Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Numbers visualization

Numbers are really fascinating, so here there are 2 cool number hacks I found time ago.
1) Numberspiral.com Number spirals are very simple. To make one, we just write the non-negative integers on a ribbon and roll it up with zero at the center. The trick is to arrange the spiral so all the perfect squares (1, 4, 9, 16, etc.) line up in a row on the right side: and then interesting patterns start to emerge.
2) The secret lives of numbers (applet): determine the relative popularity of every integer between 0 and one million. The resulting information exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns which reflect and refract our culture, our minds, and our bodies.
For example, certain numbers, such as 212, 486, 911, 1040, 1492, 1776, 68040, or 90210, occur more frequently than their neighbors because they are used to denominate the phone numbers, tax forms, computer chips, famous dates, or television programs that figure prominently in our culture. Regular periodicities in the data, located at multiples and powers of ten, mirror our cognitive preference for round numbers in our biologically-driven base-10 numbering system. Certain numbers, such as 12345 or 8888, appear to be more popular simply because they are easier to remember.

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Changing sex, one page at a time

Some months ago, I read this post at Terranova which made me think a lot.
Suppose a disgruntled programmer were to run some code that flipped the sex of every player character in EverQuest. Further suppose that this programmer did such a thorough job that it would take a week before all the characters could be flipped back.
The players would complain, obviously, but would they actually play for that week? Would they learn anything from the experience?
It is incredible how easy is to "play with reality" and test any hypothesis when you can change at will these virtual worlds (but in which real humans "lives", and some for many hours every day...)
Now from a post of Zephoria at Misbehaving, I come to know that Ping created a service that swaps the gendered pronoun information on every web page ("he" becomes "she" and viceversa, but there are a lot more swappings). Check it at Regender.com. I tried it on my blog and I kind of realized that I don't often use 3rd person pronouns. But you can try, for example, on regender the Book of Genesis from the Bible for a different take on who created what.
In the beginning Goddess created the heaven and the earth....
Besides jokes, I think it can be an interesting mental exercise for realizing how society imposes on us some ways of thinking, and how they could be different if just ... Well, call it "one day of regendered navigation", if you like.

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Flickr's approach to polysemy: clusters

Some words (tags) have more than one meaning. Flickr now let you see the different meanings of tags. Some examples: jaguar (the car, the animal), bush (the president, the flower (greeny), the tree, the graffiti/art on bush the president), europe (france, italy, travel, germany), hot (summer and heat, red and pepper, sexy and woman, water and wet, fire and flame), turkey (the country, the food, the holiday), white (flower and nature, clouds and sky, snow and cold, light), tiger (the MacOSX interface, the animal), cameraphone (pictures of cameraphone, pictures taken with cameraphone, the food (probably a very often photoed object), the cat (probably a very often photoed object)), freedom (sky and free, peace, bird), sadly one of the clusters of italy is church.
Description of this new feature at Flickr Blog along with another new feature: interestingness.

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

ArteSella (nature art) slideshow

Today I visited ArteSella, an International Exhibition of Nature Art that is very close to Trento. I'm not very good in explaining how magic this exhibition is so I guess I'll let the images speak. Or, if you prefer, the Artesella Flickr slideshow. If you want to come in Trentino for a rejuvenating period, you know who to ask for ...
From ArteSella site:
Arte Sella is an international biennial exhibition of contemporary art which began life in 1986. It takes places in the open, in the fields and woods of the Val di Sella valley (near Borgo Valsugana in the Province of Trento). Since 1996 the Arte Sella project has been laid out along a path in the woods on the southern slope of the Armentera mountain. The route, named ARTENATURA (“Art in Nature”) is designed to enable visitors to view the artworks and at the same time enjoy the natural site itself (with its different types of woods, rocks and trees …)
The idea of the exhibition is not just to display works of art but also to show the creative process involved: the works are followed day by day as they are created and the artists are called upon to express their relationship with nature from which they draw inspiration – a relationship based on respect.

The works are usually three-dimensional since they are constructed using stones, leaves, branches and tree-trunks; occasionally man-made objects, materials or colours are used. When the exhibition closes, many of the artworks are left to decay, thus becoming part of nature’s life-cycle; others are put on show in museums, art galleries and exhibitions in Italy and abroad.
In the last few years Arte Sella has expanded to include the nearby rustic Malga Costa. This unusual but attractive building has served as the backdrop for various exhibitions and events which have attracted considerable interest.
In 2001 near the Malga Costa the artist Giuliano Mauri built the massive “Tree Cathedral” artwork for Arte Sella.

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

An Automatic Patent Requests Generator: overflooding the Patent Office?

