I was at Cafe Cozy Corner yesterday morning, which is part of a Brigadoon-like complex of businesses that seems to have erupted at 10th and L over the weekend. Most notable among them is an almost completely deserted CVS — I'm pretty excited at the prospect of having a drug store a mere four blocks from my house. It's true that it won't stock anything that Giant doesn't, but it's also true that checking out at Giant always involves at least twenty minutes of standing in line.

But the coffeeshop isn't as impressive as the CVS. It does have a lot of fantastically weird packaged foods — Pokky, dried tofu, and triangular rye crackers, among other things — but the clientele seems to consist of hungover not-actually-blonde girls in sweatpants and their lunkhead boyfriends (actual overheard conversation topic: Facebook). And, although Yglesias maintains that my goy status disqualifies me from opining on bagels, these chewy abominations were even worse than the watery coffee that accompanied them. Topping things off, the only wifi to be had was an incredibly slow link stolen from a nearby apartment.

So: CVS thumbs up, coffee shop thumbs down. But the latter's problems aren't anything that a new chef, a wifi link, and a serious botulism outbreak couldn't fix.

So, as you might imagine, this new CVS will be the point around which my mental landscape revolves for the next few days. On that note, I've already begun to make cutting new observations about my new drugstore-based lifestyle.

For example, have you heard of "HomeGoing" cards? Last night I found myself shopping for a "dear Grandpa, sorry your three-legged cat got torn apart by stray dogs" card (yes, really — I had to settle for "condolences on the loss of your pet", which could be talking about anybody but will have to do). But in the midst of perusing the card aisle I came across a sizable selection of HomeGoing cards (they even had their own separate section in the card aisle). A little investigation shows that these are condolence cards, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the term is meant to imply that the deceased has gone to heaven. But I had never heard the word HomeGoing before.

The internet doesn't have much to say about it, either. Wikipedia just turns up references to individuals' HomeGoings, and the top google hit is a press release from a disreputable rightwing media outlet. That's not much to go on.

So is this something new? Is it yet another way for evangelical Christians to turn half of America into a secret society that can snicker at us until Rapture O'Clock? Is this some repopularized archaic term that I've simply never heard of, but which has a long and appropriately humorless Protestant history? Or has (Hall)market research simply shown that people buying cards about death don't like to think about death? Right now I'm leaning toward the first or third explanations — "HomeGoing" sounds a little too much like a made-up religious observance from Battlestar Galactica for me to think that Pilgrims came up with it. But for all I know it might actually be funereal cosplay: I didn't check inside any of the cards for references to the Lords of Kobol, but I wouldn't be surprised to find them.

I missed all of the net neutrality fun, I'm afraid. But to summarize: Julian took issue with Craig Newmark's decision to analogize a non-neutral internet to pizza companies buying additional phone lines. Cory Doctorow dropped by, son1 posted about it, Kriston was all over the comments, and I was too sick to wade in. Argh.

Well, Ezra's just put up a post about it, so maybe now's my chance. I disagree with Ezra (I think that the quality of phone service probably is a desirable differentiator for pizza delivery joints), but I do think Julian's being too blasé about a purely market-driven internet.

Something that JP and I just figured out at work: how to change a Flickr RSS feed so that it returns images larger than the default, using Yahoo Pipes. Here's a feed of my photos demonstrating the functionality. Here's the pipe in question, so that you can adapt it to your own feeds. And here's Flickr's documentation on its URL formats — if the 1024 pixel size is too large for you (or you want a smaller-than-normal image for some reason) consult that link and replace the "_b" in the first regex block with the appropriate underscore + letter combination (or remove it entirely for the default size of 500 pixels on the longest side).

Now that it's got a regex module Pipes is even more powerful. It does seem at least slightly buggy, though: the regexes to strip out the width and height really should be able to be combined into a single operation (e.g. /(width|height)=['"]\d+['"]/), but that didn't work for some reason and I had to break them out. Ah well.

The only major broken thing about Flickr's RSS that remains is the fact that if your contacts add photos too quickly, Flickr won't show them all to you. It's sad but true — if your contacts post more than 20 photos in the interval between Flickr's RSS regeneration (or your feedreader checking your contacts feed), some will simply never appear. Drag. I can think of ways to solve this, but not with Pipes, unfortunately. In fact, given that Pipes is likely to query your feed less frequently than your feedreader, this solution may suffer even more from that limitation. I haven't tested it carefully, but suggest that you try it out side-by-side with the default Flickr feed for a while to ensure that it's not dropping photos.

UPDATE: Looks like there's a bug in Pipes that makes the Regex module default to operating on the "title" field when you load this pipe and edit it. Be sure to change that to point to "description" instead, otherwise the pipe won't process the right part of the RSS and won't alter the feed at all.

UPDATE 2: I made a modified version that lets you plug in your own contacts feed RSS URL (and delivers 500px images, not the 1024 versions). You can find it here. Just get the URL you currently use for your contacts feed out of your RSS reader (or Flickr) and paste it into the text box. Submit the form, then scroll to the bottom of the page for the link to the RSS version of the pipe's output.

