hey, it's noah
Hey everyone, just a quick note to say posting will be pretty slow over the next month or so as I get married and go on my honeymoon. I may try to talk a few folks in to picking up the slack around…
The Awl has an excellent interview with Pac-Man on his 30th birthday. Here’s a short excerpt:
dotmuncher80: I’ll let you in on a little secret: None of us move as quick as we used to. The other day Blinky had me stopped in an alley in the upper left and I was like, “Fuck, this is it,” and I hear the dude WHEEZING. I was like, “You wanna sit this one out?” and he goes, “Dude, you don’t even know.” We are all running out of energy.
BALK: The power pellets don’t help?
dotmuncher80: You mean the speed?
BALK: I thought they were just “power pellets.”
dotmuncher80: Dude, they’re speed. I am a 30-year-old SPEED ADDICT. Real accomplishment there. What a wonderful life I’ve made for myself.
Nice Friday afternoon reading.
In case you needed another reminder that congress doesn’t represent you, here’s the Washington Post on political ATM usage:
Sen. Ben Nelson (D), for example, told the Omaha World-Herald this week that he has never once used an ATM, relying on bank tellers instead. His Nebraska colleague, Sen. Mike Johanns (R), has used his ATM card fewer than five times. And Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, told the newspaper that he has a bank card but doesn’t use it for cash.
“I’ve never used an ATM, so I don’t know what the fees are. It’s true, I don’t know how to use one,” Nelson, 69, said.
I’m very glad the folks making the decisions are also part of the 7 percent of Americans who don’t use ATMs. Great.
Great.
Aging Congress flummoxed by ATMs
[Via Clusterflock]
I can’t for the life of me remember where I found this or who sent it to me, but over at a blog called The Unlikely Fan someone has done an excellent comparison of the World Cup teams to US sports teams. Argentina, for instance, gets the Washington Redskins because “They’ve been good for about as long as the game has been played. They have so much history that your default expectation is for them to always be good, even great. But the reality doesn’t support that: they haven’t won anything in around twenty years.”
But the very best comparison is Japan = Gonzaga:
A team that has come to dominate its humble region the last couple decades or so. But they don’t make a dent in the big dance, despite amazing hair.
I’m ready for the World Cup to get started.
While it feels like everyone in the world is talking about the whole Facebook privacy thing, my quick and informal survey of some non-internety folks came back with a bunch of blank stares.
Anyway, Openbook does a better job explaining what’s up than just about anything I’ve seen. Do a quick search for anything you imagine people wouldn’t want made public about themselves and it comes back. It sort of reminds when AOL released a whole bunch of supposedly anonymized search data only to find out that it’s really easy to track back to individuals. Only this time there’s not even an attempt to make it anonymous. Now I get that people should have a better understanding of what they make public and all that jazz, but it’s pretty easy to find some stuff that any person with half a conscience would hide away for the person who made it public.
[Via The Awl]
Some interesting research on the value of near-misses in gambling:
Henry Chase and Luke Clark of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute in Cambridge have previously found that the brain responds to near miss gambling outcomes in much the same way it does to as winning. In moderate gamblers, both types of outcome activate the reward circuitry, and although near miss events are experienced to be somewhat less rewarding than wins, they nevertheless increase the desire and motivation to gamble. For games involving skill, near misses indicate an improvement in performance and spur the player to try again. But gambling is a game of chance, which distorts gamblers’ thought processes - near misses cause them gambler to overestimate both the level of skill involved and their chances of winning. This spurs them to continue gambling.
Interesting to think about the implications of this sort of stuff on the “gamification” movement currently going on. The article also highlights that manufacturers of gambling machines have been smart to this effect for awhile: “Using a technique called clustering, they create a high number of failures that are close to wins, so that what the player sees is a misrepresentation of the probabilities and randomness that the game involves.”
Lately I’ve been having lots of conversations about augmented reality. Not the marker/webcam type, but just the general idea of using technology to augment the world we experience. While there is a lot of cool marker/webcam stuff, it’s not really “useful” yet. That why I love it when I see stuff like this new feature for an iPhone app called Sodoku Grab that can read the puzzle you’re looking at and overlay answers (or tips) in real time.
As a total aside, it reminds me of another puzzle cheating story. A few years ago I had a few thousand people land on a random entry via the search term “tom wolfe catchphrase 1970s.” Confused, I quickly put up a page with that title and asked people what the hell they were looking for. As it turned out, they were all trying to cheat on their New York Times crossword puzzle. The clue was “Tom Wolfe catchphrase popularized in the 1970s” and that had randomly landed on my site. If you’re ever wondering about some of the more random phrases that pop up in Google Hot Trends, now you know.
[Via Beyond the Beyond]
My friend Scott Rafer made a really interesting point about Gilt Groupe and Groupon and their lack of search engine optimization:
Most interestingly, neither of Gilt nor Groupon uses SEO to push their offers. In fact, traditional product offer SEO would kill their businesses. One of the reasons that the merchants can offer lower prices via these services is that the prices will not appear in Google searches and therefore difficult to include in comparison shopping systems.
His larger point, which he goes on to make, is that Google’s never-ending march towards efficiency has created market opportunities in the other, non-efficient, direction. They purposely obfuscate the price of their goods from the world at large and it seems to be working pretty damn well for them.
Good article from the Economist about the realities of TV consumption:
In surveys [people] almost always underestimate how much television they watch, and greatly overstate the extent to which they watch video in any other form. In particular, they underestimate their consumption of live television. One of Ms Pearson’s subjects, a 27-year-old man, claimed to watch recorded television 90% of the time. In fact he watched live TV 69% of the time. He was probably not so much fibbing as misinterpreting the question. When asked how he watched television, he gave an answer that described his behaviour when he was alone, and thus did not have to compromise. But most of the time he watched with other people.
The article also points out how many “disruptive” TV ideas have missed a basic premise of how we consume: With other people. I can’t help but feel like the current wave of “social TV” applications that aim to allow me to connect with my friends while watching shows will suffer the same fate. The reality of the situation is that the vast majority of my TV time is already spent consuming it socially with the person sitting next to me on the couch.
The Atlantic has a great story on the Conficker worm which I had heard about, but not paid a ton of attention to. Apparently the thing is pretty damn sophisticated and some of the smartest computer security folks in the world are trying to fight it (mostly to no avail). I especially enjoyed the game theory of the whole thing as both sides try to guess what the other is thinking the other is thinking:
I think they were trying something, and I think that they’re too smart to do what everybody figured they were going to do. You have to remember, the world was watching this thing and waiting for the world to end from Conficker on April 1, 2009. The last thing you’d want to do if you’re the bad guy is make something happen on April 1. You’re never going to do that, because everybody’s watching it. You’re going to do something when you’re least suspected. So these guys are sophisticated. They have good code. And just even seeing the evolution from Conficker A to B to C, where there’s the peer-to-peer component, which … strikes fear into the heart of botnet hunters because it’s just so damn difficult to track—these guys know exactly what they’re doing.
Also, ran across this test to see if your computer is infected. Godspeed.
