Glimpses of the websurfing habits of a computer science professor, obsessive crafter, occasional gamer, and all around geek
I’ve added the Language Log to my daily websurf this week and am enjoying it thoroughly. If you wish you knew more about the picky details of writing, or if you just enjoy discussions/dissections of real-world writing, check it out. There are also lots of fun entries about the entrance of new words into our lexicon, including a recent one about “meh”. Also worth scanning for are their opinions about “fake” profanity.
This is a well-written discussion of the privacy concerns with Web 2.0, including a nice dissection of how the most reasonable business model for the growing number of social networking style sites is their use as data mining sources for a company’s other operations [via Clicked]. For example, Flickr is perhaps one of the most interesting ones. Search for ‘cat’, and Flickr will record the most popular photo clicked. By associating the colour and picture data within photos with keywords used to search, Yahoo is slowly building a database of human identification. It has often said that the differentiator between … Continue reading Big Brother 2.0?
Animator vs. Animation is a very good flash animation reminiscent of the Bugs Bunny vs. Animator cartoons, but in a digital world [via Clicked]. I’m most impressed by how much is going on in the video – I watched it a couple of times to try to get everything that is going on, and even then by the end it gets pretty chaotic.
In the latest installment of people doing crazy things for web traffic, we have The Monkey Chow Diaries in which a guy is in the process of trying to subsist on nothing but monkey chow, water, coffee and vodka for a week [via VidiotBox]. His videoclips sum up the story, but you should definitely check out his weblog as well, in which he answers more questions about his monkey chow experiment than in the videos. Obviously, there’s no way to tell if he’s actually doing this or not, but it’s pretty funny either way. Today is day 5, so get … Continue reading Monkey Diet
While I’ve never really been as big a fan of Something Awful as some of my friends, their recent forum thread on what if movies ran in reverse is very funny. Maybe my favorite, just for its consiceness and plausibility is for Peter Pan: “Disturbing portrayal of a paradise island’s descent into chaos as a crocodile regurgitates a pirate who then proceeds to wage increasingly ineffective war on a group of regressive children.”
There are a number of websites that do interesting “before and after” demonstrations of photo retouching, but this one from a professional photographer is particularly interesting because it doesn’t just cover fashion photos and comes from the perspective of somebody who actually does this for a living.
For my students in my AI class, who had the honor of being my last exam of the spring semester, I link to the Top 10 Strangest Robots, with video! RunBot might be my favorite because he is so cute, but the OmniZero robot boxing video is probably the “must see” of the bunch and Robonova is impressive too.
It’s amazing how the last day of classes feels like a Friday, regardless of what day of the week it falls on, and how many appointments I have scheduled for the following day. I think it’s the general campus vibe that does it. In that vein, I thought I’d do a random link collection – fodder for some late night study breaks. First up, a student showed us this face locator tool from the Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition company during a class presentation today, and it is very cool. It works wonderfully with group photos even, though we found that it … Continue reading
If you have ever enjoyed anything I have linked to, you will go listen to the song Code Monkey (just click on the “Code Monkey” link under the blurb). It is birlliant and true and funny and I am geeking out to this song in my office, to the dismay of the student who just came by to ask a question. I actually acquired a code monkey of my own last summer (he is purple and plush and from Seattle, as many good code monkeys are), and perhaps I’ll finally bring him in to the office with me tomorrow.
Hosted at the University of Vermont, this Web Essay on the Male Gaze, Fashion Advertising, and the Pose has a nice discussion of the issues in advertising portrayals of female beauty with a combination of scholarly references and good imagery. Worth checking out – it may not be Killing Us Softly, but it’s an interesting read. I particularly like the photoshop job they do in the first few slides.