and I feel fine
Thursday, August 30th, 2007Something to brighten your day:
End of the world (flash cartoon).
Archive for August, 2007
stupid quiz time again
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007You are 100% Try-Lingual!!
You are quite the Linguist! I suppose you wouldn't be trying to show off to your friends, would you. Splendid job. Time to put the quiz on a blog or email a link to your friends. Check out some of the good quizzes here, but be sure to avoid the bad ones. Auf Wiedersehen! Adieu.
today’s diversion
Sunday, August 12th, 2007The Time Travellers of 1908 (Quicktime video, about 10 minutes)
the mysterious universe
Saturday, August 11th, 2007Put on your spacesuits, gang - it's time to pay off some student loans.
Meteorology
Saturday, August 11th, 2007Meteorology is the science of angelic war. But it appears that the citizens of heaven are taking a cease-fire, because today is supposed to be beautiful.
Someday, I'm going to have to actually organize all the toys and tidbits on this site. Here are some of my favorite toys:
- The Vigenere Encoder
- The Playfair Encoder
- The Williams Carlos Williams Machine
- The highly beta Flickr Walkabout
There's also the Google Walkabout, which is an experiment in random limited search - it will be more interesting someday.
I've spent a fair amount of time experimenting with APIs for various online communities, with the notion that the evolution of the "semantic web" might represent the evolution of a collective mind. Towards that end, I developed the Flickr Free Word Association application. As you very likely know, Flickr allows its users to associate tags with every image they post. Flickr then calculates which tags are related to which by the frequency by which they appear together (I think). The free word association application takes a word you enter, treats it as a tag, and returns a related tag. It's an interesting way of exploring the cognitive associations the entire Flickr community makes. A caveat about the freeword association application, however: Flickr's vocabulary isn't as extensive as one might like. When the application encounters a word that Flickr doesn't know, it uses the dict protocol to look up synonyms in an online dictionary. So it's not pure Flickr, sure, but it's still kinda neat.