The dust has settled, and this is the only internet April Fool's joke I've seen that seemed genuinely funny — it nicely takes advantage of paranoia users have about the site itself and is well-executed, slipping the outlandishness in early then playing it (mostly) straight until a final sly jab at the end. Good job, Hype Machine.

Gmail Paper was alright, too, but it didn't seem like a knockout to me.

But maybe I'm just being cranky. I'm pretty down on internet April Fool's jokes in general — they're usually pretty tin-eared, predictable and dumb, and there are far too many of them. To see just how incredibly awful things can get you only need to check out the April 1 edition of Slashdot.

I've been meaning to get some ferromagnetic fluid for a while. Suddenly it's become urgent.

Video via BoingBoing.

Traditional sources of diamonds (aka "diamonds for suckers"):

Where my friend Jeff gets his diamonds (aka THE FUTURE):

That's pretty great. On a related note, if you didn't see it when it first ran, go check out Wired's article on artificial diamonds. Some of the entrepreneurs quoted in the piece were actually in hiding because they thought DeBeers might come and kill them. Awesome. Maybe that's why the scientists in the photo above are all either floating safely out of harm's way or have their heads ensconced in pressurized chambers.

None of them are released yet, but the odds of me buying or downloading each is high:

The Coop for Firefox

At the moment it's little more than an idea stolen from Flock and a wiki page, but if it ever launches this will be a social networking tool I could see myself using. I could be getting this wrong, but I think that instead of creating a new network it'd adapt your browser to integrate existing ones, and organize updates by person. So you'd have a list of friends, with Flickr photos, del.icio.us links, blog posts, twitter messages and who knows what else all organized by person instead of by service. I've been ready to have my news RSS and social RSS separated for a while now; this looks like a pretty slick method for doing so. Of course, the real question will be how easy it is for the app to track down all of your friends' various accounts on the different sites it can talk to.

Chumby

It's like an expensive alarm clock, except also magic. I'm pretty sure there was a Saturday morning cartoon with the same premise during my early childhood, but now it's all coming true. Also, one of the major players at the company is the guy who cracked the original Xbox, who's an incredible hardware-hacking badass. Naturally, Chumby will be open source. You could stream WOXY as your alarm, benchmark how long it takes you to get up in the morning, or have it wake you up in the night if someone sends you an urgent email. Neat!

The Helio Ocean

It's becoming increasingly clear that my Sidekick 2 is not only irritatingly behind the times but also very likely to break before the end of the summer. Its screen gets jumbled from time to time, requiring a swift smack. And one time the microphone stopped working (also requiring a swift smack). I was going to wait and see how the iPhone works out, but Nicco told me to take a look at the new Helio phone. After reading about it, I think I'm convinced. It'd be nice to know how expensive the associated plan will be and whether the device can work as a bluetooth modem. But even if the answers are "expensive" and "of course not", I'm still pretty likely to get one.

Yeah, yeah, I know: it's better to have to pay a small amount/refunds are tax-free loans to uncle sam/there's always next yea*&@#I WANT FREE MONEY!!! And if I'm not getting any, why am I doing my taxes now, instead of at 11:45 pm on April 14?

This is the first year I haven't gotten a refund. New job, yes, but default withholding, I thought. I guess the addition of a 401(k) really fucked me over. It was not, presumably, the whopping $28 in dividends that the lingering shreds of my college mutual fund delivered.

I guess this means my dreams of HDTV ownership will once again be delayed. At least I've got that thirty dollar refund from D.C. That should cover, oh, about half of the cost of doing my taxes on H&R Block's website — something else that I've never had to pay for before.

Man. Doing my taxes used to be a lot more fun.

As you've probably seen over at Yglesias's place, Sara's got a new paper out arguing that we're placing too much important on education in the first three years of life. It's an interesting read, and short enough that you've got no excuse for not grabbing the PDF. By the end, I was inclined to agree that our current efforts in the 0-3 range are wasted, and that we'd probably be better off paying more attention to education for slightly older kids.

With that said, the neuroscience classes I took in college make me bristle a little at the idea that early childhood intervention isn't scientifically justified. Kids' brains are simply doing too much interesting and dramatic stuff during that period for me to believe that there's nothing to be gained by intervening during it. We're probably not addressing that opportunity very well — but I do believe that the period represents a genuine opportunity. So, some quibbles:

First, I kind of think that the scientific case against very early intervention is being overstated. Just because idiotic measures like Zell Miller's classical CDs for newborns don't work doesn't mean that that the first few years aren't a big deal in neural terms, or that the government might someday be able to make itself useful during them. And since the fad for neuroscientifically-justified curricula only occurred in the mid-to-late nineties, citing the lack of evidence in favor of these programs seems a little harsh to me — it's a bit early for any good longitudinal data about these early interventions' impact on life outcomes to have shown up, right? The kids born during this period of brainthusiasm aren't even in high school yet.