Since really trivial patents get granted (as long as you pay), i was wondering how hard could it be to organize a Distributed Denial of Service Attack on the Patent Office [the Patent Office probably reviews a bit patent requests, eventually accepting all of them since the only funds they received is from granting patents].
The idea: to modify a bit the SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator (a wonderful GPL-licenced generator of Computer Science papers who created a random paper that got accepted to a conference!) and overflood the Patent Office with automatically generated Patent Requests. I bet that 95% of the (randomly generated) Patent Requests would be accepted. Did I heard "NoSoftwarePatents"?

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

China releases "Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004"

USA is used to release a report on Human Rights for every country in the world. Every country but the USA. So China thought about filling the gap and presented The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004. (i read the comment in Italian by Repubblica). Interesting reading, full of data, numbers and stats. This is a link to Yahoo Cache version, just in case.
Of course nobody could argue that China is better than USA about Human Rights. But it is interesting that China is explicitly attacking USA on such a topic: can you imagine any other country releasing such a report? By the Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China. I can't. With this report, China is saying "we are as powerful as you and we can judge you, as you judge all the world". This is a scary situation for our future.

Following is the full text of the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004, released by the Information office of China's State Council Thursday, March 3, 2005.

In 2004 the atrocity of US troops abusing Iraqi POWs exposed the dark side of human rights performance of the United States. The scandal shocked the humanity and was condemned by the international community. It is quite ironic that on Feb. 28 of this year, the State Department of the United States once again posed as the "the world human rights police" and released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. As in previous years, the reports pointed fingers at human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions (including China) but kept silent on the US misdeeds in this field. Therefore, the world people have to probe the human rights record behind the Statue of Liberty in the United States.

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

M1cr0$oft 5uX

Annoying. Someone speaks a language that you can know only if you are part of an (evolving) community and someone, as a spy, reveals the "secret" vocabulary. Annoying and arrogant. And an Hacker is not a Cracker. And try to make sense of these words that I predict will evolve s00n in somet|-|1n6 else: "w4r3z" "h4x" "pr0n" "sploitz" "pwn" "0\/\/n3d" "pwn3d," "kewl" "m4d sk1llz" "n00b," "noob," "newbie," "newb" "w00t" \o/ "roxx0rs" "d00d" "joo" "j00" "_|00." Upset.

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

The meatrix

The Meatrix, good example of flash-aktivism.
Think about it next time you eat meat,
and choose the red pill.

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Your Christmas is the result of Coca-Cola marketing?

Someone told me that Santa Claus was invented by Coca-Cola. I investigated a bit and it seems that this is more an urban legend and it is not completely true.
"All this isn't to say that Coca-Cola didn't have anything to do with cementing that image of Santa Claus in the public consciousness. The Santa image may have been standardized before Coca-Cola adopted it for their advertisements, but Coca-Cola had a great deal to do with establishing Santa Claus as a ubiquitous Christmas figure in America ..." (from snopes).
However I just checked some websites and we know how it is easy to put up a website saying anything. So I remain with this little doubt: did I spend my childhood "worshipping" a puppet created by Coca-Cola marketing?

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Knowledge organization: from tree to tags?

I'm probably not the first to note it but it seems new tools for organizing knowledge are moving from directories-based (i.e. trees) into flat tag-based. We know that ubercool applications such as del.icio.us, citeULike, flickr use tags, but i realized today that even gmail does not allow you to create folders (and (sub)*forders) for your email messages but only to tag them. In this way emails remain in a single big pool but you can have different views over them based on the different tags you used.
I'm wondering if (and how) filesystems can move in a similar direction, or at least the "explorer" visual interface of a filesystem. VennFS (snapshot) seems an interesting direction even if I'm not sure the representation metaphor is easy to grasp. It is selfevident that the fact many people are used to directories-based structures does not mean this is the best way to organize knowledge.
A quick search resulted in 2 keywords related to tag-based system you may want to analyze more: folksonomy and ethnoclassification.
Pros of tags-based tools: an object can fall under more than one categories, you don't have to think once forever your categorization structure and then be stucked with it but tags support evolution.
Cons of tags-based tools: unless the tool incentives re-use of tags, you can easily end up creating too many tags and forgetting about them, resulting in inability to find the information you previously categorized.

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Google Grid

You must watch this Flash Video. It is the story of Media until year 2014. It contains facts such as "Google Grid", "Googlezon" (google+amazon) and "nytimes gone offline".
What happens to the news? And what is Epic?
Watch it, it is only 8 minutes but it is a jump in (one of the possible) futures.

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Scholar.google.com

Google creates a new functionality almost every week. This time we have http://scholar.google.com/ on which you can search for "scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research". [Found via an email sent by Valdis Krebs on SocNet mailinglist].

