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Category Archives: links
Peaceable Assembly
Flash Mobs are kind of a limit case of the first amendment’s right to peaceable assemble. I have no idea if they have similar constitutional protections in India. I seem to recall that Gandi was a fan of mass nonviolent resistance because it was a practical solution to pent up disaffection, better than violence.
Meanwhile I highly recomend the short story Larry Nevin on Flash Crowds, it’s in the book “Flight of the Horse.” His solution to this class of denial of service attacks was laws – to date I’ve don’t think I’ve seen another solution that works.
Beep
Beep – A cure for hickups; well it worked for me.
Assorted Links
Assembly – Theory/calculus of how to assemble things.
Skype – ?
Blurb – How to use your critics to get blurbs for your book, or website.
Play Money – Blog on the real money markets for online game commodities; see also Unreal Estate Boom, or, The 79th Richest Nation on Earth Doesn’t Exist.
Fox News – media lies – Possible we should use some standardized testing to guide the allotment of media market share.
“Don’t be evil” – but if we are – shut up!
Malfoy – that snake!
Cybercrime Blog – Just in case your not already in a panic about identiy theft and it’s many friends. Just how much is a credit card # with persion info and CVV2 code cost? $10..$60 per thousand – credit cards are not accepted though.
FooCamp – What does it all mean? Private function, public fame, why it’s like a celebrity wedding!
Digital Hand – a complement to the invisible hand. What I sometimes refer to as Moore’s law and friends (so as not to leave communications and storage out of the picture). Other branchs of technology are beginning to have growth curves that are as extreme, biotech for example.
SAP Ventures – has a nice blog with a daily set of pointers to interesting articles on various topics. Including…
Depression, Seratonin, Alergies, and Memory – from New Scientist
Tipping Fee?
Fun summary from David Brake outlines from tools for tracking google queries and sales ranking at various bookstores.
Ironically one of these, JungleScan, which shows winners and losers in sales rank on a given day, reports amoung it’s loosers Tipping Point. Down 65%.
Amazon sales rank is, apparently, quite volitile.
Astroturf and other Link Parasites
Astroturf — generating site from the Bush/Cheney ’04 campaign will find send you letter to the editor to all your local newspapers and provides boilerplate you can grab and stuff right into your letter.
Bead-a-lee?
Delightful Multimedia fun, via blog.org.
Crude Slander — directed at the author of Nickle and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America
Etzioni
A fat young man without a good word for anyone finally gives voice to something that’s been bothering me and I now take it back.
Meanwhile you gotta love: “astute readers will perceive here a man battling for his life against the forces of digression” – I certainly can relate to that!
Huge Penis!
Power-law graph layout
Nice paper sketching an straight forward algorithum to layout a graph informed by the assumption that the graph’s connectivity exhibits a power-law distribution. The general idea is to sort the graph into rank order and then layout the upper-classes first and pack the lower-classes in latter.
I love the way that a even a graph layout problem becomes a statement on strategy, social engineering, governance, etc. when your working on things like this.
“The highest layer possesses a small number of highly influential nodes. Consequently, it requires the highest temperature so that the nodes are forced to spread out from one another, and explore the global search space. This is essential as these highly connected nodes define the final structure of the graph.”