People often say "I wonder who clicks on search ads, because I sure don't". Turns out search history records this stuff (if you have it turned on). I've clicked on 9 ads this year, and bought products from two of them: a junk hauling company, and a balsa wood supply house. You? - ⓞnor
Wow; 3 clicks! And I thought I never had either. - Benjamin Golub
I click on quite a few search ads -- last one was for fivestarbutter.com after a search for "butter of the month club -peanut" Can you believe that there's no such thing? - Ginger Makela
It would be eerie (and interesting) if search history could also track Google AdSense clicks as well. - Atul Arora
Did you order some Five Star Butter? Is it really the Best Butter on Earth? Because "deeply creamy, almost more like cheese than butter" sure does sound yummy. - ⓞnor
Nope. Didn't order any. The "more like cheese" part kind of turned me off. Plus, the $36.99 + $19.95 S&H killed it. - Ginger Makela
Haha... I can tell my daughter has been using my computer: "Be Jasmine from Aladdin-brandsonsale.com/jasmine-costumes" - The other 6 times has been my wife with what I can tell from the links. Ginger, you've found a niche that hasn't been filled? I smell a start-up. - Vince DeGeorge
clicked 13 times so far this year. my most recent ad was when i was looking for a giant toilet paper roll to propose as a gag gift for a friend who's joining the peace corps - Karl Rosaen
10 click throughs... I'm not really against it. A lot of times the sponsored link at the top is exactly what I'm looking for... I kinda feel bad for them in that case. Like if I google "Virgin American" and then click through they paid for what I was already trying to find. but they got a friendfeed comment so it all evens out in the end :) - Frankie Warren
I have about 10, but nine of those were me LOOKING for spam. Some guy kept emailing me well after I told him to stop, so I searched for all the gold, forex bullshit ads and signed him up. Problem solved. Thanks Google! - Baratunde Thurston
I wonder how I could click on them at all, as all my browsers have it Noscript- and Adblock-disabled, and I tend to avoid clicking into anything not my topic at all? - silpol
I don't have search history enabled. I just enabled it, installed the toolbar, thought about the privacy implications, shuddered, and uninstalled it. When Viacom wants to know what I read, they'll have to sue my ISP and t-mobile. :-) As for ads, I honestly don't click on them. :-) - Joanmarie
Pretty sexy auto summarization of review content (Amazon electronics only at the moment), with a spiffy interface where you can mouse over bits of their summary text and see the snippets of input reviews that went into it. - ⓞnor via Bookmarklet
From their blog: "Taken together, it’s easy to see that the Five Star system– as it stands today– has almost no communicative value at all. It’s time to liberate ourselves from this tyranny and call the system what it is: a weak numerical hack." - ⓞnor
I want a visualization like that for the last year, or better yet the last 5 years. This particular chart was from the switch from backwardation to contango in early 2005. This article in general, from three years ago, is painting a somewhat complicated picture of institutional investors being front-run by opportunistic traders. - ⓞnor via Bookmarklet
Interesting. I didn't know what the terms backwardation or contango meant. - Chris White
My version, 1986-present: http://spreadsheets.google.com.... I can't draw any conclusions from it. I can't help but think that guy on TheStreet is spinning a fairy tale out of random data. - ⓞnor
"This table is made through rapid prototyping (3D printing) of branches that become increasingly more dense at the top to form a planar surface." How would you clean this? Seems like crumbs would tend to get stuck in the surface. - ⓞnor
This is beautiful work. It's a shame that 3D printing material is so expensive, not really practical for mass production. (You could cover the surface in glass or clear acrylic) - Jason Wehmhoener
It would take forever to clean. It has infinite surface area! - Kevin Fox
This sort of thing would be a great test case for RepRap (but don't use hot water to clean your thermoplastic table!). - ⓞnor
@kevin The same thought came to my mind...Infinite surface area - Varun Mahajan
Varun, Kevin, that reminds me of the old philosophical problem: in a race, every person has to cross half the distance before they can reach the end, and then half of that next a distance, and then half again and again.... so how do they ever reach the end? - Nick
"These cookies, made from contrasting colors of butter cookie dough, are a tasty realization of the Sierpinski carpet, producing lovely, edible fractals. As with our earlier project involving clay, you can make these by using a simple iterative algorithmic process of stretching out the dough and folding it over onto itself in a specific pattern." - ⓞnor
Well, a "noncorporeal chew toy" is a nonsense concept, and the notion of adding bacon flavoring to such a thing is ridiculous. The picture is obviously drawn in 3 seconds with Paintbrush. The $789.45 price is insane. It's some kind of strange fake entry, and I found it funny. But also, bacon is really tasty, have you tried it? I mean, like good, organic, flavorful bacon, fresh off the sizzling grill, right on the cusp between crispy and chewy, paired with a piping hot biscuit... - ⓞnor
"But then when we show it to a synesthe, he says, oh, I see a red triangle against a green background, and he saw it virtually immediately, in other words he saw it in a matter of two or three seconds instead of taking twenty or thirty seconds... so if he's crazy, how come he's better at it than we are? Okay, so this shows that in fact he's not confabulating, he's not making it up, he's literally seeing those things." - ⓞnor
