All-inclusive Randomness

base.google.com finally stopped teasing and went live. i anticipate busy times at work. and lots of blogbuzz tomorrow.

(image courtesy of John Battelle’s searchblog)

ha! found the first bug. the damn little window claimed it couldn\’t publish my previous post yet now i see it like million times. bah. ok, i will submit constructive criticism.

technorati tags: geeks

ok, i gave in. or, to put it differently, i finally alloted more than two minutes of focused procrastination to the task of exploring flock — the widely (geekily) acclaimed new web browser. due to the minimalistic state of the website, exploring meant downloading and installing. i will have to play some more to see whether it sticks (pro: everything is handed to you on a plate, con: everything is handed to you on a plate).  but  it looks pretty good so far. add your comments, expect more comments…

technorati tags: geeks

theslovak is considering spending 5-10 years of her life studying the open source community. Fortunately, O’Reilly has released a new book, open source 2.0, to lead her in the right direction.

Couple hours ago, the Nobel prize for economics was announced and it went to two game theory dudes — Thomas Schelling (U.S.) and Robert Aumann (Israel). Game theory is neat (as an anthropologist, I have to reserve some suspicion for it, but I did attend a wonderfully bizzare conference once that put economists, who were excited about rational choice theory and the like, in the same room with other social scientists, who were more aware of ‘cultural relativity’, and then threw in a mix of humanities folk, even including full-blown philosophers. I loved it.)

On a related topic: For all those of you who would like to win one of these babies one day, there is a handbook out there by Peter Doherty, an Australian Nobeler, featuring much wisdom, such as the following:

“Good habits start early: eat and drink moderately, take vacations, don’t smoke or over-use recreational drugs (alcohol included), take regular exercise, avoid extreme sports, and seek professional help for suicidal thoughts,” Doherty says.
And don’t be a dilettante. “Bright people who hop around from one topic to another often achieve very little,” he writes.
You will also need a good education. Doherty recommends growing up in an intellectual and supportive family in the United States, Europe, Japan, Canada or Australia. But he adds: “Sometimes the idiosyncratic outsider will rise to the top”.

For those who don’t care, or would settle for an Ig, let’s drink beer and be happy (and healthy too).

Check out Instructables, a website for “Step by Step collaboration.” Or in my words, the website is a very well-designed interface for sharing instructions on making shit. All tagged and everything.

Current projects range from recipes (Fried Banana Breakfast) to practical needs (foldaway bike racks) to furniture (Love Table).

Instructables was created by local supercool Engineering Design and Technology Innovation firm, Squid Labs. They have a bunch of other awesome projects and recently merited a Wired brief.

PS - Squid surprise tomorrow. If I have time and locate a device.

BBC is trying to stay hip and keep up with new technologies. They’ve been doing a podcasting trial for while now, and this week announced BBC “rip, mix, and share” — limited access to their video archive, allowing people (presumably just in the UK) to download video clips and do whatever they want with them under the Creative Archive Licence. It’s done by BBC and some other public Brittish bodies, allowing people to share, watch, listen and re-use moving images, audio and stills for non-commercial purposes. It also says something about “only available in the UK”, but what does “in the UK only” mean in the “virtual realm”? (apprently, they’re going to try to limit access based on geography. dunno, haven’t tried). Radio 1 is encouraging VJs/DJs to use this material with music and do cool stuff. Haven’t been able to find any examples yet though.

For amusement and inspiration (really odd kind of inspiration though, sounds smack full of halucinogens. but hey.) see what BBC has to offer to aspiring VJs:
- a clip you didn’t know you wanted: a white stallion galloping
- another golden jewel -> among the top 5 most downloaded clips right now on the Radio 1 website is “organic hens laying eggs”

Oh man. I just found Elgg, a sort of friendster/facebook for geeks and nerds. They call it a “learning landscape” and it’s a web community as well as an open source project (you can download the elgg platform onto your own server if you wish.) It’s blogs (private or public), tags, file sharing, communities and groups, wikis, all sorts of keyword connections and who knows what else. If I continue feeling nerdy, I might actually try this out, because, I have to admit, this might be sort of genious if it works.

A downloadable tool by the Compendium institute offers a way of organizing thought, teamwork, fiction, art, conflict resolution, or whatever else into an interactive visual map. I’m about to download and test it, and will post my review within the next couple days.

A new keyboard, to be released sometime next year, by Art Lebedev, is just, just, well, i don’t have words. besides pretty neat sleek design, and an additional function/application keys panel, all the keys are individual mini display screens, providing for unlimited functionality and change in function, layout, etc., changing the way we think about pressing keys… yummy.

More info…