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Search engine switch

While the evil company launches its search engine (no link - no pagerank), i finally decided to make the switch to Yahoo! search engine. If you use firefox (you should!), it is as easy as changing the icon in the top-right box (mycroft).
[This blog is 1st results if you search for Paolo, in Yahoo! but of course this is not the only reason I switched I like to promote some diversity in the search engine arena as well]

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Brain-computer direct interface

100 electrodes implanted directly into the motor cortex of a 24-year-old quadriplegic man allows him to control computer directly and hence play videogames and check email. Read the article in Nature . I would be interested in reading the explanation of the man on how he learnt to control the computer and how he feels in controlling it. The similar questions are: "how have you learnt to move your finger?" and "how do you feel when you move a finger?". It is something it is difficult (or impossible?) to explain, it just seems natural. I may guess it is the same for the man and his brain control on the computer. Unluckly the article does not analyze this. (found via BoingBoing)

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Google addons

Google print, Google SMS, Google helps China censorships.
The Google Italian version is now offering: maps (just search for an Italian city, such as Bologna), trains timetables (just search for two Italian cities, such as bologna roma), UPS packets monitoring (just enter an UPS code, such as 1Z1234567891234567). [found via Pandemia]
For the train timetable, Google.it doesn't use the Italian Trenitalia but the German reiseauskunft. Well, I guess they are more reliable (both as train service and Internet site).

In the meantime, Yahoo! goes personalized: not very impressive for now but it is just a first step. A9.com has probably the advantage of having already all the Amazon's logins (and of offering discounts on Amazon if you use A9). In the pre-Internet economy you would have had to pay in order to use a so useful service such as a search engine; in the Internet economy they offer you discounts if you use their search engine ... and I suspect, sooner or later, someone will pay you for using their search engine. In a real free market, the sellers must sell while the comsumers can wait and accept the best offer (usually going down near 0, or even in the negative numbers, as I said?). This is an incredible powers shift.
Ok, I stop the "changing economy" ramblings and ... did I wrote that at the FOAF conference there was a guy from Yahoo! ? It would be great to have Yahoo! MySearch FOAF-enabled.

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Google Bug?

I was searching in google for "Beth, T., Borcherding, M., Klein, B.: Valuation of trust in open networks." and I got this result page: the link of the homepage (in green) is displayed not correctly.

It is so strange to receive something not perfect from google. Could it be a bug? Or maybe it is a feature? I tried some other queries and it seems that "B B." is treated as some sort of bolding directive or so.

Try it yourself

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Is better Yahoo! or Google? You decide.

Yahoo dumps Google search technology. You can decide by yourself if Yahoo! is better than Google by comparing search results on this double-search-page (found via OlandeseVolante).

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Mixmaster: combine the content of a site with the layout of a different one

With Mixmaster it is possible to combine the content of a site with the layout of a different site.
I produced some funny mix by mapping the content of my site on Boingboing.net layout and on Smartmobs.com layout and on Cnn.com layout and on New York Times layout and on News.google.it layout and on Slashdot.org layout and on
Simplebits.com layout and on Deanforamerica.com layout and on Cesca layout.
The content of governo.it (empty propaganda) on my layout is instead pretty disturbing!

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

New year's eve in Chiapas (photos)

Since I was out of the blogosphere during the past 20 days, I have many things to blog about.

The first is that I've been in Chiapas (Mexico) for new year holidays. New year's eve in a Zapatista village (La Garrucha). I'll blog about what this revolution means for me and the world later. For now I just publish the link to photos.

The sign in the photos reads: "esta usted en territorio zapatista en rebeldia aqui manda el pueblo y el gobierno obedece" meaning "You are in Zapatista lands in rebellion, here the people rule and the government obeys"

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Murdoch privatizes government propaganda

I was listening this morning the radio program Democracy Now while a guy made a very clever point. He said that Murdoch owns televisions all over the world (for example, Fox in US) and that he also owns a satellite channel in China. But, how can Murdoch buy television channels in every country? At the cost of oversimplifying, the model is the following: "I, Murdoch, offer you to privatize the government propaganda and you, govern, offer me a monopoly in Broadcasting."

Actually, it is a very clever move, I don't see any reason for a govern (US, China, Italy, whatever, ...) to say no to this offer.
By the way, Murdoch also owns all the satellite channels in Italy (SkyTv). So we have a monopolist and prime minister that owns all the traditional 6 tv channels and a global monopolist that owns all the satellite tv channels. Do you wonder why Italy is 53th in the world press freedom ranking?

Categories (tags):

Misc

misc

Automatic Translations of this Blog

Thanks to the progress of Natural Language Processing you can experience this blog in many languages. The results are kind of weird but translating human language automatically is a very hard task because it requires the machine to "understand" what the human he's speaking about.

For example:
Translate my English Blog to Chinese or

Translate my Italian Blog to Portuguese

You can find more languages if you continue reading.