Similarly, just because the adult brain is more plastic than we once thought doesn't mean that the brain isn't at its maximum plasticity during early childhood. Myelination is occurring at a breakneck pace during this time, making connections usably speedy at the cost of reduced synaptic flexibility. It's a big deal, and it's plausible to think that stimuli that affect this process could have significant impacts on the final state of the brain.

As Sara's paper points out, we know that the richness of the environment has an effect on synaptic density in animal models. But she discounts this by saying:

Child advocates also cite experiments in which animals that lived in more stimulating environments—with toys and other animals—developed more synapses per neuron than those that lived alone in sterile lab cages. They argue that these studies show that enriched environments enhance brain growth. But, as author John Bruer points out, the environments that wild animals live in are more like the enriched environment than the lab cage one.

But couldn't you also say that a preschool classroom more closely resembles the proto-human existence on the primordial savanna (or whatever) than a crackhouse does?

Thus, this experiment simply repeats the finding that severe deprivation hurts development; it does not show that a more engaging environment produces smarter animals— and it definitely does not show that extra stimulation produces smarter children.

True. But it's reasonable to consider deprivation and stimulation as a continuum, right? It seems likely that it's not a linear relationship; there's doubtless a point of diminishing returns. Extra stimulation may not produce smarter children, but there are decent reasons for thinking that seemingly-benign neglect can producer dumber children. Is it crazy to think that government-sponsored early childhood programs could be a way to remedy this problem?

I wholeheartedly agree with this, though:

Even if neuroscience evidence did show unequivocally that the years from zero to three are the most important for children’s development—and it does not—that wouldn’t tell us how, or even if, governments can intervene effectively during that time to improve child development or life outcomes. In other words, neuroscience research—with its heavy reliance on PET scans, MRIs and studies of lab rats—is meant to help academics understand how the brain the works; it is not meant to inform social policy.

All those baby Einstein products are made by hacks and charlatans, and I have no difficulty believing that the education money the government currently spends on kids' first years is mostly wasted. But based on my understanding of the neuroscience, it does seem like those years are probably worth some policy attention. I agree with Sara that we're not capable of making superbabies — but I still believe that these programs might help us avoid subpar babies. But maybe that's a task for social services rather than the school system.

Off Seventh's got video of the farce that went down at the latest Shaw ANC meeting — prohibitions on recording, rule-breaking, and finally the cancellation of the meeting by fiat. It's not the most rigorous application of Robert's Rules of Order that I've ever seen.

More here. I'm glad these guys are fighting the good fight against the entrenched cronies who populate these councils. It looks like it must be a huge pain in the ass.

I decided to bike instead of taking the circulator, and as a consequence I got down to the chinatown bus stop a little faster than I had intended. I headed across the street to the Red Roof Inn's hotel bar to get out of the wind. The playlist, during my brief time here:

• Nickelback, I think
• Sheryl Crow
• Definitely Nickelback

I think it's time to head back outside.

It seems like everybody's been posting spring playlists:

• Kriston
• DCeiver
• The Governess
• Amanda
• Adrienne

I did a little evangelizing for playtagger over in Kriston's comments, and the PT bookmarklet I've got in my browser has made it easy enough to navigate through the mp3s that everyone's been linking to. But it occurred to me that folks might get some use out of an automatic flash player.

So! If you've got a webpage with a bunch of hyperlinks to mp3s and would like to add a nifty flash player to it, I've written up a handy tool to let you do just that. Simply put the permalink to your entry in the form field below and hit submit. That'll bring you to a page with some HTML. Copy that into your post and you'll have a player for all the mp3s you posted. Kinda neat, huh?

A word about that "disable coral" option — since this loads the flash player off of my webserver, and since you may not be paying for the bandwidth used to stream those mp3s, the polite thing to do is to use the Coral CDN. However, it seems to be broken today (for me, at least), so I've left it disabled by default for the time being.

Here are some sample players that work with the pages above (Amanda and the Governess didn't post mp3s, and DCeiver was too polite to link directly to them, so no links for those guys):

• Kriston
• Adrienne
• and, for good measure, Catherine's non-spring-specific but still useful-for-demonstration-purposes Washingtonian playlist

UPDATE (5/10/07): Thanks to some jerk hacking a piece of third party software on this site, this script has been unavailable for the past few weeks. It should be all better now.

If anyone's interested, the source code is available behind the jump.

• Erase the line between your bookmarks and del.icio.us. Via Techcrunch.
• This t-shirt is pretty awesome. Also.
• Bruce and Craig Finn. Charles tracked down the video, but it ain't great. Still, despite the video it's clear that this must have been an amazing thing to see. I guess this really is going to be the year of Springsteen. Sorry, Mr. Byrne. It was a nice renaissance you had going there.
• Lego bumper cars, using the power of MAGNETS. Originally from here via here. It's pretty goddamn clever.
  
