft Word. Ecto’s editor is surprisingly simple.

Ecto is a little easier for setting up pictures than the vanilla MovableType web interface though.

Stu’s having fun! Translucent concrete, power free refrigerators, cheap around the world travel. It’s better than an old copy of popular science!

Del.icio.us is neat.

What’s in it for me? I get an account where I can collect bookmarks and access them from all over the web. It’s easy, since I can add bookmarks to your account using a bookmarklet. So I can type cmd-2 and hit a button I’ve saved another URL.

What in it for us? We all get to see what other folks are taking note of. For example I can discover that other folks that have taken note of the same bookmarks I’ve noted and then look at other things they are noticing.

All the stuff you’d expect: categories, what’s new, popular lists; and of course people have built hacks that complement it for automaticly capturing the URLs from blog postings, or embedding your recent entries into your blog’s home page.

It’s a very interesting example of how people will volunteer to reveal stuff and that a hub can create a network effect, which creates value out of collective action, and generates assorted complements around that hub.

I gather this is the work of the same guy that did the geourl stuff I pointed out a long time ago. A similarly sweet lite idea.

Give it a try!

• Create an account.
• Put the bookmarklets on your toolbar.
• Add some pages from your browser bookmarks and history.
• Join the fun.

Photoshop Tatoos – Hehe, the media office at BYU decided to hide the tatoos on their basketball players.

Longhorn – Good reasonably short overview of longhorn by a VC.

I’m Above Average (pdf) – An amusing essay about the puzzle presented by reading the liturature that shows that people tend to rate themselves above average. Given that knowledge how do you adjust your own self evaluation? If depressed people have less of problem with this are faced with a choice between being depressed and being accurate, etc.

Columbia Report – Murder! We apparently learned nothing from the Challenger Report. Kafka!

Normal Accidents – One of the best books on how hard it is to build high reliablity systems in some situations.

Future of Shopping – Neat fash demo of a tool that helps search the universe of cameras.

Worse Mistake – Jarred Diamond opines that agriculture was a lousy deal for most of the population, but good for the elites. I think “Diamond” is a great example of a high signal value name.

Top Ten Lists – Is there anything more elite? … “The publication of multiple ten-best lists is probably a well-intentioned effort to embrace the principle of pluralism…”

Conservatives – A nice description of what a conservative is. I’d note though that this is not the same as what the right wing in American politics is, or at least it’s not what the VoteView model calculates it to be. “Say” and “Do” are often different like that.

Social Network Visualization – Spiffy! via Overstated.

Six second videos – Art!

del.icio.us

THERE ARE ALSO LIMITS WHICH CANNOT BE EXCEEDED DUE TO THE STRUCTURE – but then, SQUOZE provides 4 bits for dynamic typing!

Loom — Excellent blog on genetics and biology.

CBO on 50 year deficit – bleck.

SeatGuru – Sad, but I need this. Where the good seats are on the airplane.

Commit Sluts – Amusing, but maybe these folks are what Gladwell refered as “masters of the light relationship”, i.e. the hubs.

Hal Varian‘s – New York Times columns!