Gessel On…

After Tortuga had her kittens, the clatter of tiny paws was almost deafening.  We really could have used a whole case of these!

This is a great description of Homeopathy.  I have occasionally pointed out to (usually unreceptive friends) a few of the curious consequences of logic in Homeopathy, but this little cartoon is a far more entertaining analysis:

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The “like” button got added about 10 minutes ago.

I guess people have some issues with facebook, or get the irony. Either way pretty cool that 495 people liked it in the first 10 minutes. And that’s from 2 of 8 servers (meaning 75% of visitors don’t see it yet).

I like that.

AWESOME! Facebook open graph lets you grab data from facebook with an oauth connection. They hand back some amazing data for your exploitation pleasure. You get automatic login with a default privacy set to allow. I’m sure they will carefully vet every site they give permit, just like they say they will, and so you can be sure they’ve visited the companies, performed background checks and submitted everyone at the applying company to a lie detector test.

Until then try the sample code so you can see what sorts of things you get back, like this query:

Then vary the object ID. (..com/objectid?acc…) Poking around to 4 I get:

{ “id”: “4″, “name”: “Mark Zuckerberg”, “first_name”: “Mark”, “last_name”: “Zuckerberg”, “link”: “http://www.facebook.com/zuck”, “birthday”: “05/14/1984″, “work”: [ { "employer": { "id": 20531316728, "name": "Facebook" }, "start_date": "2004-02" } ], “education”: [ { "school": { "id": 105930651606, "name": "Harvard University" }, "concentration": [ { "id": 111394625549982, "name": "Computer Science" } ] }, { “school”: { “id”: 108366532520435, “name”: “Phillips Exeter Academy” }, “year”: { “id”: 115476681798224, “name”: “2002″ } } ], “timezone”: -7, “updated_time”: “2010-02-14T09:05:15+0000″ }

Substitute any username for the query object and get that user’s profile (friend or not).  Increment through all possible object IDs and collect the entire FB data set.

Catching up on back xkcd, I saw this absolutely brilliant gem of data presentation (though line charts inaccurately suggest the interpolated data is meaningful) and had to try it out myself.

I searched for “I’ve had sex with <x> people” and varied x from 1 (person) to 50 (people). After about 15 it gets kind of boring, but for some reason 14 is the 3rd most frequent answer after 5. 4 is the most common, 5 the second, then 14. 8 also stands out as anomalously frequent, more than twice the frequency of 7 or 9, but we already knew 8 is a lucky number; clearly 14 is the right answer for number of sexual partners.

Now this inspires another search for “<x>  is a lucky number,” and there’s almost an inverse correlation. 8 is a lucky number, but 14 is much less lucky than 13. Perhaps with this illuminating data analysis, people will realize that 14 really is the luckiest number and drop the fascination with 13.

The “Vulva” theme has faded, this is a thought-provoking replacement.

My UAL flight had 4:3 side screens and a 16:9 center screen. The program material was 4:3 and dynamically distorted to fit the 16:9 screen.

Now I’m used to 16:9 screens showing horribly distorted video in hotel rooms; it seems every hotel has invested in wide screen TVs but, hey, broadcast is 4:3. So they’re fixed at “stretch” and only occasionally do you find a TV that you can reset to pillar box so it doesn’t look horrible. And I thought that was bad.

But this is amazing – the screen has a variable distortion field – stretch is zero in the center, but becomes more pronounced on the edges. That means that the necessary compensation is worse than 2:1 on the outside edges, just horribly distorted, while the center is undistorted. I suppose the theory was an analog of fovial vision… gone awry, but the result is just weird, disturbing when someone walks across the screen and seems to get twice as fat from center to edge. Who thought that was a good idea?

People: do not distort the image. Just because you paid for the pixels does not mean you must use them.

UAL Triple 7, three class plane, cross country flight (SFO-IAD): about as far as you can fly CONUS to CONUS, and I can’t get my nuts warmed?

I’d trade the puffy comforter for warm nuts any day.

For reasons some people don’t understand, I think ceiling cat is pretty funny. Since my stray cats aren’t very good at behaving I made a paper one using a pattern from tubby paws. Now Ceiling Cat is watching. The best part is I’m the only one who notices.

I think I need to install camera’s in ceiling cat’s eyes… new project.

type “is ” into the Google search bar in FireFox and you get:

“why” is even funnier

I’ve always wondered why I can’t own a Canadian… thanks Google!

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