  
  
  Click To Play
• Also from Techcrunch: remember that Coop social networking extension for Firefox that I was excited about? Well, there's an early version available. Unfortunately, in a cruelly ironic twist the only service it currently supports is Facebook. (Sidenote: if I was a twelve year old British boy with the same general opinions about technology, would I begin calling it Fæcesbook? Yes. Yes, I probably would.)
• Finally, Google's new "My Maps" functionality seems pretty neat. But reading about it, I'm even more intrigued to see that the GMaps API can now consume GeoRSS — I'd missed that announcement. The DC government publishes a number of RSS feeds with geographic information in them; Yahoo Pipes can also speak GeoRSS. It's getting awfully easy to build mashups.

Bummer. It was only two blocks from my house, but I only went there once, for an incredibly awesome Halloween party in 2005. I didn't really know anyone there beside the folks I came with, and there were beer-related difficulties — we didn't stick around very long. But it was still extremely cool, and one of the most un-DC parties I've ever been to in this town.

I was definitely an outsider there, but I was still really glad to know that a scene like it existed. Hopefully it's being recreated somewhere else even as I write this — judging by the City Paper article I'd say it probably is. It seems unlikely that the folks running Fight Club would spontaneously disassemble their social hub unless they had another option available.

At any rate, the photos and video I took that night are below.

Click To Play

And you should come see him play. Tonight! Velvet Lounge! 9pmish! More details (and music) here. I'll see you there.

As for me, I'm rushing to meet a deadline for all of that similarity matrix stuff I was working on earlier. I've had to trade a little scholarly rigor for visual flair, but it's looking like I'll definitely have a visualization to show. And I'm pretty confident that this'll be the most analytically-rich entry of the contest.

On the other hand, I'm even more confident that I'll lose to somebody who spent two hours writing a script to, say, Twitter geocoded YouTube clips of legislators' gaffes to constituents' Zunes. Or something. But that's the nature of the beast, and I still had fun tackling this project.

Well, that was a hell of a success. Charles, Aaron, Adam and Spencer sounded great — amazingly so, considering that this was their first gig. Admittedly, all but the last of these guys have known each other forever and have some experience playing together. But Spencer's the drummer, and dropping in a new rhythm section is no mean feat. They couldn't have practiced more than a half dozen times as a full band, but you wouldn't have known it from listening to 'em. It was a great debut.

Part of the credit has to go to the Velvet Lounge, whose resident sound guy has a reputation for being the only U Street audio engineer that consistently gives a damn. But part & parcel with that is the undeniable loudness of the tiny space. So if you're feeling old and hearing-damaged, head over to Shelley Batts' place. She's got some scientific recommendations for protecting your hearing. The short version: take some aspirin or vitamin E after a loud show. And, if at all possible, be African American.

You ought to watch it through to the end — it gets progressively funnier. Via Jason, who left the URL in Emily's comments.

UPDATE: I should've mentioned it before, but Jake the Dog is voiced by John DiMaggio, who also lends his talents to a certain miscreant robot that we all know and love.

I've gotta say, I'm pretty surprised that this Don Imus story is sticking around for so long. What he said was deplorable, but he's a goddamn talk radio host. It's his job to vamp for hours on end every single day. You'd find yourself saying some remarkably stupid things, too, if you were put in that position. Odds are that you'd also have a crass, mean sense of humor (the market selects for that sort of host), so those stupid things you'd be spouting would probably be despicable as well.

If someone devoted a month of time to listen to any nationally syndicated shock jock's show, I'm pretty confident that they could find something equally vile and idiotic to mount a public campaign over. That doesn't excuse Imus or any of the other jerks who provide meaningless filler between our airwaves' commercial breaks, but it does make me wonder why the hell I'm still reading about this incident on a daily basis.

I'll admit that the overlap between Imus's guest list and the punditocracy is interesting and unique to his show. But it's not that interesting. To the extent that this incident will destroy a broadcast outlet for journalistic narcissism, I'm all for it. It'd be great if it could be done a little more quickly and quietly, though.

As for Imus himself, I guess I'm against any further punishment — we've all got a doddering relation who's started to cheerfully spout racism in their senescence, don't we? I say give grandpa a break. The guy is not exactly the picture of health, his ridiculous wig & cowboy hat notwithstanding. Mother Nature is the most effective FCC regulator of all. Take his sponsors, trim his guest list, and let his inane radio show fade into the sunset.

Now for god's sake, can we please get back to discussing the paternity of Anna Nicole's baby?

I thought I'd love this software; everyone else does. And the UI is pretty good. But it keeps forgetting my entry-sorting preferences; it gets confused if I have identically-named feeds with different URLs; and it seems to be updating erratically, suddenly finding old posts that I know have been online for a few days. There's no way that this many different RSS feeds that I'm subscribed to have simultaneously become screwed up in the last couple of days — it's got to be the reader.

