False Positives

From The Hitchhiker’s Guide Project:

The Encyclopedia Galactica used to be the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom in the universe. That is, until the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came along. The Guide scores higher that the Encyclopedia in two respects. First, the Guide is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words “Don’’t Panic” inscribed in large, friendly letters on the cover.

Here’s what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

Keep this quote in mind that next time the Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica Smackdown erupts.

Update March 8:AKMA might have got here second, but it’s an honor to have my analogue seconded, especially by the MAN who introduced Joey (aka Accordion Guy) to Wendy (aka “The Redhead Wore Crimson“). How many pages of Google spew did you have to go thur? Ack!

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Written by Matt Biddulph del.icio.us tag stemmer, uses Porter stemming to show where you’ve made different del.icio.us tags with the same English word stem. You can use it to help clean up your personal fauxonomy.

The Porter stemming algorithm (or ‘Porter stemmer’) is a process for removing the commoner morphological and inflexional endings from words in English. Its main use is as part of a term normalisation process that is usually done when setting up Information Retrieval systems.

(via Joi ito’s del.icio.us bookmarks.) Category : folksonomies

Update: Matt now has a intro page to the Tag Stemmer up : Stemming tags, and one website to the tune of another, with a notes & Links to demo expriement: “del.icio.us seamlessly embedded in the BBC Radio 3 website“. A kind of “Tag Explorer” : this page has been tagged with X & Y, see other pages you have tagged with X, see pages other have tagged with X.

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Miguel de Icaza (of Ximian GNOME fame) attempts to “re-balance the force” after AccordionGuy Sexy Beast remix causes cosmic meltdown.

Category:Humour; (Via Ted Leung)

Update : Joey noticed and added his own chessy tasteful captions.

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Cooking with EFF: KnoppMyth r5a5 and pcHDTV for DTV Liberation because they want to Kill P2P to Save TV.

Electronic Frontier Foundation has a cookbook to guide you in assembling your own personal video recorder (PVR) with KnoppMyth r5a5 and pcHDTV.

Why? Because the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) requires all future digital television (DTV) tuners to include “content protection” (aka DRM or “Digital_rights_management”) technologies. Starting July 1, 2005, all makers of HDTV receivers must build their devices to watch for a broadcast “flag” embedded in programs by copyright holders.

However, despite the manufacturing ban, existing equipment will continue to work (and to be lawful to possess and operate); it will be immune from the restrictions imposed on future equipment. That means that the equipment you can buy today is more functional and more useful than what you may be able to buy after July 1, 2005. Start Cooking!

and the New York Times looks at the simmilar issue with : Steal This Show

Category Exploding TV/DRM

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Robert X. Cringely on “Dethroning King Gillette” asks the question “Is iPod the Razor or the Blade?? He looks at the margins on the iPod and songs sold at ITunes and concludes that Apple is still in the hardware business, for now, but is doing what King Gillette could never dream to — making money on all parts of the deal.

He also examines the Mac Mini ,again, and sees lots of potential for dominating the micro-server space, plus redefining the Internet video business. Good bye Netflix & BlockBuster.

In his earlier examination of the Mac Mini he concludes that the Mac Mini is a fixed component in a system that will extend iTunes to selling and distributing movies. But this will not have until H.264 (a high compression digital video codec) is support in OS X, which is not due till 10.4 (code-named Tiger) is available, promised for the second quarter of this year.

He also notes strange goings on at iFlicks and iFlix.

All of this also relates to the Exploding TV Meme and the begining of distributed (p2p) mass niche (the long tail) rich content (Digital audio and/or video).

Category:Exploding TV

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Alerted by a small piece from the “Inside City Hall” column of the Globe & Mail (unavailable online and unattributed) I’ve discovered that Sherry Carroll, Don Valley East Toronto Councillor (Ward 33), is a blogger (started December 1 2004 with regular postings).

Websites are not uncommon for Toronto Councillors, especially when election times comes around, but tend to become rather forgotten save for few Media PR pieces and community meetings. Councillor Carroll is the first Toronto Councillors, that I’m aware of, to attempt this style of communication. Although not my City Councillor, the insight to the activities of one of our Councillor’s should prove enlightening, if not entertaining. Welcome! (Any other Toronto/Ontario/Canada politicians blogging? Let me know.)

Category:Toronto

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@ AMERICAN DIGEST

If….

• You post squirrel recipes on a website.
• You’ve ever bought beer online.
• You write to Hewlett-Packard to sponsor a NASCAR team.
• You’ve modeled your new ‘Daisy Dukes’ for a webcam.
• You have a celphone headset for your fishing boat.
• Your robot dog is named ‘Bubba’.
• You paid more for your computer than you did for your house.
• You subscribe to the chewing tobacco newsgroup.
• Your windows wallpaper is the confederate flag.
• You make John Wayne MP3s.
• Your IM lists are ‘Hunting buddies’ and ‘Mama’n them’.
• Your ringtone is a Hank Williams song.
• You changed beauty shops because they didn’t offer websurfing under the hair driers.
• You modified your gunrack to hold a rifle AND your laptop.
• You help install a wireless hotspot zone in your favorite Honky Tonk.
• You’ve ever called Graceland to tell them their webcam was down.
• You have your monster truck magazine collection on CD-ROM.
• You’ve ever been to a computer show wearing a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt.
• You’ve used your shoe’s spike heel to pry out a DVD that was stuck in the player.
• Your ISP’s office is on a gravel road.
• You sent your husband an Ecard of Dolly Parton on the first day of deer season.
• You have Harley Davidson stickers on your mouse.
• Your Windows sound files are all steel guitar.
• You wrote a really cool flash animation that involves Jack Daniels.
• You’ve ever emailed a digital photo of your new tattoo.
• You know the GPS coordinates of your deer stand and duck blind.
• You’ve used a photo editor to see what you’d look like in Tammy Faye makeup.
• You’ve used a locking CD case to close a bag of salsa chips.
• You’ve ever gotten Kripsy Kreme icing INSIDE your PDA.
• You’ve ever spilled moonshine on your Blackberry.
• You wired your grandma’s outhouse with broadband just for giggles.
• You have a satellite photo of the Dallas Cowboys’ Cheerleaders on your wall.
• You’ve ever painted a URL on an overpass.

category: Humour

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apophenia: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term was coined by K. Conrad in 1958 (Brugger). Or to take the subtitle of this blog “making connections where none previously existed”. Spotted in The Intimate Planet

Category:Words

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Toronto’s annual WinterCity Festival is a 14-day city-wide celebration of our city’s culture, creativity, and cuisine, to encourage residents and visitors to get out and experience Toronto’s restaurants and attractions during the traditionally quiet winter season.

The festival’s culinary element is Winterlicious , which this year is between January 28 - February 10. WinterCity also includes free entertainment and the Arts

For more upcoming events, checkout Toronto’s You Belong Here website and it’s excellent Events and Attractions quick links. (They allow for subscribing to a “Toronto You Belong Here” email, but maybe they need a RSS feed?)

Category:Toronto

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FlickrBlog

“A guy from Scotland goes 5490 miles to Tokyo and takes a picture of a girl taking a picture. She turns out to be from England, 413 miles away from him” and then “he posts the picture he took on a Website (in Canada, irrelevantly) and within 6 weeks the girl in the photo finds it”. Small world…(via kottke.org)

And then there was John Perry Barlow’s “Intimate Planet” experience. I feel as if the Global Village became real to me that night, and, indeed, it has become the Global Dinner Party. All at once. The small world has become the intimate world.. again Small world… (via Boing Boing)

Welcome to the “Global Dinner Party”

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