SJ’s Longest Now

A good laugh

Posted on May 7th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized.

Simply brilliant. The world needs more media like this.  And more of those fat sign-anything markers.

0 comments.

Wikipedia researchers wanted!

Posted on May 4th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: chain-gang, metrics, null, wikipedia.

Do you know people who are currently doing statistical and social research about Wikipedia, or have good ideas about this they haven’t had time to work on?

I’m trying to build support for continual, detailed statistics generation from Wikipedia data, possibly at the Harvard-MIT Data Center.  There is still time to come up with good ideas for lightning talks and discussion groups at Wikimania 2009 this summer in Buenos Aires.  And there is a research-related Wikimedia job available starting this summer.

I am uncomfortable with many of the details of said job posting*, but as long as its up the best people should apply.

(more…)

1 comment.

Weeklong sleeplessnesses

Posted on May 4th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Reading through the Torture Memos, I found one useful tidbit : an improved lower bound on how long one can last under stress without sleep.

During a particularly busy week in college, I once spent 4+ days without sleep (just over 100 hours), and remember the world had a certain quivering texture, and that I heard occasional faint singing in the background, the last day.  I wasn’t exhausted when I had dinner and went to sleep at last, but certainly slept soundly for the next dozen or so hours.  So I’ve often wondered what the accepted limits on healthy sleeplessness are.

Well, now I know with a bit more detail : those human health heroes who also advise no more than 4 hours of waterboarding sessions and 24 minutes of simulated drowning in a 24-hour period (else you might start to inflict permanent physical or mental harm) say : no more than 7.5 days (180 hrs) without sleep before resting for a full 8 hours.  If any of you manage longer than that, let me know…

1 comment.

drunk with righteousness

Posted on April 25th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Clay Shirky takes a step back.

“In 1987, a a teenage girl in suburban New York was discovered dazed and wrapped in a garbage bag…”

0 comments.

Japanese young’uns freebasing refined sugar

Posted on April 24th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

What do you get when you cross Japanese cuisine, never a hotbed of sweetness, with mounds of pure, refined sugar?  To make any headway on the Japanese table would probably require a foodstuff so addictively sweet it would eat its own head.

Indeed, rule 51 holds true: if you can think of it, there is a cult ja following making videos about it.  Moral : buy stock in ritalin and anti-diabetics.

1 comment.

Where’s Wolvie?

Posted on April 19th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

I like Hugh Jackman.  I’m certain he is good with kids.  He doubtless helps old ladies and boyscouts alike cross the street.  Which is why even with his stage skills and the benefits of strenuous exercise and makeup, he’s no Wolverine.   #23 on the list of Things Wolverine Would Never Say:

“The FBI are on to it and they’re taking it very, very seriously.“

2 comments.

Ice Age cometh

Posted on April 8th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Sometimes people are wrong today.  More often they are wrong tomorrow.

• Here are some original mainstream ice age predictions from the 70s.
• Joshua Ramo wants to tell you how to cope with more and more people being wrong about greater and greater things.

0 comments.

You’d never guess…

Posted on March 19th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

That the commenter with 22 exclamation marks per paragraph is the highly prolific xword puzzle writer featured here.  I suppose I mean I would never guess.   And it’s not guessing now that I know.

I should put in a plug for Joon’s crosswording feats : congratulations, my friend.

0 comments.

Different strokes

Posted on March 19th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

A friend of mine had a stroke last night, and tried to sleep it off before heading to the hospital in the morning. It is hard to know how to deal with sudden changes out of the blue, especially when they are to something as fundamental to your sense of self as your body or mind… I’m not sure how to think about such things, or how to prepare for them.

(more…)

0 comments.

Ear worm heaven

Posted on March 17th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

The compleat works of favorite source of ear-worms, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, has finally returned to my possession after some time apart.  Welcome home!

Here’s a favorite from one of their albums. I transcribed a bit here, but you can find a book of their songs for further reading.

Have Some Madeira, M’dear (listen)

‘That decanter and this hat gave us the idea for this little Edwardian song…

(more…)

0 comments.

Happy Pi Day!

Posted on March 14th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Bake a Pi, have an re[ci|ea]ting contest, sing a traditional rap.  And happy birthday, einstein.

0 comments.

Dreaming in purple links

Posted on March 6th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Recently, I have been having troubling dreams of identifiers and classifications.  Something is missing in my soup.  Also, our public library system is surprisingly behind the times on providing basic public services such as universal global identifiers.  (come to think of it, who does provide such a thing?)

3 comments.

Things I have stolen

Posted on March 1st, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

I have to think up a list half as good as David W’s (how did I miss that last summer when it came out?) : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-wein…

What have you stolen recently?

2 comments.

Readying the shovel : an operetta in two parts

Posted on February 26th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

I don’t like people who throw about new terms as though they were old. It has the smell of name-dropping without any of the potential for gossip. So I’ve downgraded my opinion of people I’ve found using the phrase “shovel-ready” in recent weeks. It has reached such a state of malaise that today I went in search of the origins of the term.

To my surprise (but not yours, astute reader), the term originated with the owners of shovelready.com,  who have used it for the past decade to refer to economic development projects in upstate new york that have “worked proactively with the State to address all major permitting issues, prior to a business expressing interest in the location“.

This became a designation used cross New York state, from where it no doubt came to the attention of its senators and later Obama.  One might also take its popularity as a reflection on the excellence of the site design at shovelready.com — which I would guess drew Clinton and Obama and their aides to discuss it.  So congratulations are in order to the underappreciated web designers at National Grid.

0 comments.

Sleep, glorious sleep!

Posted on February 25th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

yawnlog beta is live!   Check it out.  track your sleep patterns and those of your friends… and try to live up to your own goals.

0 comments.

o–o

Posted on February 19th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

nbsp;http://o–o.jp/  with new length-defining action!

Also: Fun with associative arrays.  Wikipedia has never been faster.  Now if only the edit button worked…

0 comments.

Infoslicer code released : reading Wikipedia subsets has never been easier!

Posted on February 12th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

The infoslicer project has finally released its code under the GPL. This project started many moons ago with a discussion between me, Anne Gentle and Todd Kelsey… Michael Priestley got involved and helped find new interest…  Anne Gentle published a nice overview last year.  Since then the project has changed a bit, absorbed some summer interns, and set up a code repository.  And now it’s freely licensed as well.

From Laura Cowen’s announcement today:

Non-developer types can download the InfoSlicer xo package to install on their OLPC (or other Sugar installation) from: http://sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/InfoSlicer

One caveat is that the xo package that you can download from there doesn’t contain any sample articles from Wikipedia (which ideally it would to help you get up and running more quickly using the tutorial). You can use InfoSlicer without these sample articles (you can download Wikipedia articles from within InfoSlicer anyway). If anyone is able to re-compile the xo package with sample articles in it, I can provide instructions on where to put the sample articles in the package so that InfoSlicer automatically picks them up when it starts.

Download infoslicer for the XO or run it on your own system, watch a video of infoslicer in action, and give it a whirl!  You can send feedback to the OLPC library list, or specific feedback on downloading/reading wikitexts offline to the wikireader list (which is for wikireader discussions of all sorts, not only related to XOs).

5 comments.

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