But that's just an irritating recent issue. Far worse is a long-term but difficult-to-spot bug I've been having wherein NNW occasionally loses a feed entirely, transmuting it into a clone of another one. After an initial honeymoon I'm being forced to conclude that this program can't even perform its core function. It kinda blows, and I'm surprised to have so many problems with a well-established program. I guess paying for software was a bad idea after all.

Potbelly, 2:30ish. I'm standing in line, having just ordered a delicious turkey-on-wheat, when I spotted an older gentleman in line behind me. He was wearing a pinstripe suit, a blue shirt with a white collar, and a yellow tie. His gray hair was gelled into a short, relatively tasteful euromullet. And he was carrying not only a copy of "Who's Who In Real Estate" — surely one of the most vacuous possible incarnations of a shamelessly vacuous line of scam-books — but also what I can only call a scepter. I guess it could've served as a cane, but the black shaft looked a little insubstantial. And the brass head was spherical in a distinctly uncanelike way. Also, he wasn't using it to walk — it was just tucked into the crook of his arm along with the book.

I don't really know what else to say about him. Have you ever seen somebody and instantly known that they were the X-iest example of X that you've ever seen, but still been unable to solve for X? I don't know what sort of world he'd just come from, but I've got a feeling I should be grateful that it only intersects with my own in sandwich shops.

I've been holed up, building this for the Sunlight Foundation Mashup Contest. My academically-minded friends will no doubt be horrified by the imprecision of the visualization — I'm really supposed to have done this by building a proper similarity tree, in which joined nodes become collapsed into their average. Those joined pieces are then treated as single nodes and everything is recomputed relative to them; repeat until every node has been added.

But that would've been hard! And I'd already written my algorithm. Nevertheless, thanks to son1 for pointing me in some interesting directions.

You should also head over to Tim's — he's got an entry for the Sunlight contest, too, as well as a cool 2008 Presidential aggregator that he wrote with Rich (an improved version of which is coming soon to a glossy Washington-centered magazine near you). He's also written some smart Holovaty-ish thoughts on the the overlapping future of programming and journalism. To wit: hey, reporters! It's time to learn XML, regular expressions, some statistics and WWW::Mechanize (or an equivalent web-scraping package). I'm serious. The tools will get easier, but they're already accessible and applicable enough that you could greatly benefit from learning to use them.

Speaking of Mr. Holovaty, Adrian's busy these days getting my friends into trouble, so he's on the lookout for a programmer-journalist at Washingtonpost.com to share the load. Sounds like it'd be a pretty cool job.

1. Wolf Blitzer asking the guy who took the video of police officers outside the building what sort of cell phone he used. Answer: Nokia.
2. MSNBC's "On The Money", flashing a scrolling list of prominent executives who are VT alumni.
3. Debbie Schlussel: Was the gunman a muslim?
4. A late entry! Bill O'Reilly's infographic thing: "The shooter wasn't American, he was Korean." (True, but who cares — he arrived in the country when he was a child, according to the Post)

I saw the first two as I exercised at the gym. The lefthand TV was tuned to Access Hollywood, which displayed a computerized simulation of what Britney Spears' regrown hair might look like under the hat she was recently photographed wearing. They presented it under a graphic that said "breaking news" and somehow seemed downright classy.

This really, really makes me want to see the Flaming Lips again. You might look at these pictures (particularly the ones near the bottom) and think that it was a special performance for an unusually large festival show. Nope. It all looks pretty much like what they did when I saw 'em at 9:30.

This graffiti may not seem very remarkable. But in a town where every other beer comes in a pint glass with an Eagles logo on it, and any group of three or more adults can be counted on to eventually disrupt the parade/checkout line/funeral they're attending with a chant of "E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!!!", it's kind of noteworthy.

Also, note the stray mark between the N and S in "Redskins". That's presumably the point at which the artist was dragged away from the wall and beaten to death.

I've never been fully head-over-heels for the original, but this is an awfully nice cover. I guess it's been around for a couple of weeks, but if you haven't seen it, give it a look.

Via Jump Cuts. Also: Dawn Landes' MySpace.

This is an unusually bad article on net neutrality. The author seems to think that Comcast dumping consumers who use a very large amount of bandwidth is an example of the non-neutral net in action, and then argues that neutrality == piracy OMG!!!

It's pretty lame. Net neutrality isn't about making people pay for the amount of bandwidth they use. It's about degrading the quality of service in a way that favors one business over another. Pretending that the two are the same is like arguing that because I can order as much food as I want in a restaurant, I should also be able to pay to make other customers' portions smaller or their waiters surlier. There have been a lot of attempts to confuse people in this manner, but this has got to be among the weakest.

Besides, there are plenty of ways to get on Comcast's bad side without joining the pirate hordes — try running the Joost beta on a few machines for a month and see if it doesn't earn you an angry letter or two. Or try running through a few dozen Linux distros to find one that suits you. I bet Comcast wouldn't like that one bit.

Incidentally, the reason people justifiably hate Comcast's bandwidth caps isn't because they're anti-neutral — it's because Comcast won't tell its customers what the caps are. There's no hard limit set. Comcast just sends scary letters to the top X% of users every month, then terminates their contracts if they don't move themselves into the meaty part of the curve by the next bill. Upgrading to business service is a way around this, of course. But it's not priced for consumers (its cost reflects expected tax benefits as well as uptime, throughput and support guarantees that aren't relevant to the consumer market). Consequently it isn't a particularly viable option for most people, and they're left wondering whether Comcast is going to decide to drag its hungrier customers away from a buffet line that had been advertised as all-you-can-eat.

I've always maintained that Fountains of Wayne's "Prom Theme" is the best possible music for 18 year-olds to slow dance to before just-barely-not-impregnating one another. But Cristen's mounting a strong challenge for prom theme supremacy, as proven by the whiteboard full of geek-related promisms that's sitting in our office (she's planning a party). My favorites so far:

• a night 2.0 remembr
• under the C++ / under the SQL
• pwnderful 2nite

If you've got any other ideas, lay 'em on me. The success of an internet/highschool-themed chug-a-thon could potentially hang in the balance!

First, a discussion of Dostoyevsky's epilepsy. I haven't got much to add; it's interesting stuff, though.

Second, this article on Numenta, the brain-like computing startup from one of the guys behind Palm and Treo. I'd read this Wired article on the startup a little while ago. What they're doing is interesting, and I'm sure they've got some very smart people working for them. But in both articles Hawkins takes pains to poo-poo neural networks as a failed AI technology, and to distance his own "HTMs" from them. Yet after reading the descriptions of his technology (and the training and parameter-tuning it requires) and accounts of the sorts of tasks that HTMs can perform, the tech sounds a lot like multilayer perceptrons. The dog-identifying tasks he points to are really just a more advanced case of the sorts of problems they had us solve in Intro to Neural Networks.

I'm all for moving beginner toolkits out of Matlab and into the open source world — I'm excited about Numenta, and hope it does well. But there's no reason to put down the accomplishments of those who came before you when what you're doing seems to be a variation on the techniques they pioneered.

Well, alright: ONE giant Nazi robot. But there may also be other giant robots of differing ideologies in this movie. I don't want to tip my hand.

Found via Dan's Data — he's got links to the original, full-resolution version. It's an amateur effort put together by a group of Italian CG artists (hence the occasionally laughable voice-acting).

Mostly this is just awesome. But I can't resist the opportunity to use a giant Nazi robot as a pretense for pontification — namely, about the capacity for entertainment produced by hobbyists to compete directly with the stuff made by professionals. I've argued this point in the past, but have generally met with some skepticism about its capacity to apply to movies. I like to cite the fan-produced movie Star Wars: Revelations when I make this case. It's undeniably impressive from a technical perspective, but its lousy acting is an admitted sticking point for my larger argument.

This clip ("Code Guardian") suffers from the same problems as SW:R — it looks pretty good, but the voice acting is lousy and the script, to the extent that there is one, couldn't be called remarkable. Still, I think this is a temporary problem. Perhaps it's my own prejudices showing, but I think there's a higher barrier to producing passable CG work than there is to producing a passable action/adventure screenplay or voiceover. Becoming adept at any of these tasks requires a lot of practice and/or talent, but only one discipline requires specialized tools and training. So in a way it's surprising to see the more technical disciplines become the first to succeed at producing high-quality hobbyist entertainment. But in another way it isn't surprising at all.

One reason it's been quiet around here this week is that we're kicking off a new, tech-centric blog over at EchoDitto. I haven't quite decided how I'll handle syndicating content from that site back here — I would really like to have the things I write there in my archives.

But until I get that worked out, head over to labs.echoditto.com to keep an eye on my geeky output. We're just getting started, but we've already got a few interesting posts up:

• My thoughts on the incomprehensibility of the OLPC interface
• The first installment of JP's LCD-hanging saga
• A script I wrote for DCist to create a mobile version of a site from an RSS feed

Have a look, stay tuned, etc. You can subscribe to the entries feed here.

This is the second goddamn time, earning it the coveted title of the worst PHP software I've encountered that isn't also a Wordpress plugin. Enough already; it's gone. JP recently pointed me toward the decidedly more reputable-seeming PHPSurveyor this week, so I guess I'll be working on a DCist template for that.

Fortunately the jerk in question didn't do a very thorough job of trashing my site: he just killed the files in directories off the top level (sparing my blog, inexplicably) and put up some triumphal pages expressing his disapproval of US/Israeli foreign policy. Even more fortunately, my host has a backup from the 15th that they're pulling for me for $15. For those of you using the full text RSS script, sorry — it was one of the victims. A new & improved version will be available soon at a different location anyway, though, so just sit tight for now.

And hey, you know the saying: God doesn't close a metasploit session without opening an interesting LUG thread. So I've got big things planned: a nightly backup to my own RAIDed SVN repository that in turn backs itself up to Amazon S3. It'll be great.

UPDATE: Comments closed due to spam.

I've taken another crack at my full-text RSS script, polishing it up for a release over at EchoDitto Labs, and in the process I finally got around to adding a much-needed feature: letting users kill excess HTML with regular expressions. This isn't a feature for the non-geeky, but it only takes a single nerd a few minutes to work out the necessary expressions and share them with the class. The result is cleaner functionality: the algorithm used to leave some feeds with duplicate titles, comments, or other cruft. This allows you to strip them out automatically. As a side effect, your RSS reader stop thinking that old posts are new just because another dope added a comment calling for impeachment hearings.

My intention is for this project to be somewhat disruptive, forcing publishers and advertisers to realize that RSS is a legitimate way for people to read a site and not just a syndicated form of advertising. And the sooner everyone gets this through their head the better: if you publish free content on the internet, you will not be able to control how people will consume it.

But I do recognize that in the short term it's likely to be a pain in the ass for the bloggers I like and whose bosses don't understand how to count or sell RSS impressions. So let's start off by picking on someone who deserves the headache: here's a full text feed for Michelle Malkin. It uses the new regex functionality to chop off the "digg this post" junk that would otherwise be at the bottom of every entry.

The way to use this new feature is pretty simple: pass URL-encoded regexes as GET parameters named "/regex\d*/i" (if you're going to use this, that made sense to you). Have at it, fellow geeks. I'll get things rolling and suggest the del.icio.us tag "fulltextrss" for the fruits of your labors.

UPDATE FOR REGEX AUTHORS: Looks like PHP's magic quotes and/or URL encoding are screwing up the use of the + character in regexes. D'oh. I'll have to see what I can do to fix that. In the meantime, both * and {} seem to work. For now just use {1,} as a substitute and you should be okay.

Look, I know that everybody's very concerned about the disappearing honeybees. For the record, I am pro-bee: I enjoy consuming their sugary vomit both on toast and in tea. And out of all the invertebrates I think they run the best alternate reality games.

But the last couple of weeks have seen a ridiculously large portion of the internet devoted to concern about them. It's difficult to find a comment thread that doesn't have someone chiming in about the fucking bees. "This is somewhat OT," they'll say, "But have you heard about how cell phones are killing bees? I'm just as concerned about [Bush administration malfeasance / a blogger code of conduct / Sanjaya getting voted off Idol] as anyone else, but if we lose the bees we'll have bigger things to worry about."

This is frequently accompanied by a quote from Albert Einstein that, in an oddly contemporary, half-colloquial formulation, opines about the agricultural importance of honeybees, despite Einstein seemingly possessing no particular expertise about either subject (at least when the bees in question are traveling at less than the speed of light). I'm skeptical of this quotation's provenance, but I do kind of like the idea of attributing random boosterism to history's great thinkers. For instance, did you know that Rene Descartes is frequently credited with coining the phrase "Reduce, Reuse and Recycle"? Or that John Donne was fond of composing epigrams pointing readers to the climatecrisis.net carbon calculator? It's true! I'm pretty sure I read it on Wikipedia the other day.

Well, relax. According to a marginally-more-reputable source, the bees are probably going to be fine. As we drove to Stanford, Emily and I heard a full hour-long show on NPR about the disappearing insects. I can't find a URL for the show — this was the Bay area, so I guess it's probably only available on the goddamn WELL — but trust me: it was authoritative-sounding.

The roundtable discussion featured an entomologist whose lab was conducting the largest nationwide survey of colony collapse disorder, another entomologist who he seemed to not like very much, and a guy who'd written a book about California bees and, I think, lived among them and learned their ways. A parade of well-meaning San Franciscan hybrid owners called in with every possible bee-killing grievance that you, I and the rest of the internet could think of — electromagnetic radiation, GM crops, pesticides, the war in Iraq — and the bee experts methodically shot down each one. "Yes, it's disconcerting," they'd say, "But it's happened in the past, long before this particular [chemical / technology / front in the global war on terror] existed." They also said that there's no apparent correlation between affected colonies' proximity to developed areas, and that even bees that operate solely on organic crops have been afflicted. When the bees leave their colonies they abandon the site in a hurry — other animals avoid it for a while, too, even if there's still honey present. The experts seemed to feel that a fungus, parasite or other natural pest was probably to blame. It's happened before and the bees have recovered.

So let's all calm down. The most pressing bee-related problem of this spring has been and continues to be how to get rid of the threatening, probably-Africanized ones that seem to be setting up shop at the far end of my porch. Yet on this subject, the Kos diarists have remained strangely silent. Priorities, people.

UPDATE: Prompted by arguing the point in comments over at Unfogged, I managed to track down the program in question. It's from the imaginatively-named "Forum" on KQED. The show's archive page is here. You can download the mp3 at the following link:

Forum (KQED) – Won't Somebody Please Think of the Bees?

Here I am fiddling with other people's RSS, and I didn't even realize that my own was broken. Sorry about that — the hax0ring killed all of cPanel's redirects, making http://www.manifestdensity.net/feed end in a 404 rather than a redirection to Feedburner.

Courtesy of a Saturday visit to the National Arboretum (or Arbotreeum, as one cellphone-using patron near us called it). It's pretty nice out there, and easy to get to on the weekend thanks to the X6 bus. In fact, it's so pleasant that you can easily forget how close you are to the Washington Times building.

They've got a bunch of plants & stuff, I guess, but my botanical photography skills are pretty poor. This seemed worth showing, though: DC's state tree. It's surprisingly non-crappy, especially compared to, say, Indiana. Now there's a sorry-ass tree.

I'm a little late, but I'd feel even more like a jerk if I didn't congratulate Yglesias on his new gig. The guy's so ludicrously talented that it seems a little silly to bother acknowledging milestones in his inevitable march to the top of Mt. Pundit. Still, this is pretty great. Way to go, Matt.

It took me a hell of a long time to get around to fixing the problem with the circuit, but I finally got my Arduino relay interface/magic extension cord working — thanks in no small part to the help of a kind stranger who happened across my Flickr photostream.

I wrote it up a bit more over at labs — head there if you want more ruminations on the subject. But if you don't want the full account, just check out the video below and take quiet satisfaction from my hypocritical descent into vlogging.

Let me preface this by saying that I am sorry to be writing it. There is nothing I wish for more than our people to live in mutual prosperity and comity. However, I feel that I can no longer remain silent.

It's an open secret that there are one or more undocumented mice living in this apartment. Although the arrangement is kept off the books, most of us adopt a live-and-let-live attitude with regard to it. You perform the vital burrowing and crumb-removal jobs that other apartment residents are unwilling or too large to do. In return we forbid our friend Jon from bringing his snakes over when he visits. The arrangement works well: perhaps someday your children will be able to live a better life as detectives, professional rescuers, or confidantes to exiled princesses. I'm even willing to fund the training and tiny anthropomorphic articles of clothing that they'll need to pursue these dreams.

But let's be frank: our peoples have something of an uneasy truce. You're here whether I like it or not. Everyone knows that proposals to build better walls or do the dishes in a timely manner are little more than the lunatic ravings of the Pat Buchanans and Lou Dobbs of the world. But just because we can't get rid of you doesn't mean we can't make your life more difficult. It's in your best interest to work with us, not against us.

To be blunt, the events of the past 24 hours have been a grave breach of our unspoken covenant. You are not on the lease, and consequently you are not entitled to collect the services that are available to other apartment residents — in this case, mortuary services. We're not running some rodent hospice here, you know.

In the future, please ensure that your loved ones expire somewhere off the premises, or at the very least not in my room. Further, in the event of an accidental death on-premises I require prompt notification — preferably by email (and in an appropriately apologetic tone). Finally — and I can't stress this enough — embalming or cremation must be conducted promptly.

I am sure that this must be a difficult time for the family of the individual in question. Nevertheless, I must demand your prompt consideration and immediate compliance with these directives.

Oh yeah! I'm not issuing any more driver's licenses, either. I don't care what Geraldo said on O'Reilly.

Vegetate: surprisingly popular. I headed over this evening to wish Rob a happy 25th birthday and was amazed to see to see how packed the all-veggie restaurant became before I left. I'd just sort of assumed that this was another well-meaning progressive initiative that my superficial support would be unable to save from inevitable failure. You know, like Air America. Or affirmative action.

But no! The place was chock full of earnest vegetarians, vegans and perhaps even a few Breatharians. The bar only stocked a dozen or so bottles of liquor, but they were all plenty fancy. And the sadly lacking beer selection didn't stop me from becoming adequately intoxicated.

Anyway, I was caught off guard. During their lengthy battle with Shiloh I had assumed that the business was somehow paying its rent with dividends earned on a well-justified sense of indignation. But I guess there are actually lot of people out there who don't like eating meat. Well, good for them. But do me a favor and demand a few more types of beer to go with your not-meat.

Has DailyLit made the rounds yet? If it has, I must've missed it. My friend Chris sent me the link — it's a pretty neat idea. Pick from a list of public-domain works and have a daily installment of approachable size delivered to your inbox or RSS reader. If you've got time or the inclination to read the next one you can click on a link embedded in the entry — it'll send you the next one right away. Cool.

My tendency to pointlessly refresh my RSS reader rather than pick up a book and engage with it is downright sad — maybe this'll harness my bad habits for good.

Scientists say the bees are probably dying from a fungus, possibly in combination with a virus. They're also optimistic about it being treatable with antibiotics:

Beekeeper: Now listen bees, you've got to take the entire bottle. Don't stop just because you're feeling better.

Bees: [DEAFENING BUZZ]

Beekeeper: Alright then.

Via Slashdot.