That's wonderful. Slides 4 and 5 do such a great job at demonstrating the phenomenon. - DeWitt Clinton
This guy writes interesting books, too. - Melinda Owens
Yeah, I couldn't decide about the second half, he seemed to be making some sweeping statements about the nature of art without a lot of support. But it was entertaining and thought provoking. - ⓞnor
yeah, he's entertaining enough that you keep listening. if much of what he says is fluff, it's fluff that seems mostly right. His signature statement, in his discussion of findings from his clinical patients (I think with phantom limb pain) is "if I showed you a talking pig, would you complain that I only had n=1?" - j1m
I'm not sure about some of his claims in the first part. Synesthesia and "creativity" may be a result of failure to prune connections, but there's a theory that autism is too. (It would make sense in terms of some of the sensory filtering problems some autistic people have, and the heads and brains of autistic children tend to be larger than normal.) Autistic people are not thought to be prone to synesthesia or to be particularly creative. - Melinda Owens
Well, he presents this awesome picture of a horse drawn by an autistic child. Which doesn't prove anything about creativity in general, I don't think, but... - ⓞnor
OK, but autistic people are not thought to be more creative than the general public... The claim that synesthesia and creativity are the result of less pruning can be supported by doing simple thing like imaging artist's heads, and he doesn't present any evidence to support that. And the claim that autism can be the outcome of less pruning has more evidence behind it, and autism is pretty different from synesthesia. - Melinda Owens
Ha. I should have listened to the rest of the presentation first. Even when he talks about the horse drawn by Nadia, the autistic child, he doesn't call her creative, he calls her brain-damaged and says that her brain damage happens to allow her to isolate form well. - Melinda Owens
I can't help but think that with what we know now, theorizing about how creativity works in the brain is like speculating about which chip in a computer is responsible for firefox crashing. - ⓞnor
Good analogy. Pruning, after all, is about half of what goes on in development. - j1m
What strikes me about this is the moralizing, normativizing language. It's a wonder we can do any research at all in this area given the use of crazy, damage, etc. which already channel if not constrain our cognitive responses to these phenomena. - Daniel Dulitz
Universal principles of art? Ridiculous argument. Are we back in the nineteenth century (e.g. biological determinism)? If this talk was given to an art history or film or literature audience he'd be torn apart. - joneilortiz
why don't you think there are universal principles of art? - j1m
via Slashdot (sorry) but this is the original source. The fishies are surprisingly cute in a steampunky sort of way. Check out the awesome plugboard-and-dip-chips electronics. - ⓞnor
Daily average spot bandwidth price at a NYC exchange, 2002 - 2008, down from ~$200 in 2002 to ~$20 (per Mbps-month) in 2008. For comparison, telegeography data shows a substantial (but lesser) drop in prices for transoceanic routes. - ⓞnor
May 2002: http://web.invisiblehand.net/w... predicts "[Within] 12 months (by mid-2003), Cogent's price for a 100Mbps wholesale circuit will be near $5,000/month ... other providers' prices will probably continue to decline at the historical rate of 30% per year ... In the meantime, buyers should be aware that there is no such thing in the year 2002 as a Mbps for 10 or 30$/month." I think they were wrong about Cogent. - ⓞnor
Mar 2007: http://money.cnn.com/2007/03/2... describes Cogent (in Fortune magazine) as if their strategy and surprisingly cheap prices were news. I remember the de-peering events they talked about; some of them created substantial disruptions in Internet traffic. - ⓞnor
Apr 2007: http://www.renesys.com/blog/20... comments on Cogent de-peering some smaller ISPs in Europe, and discusses their overall strategy. Nothing I've read really explains their anomalous pricing in a satisfactory way. Anyway, I'm done with this curiosity-quest now. - ⓞnor
Cogent released $10/Mbps pricing in 2003 (I probably misremembered what the sales rep told me about 2000). http://www.net99.net/htdocs/pr... I guess availability of $10/Mbps has spread to more data centers and areas of the country since then, though the price hasn't gotten lower. I'm curious how you found the graph, though. Awesome sleuthing! - Sanjeev Singh
I found it with a Google search for [bandwidth prices]. - ⓞnor
"Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat." :-) - j1m
This is fun: 'She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."' - j1m
"The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London. " - bob
There are currently 884 results for the search ["cognitive surplus"]. It's fun to watch this meme ripple through the web. I wish I had a giant visualisation of the entire web that let me watch this particular concept spread through and between different online communities - Adewale Oshineye
"Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up.... However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter." (b/c for one thing, duh, mary ann) - j1m
What a really, really smart essay. It crystalizes a lot of thoughts I've had over recent years, but mine carry a tinge of backward, residual Protestantism. For example, I often feel guilty that, on the treadmill, while FF'ing through commercials on "House Hunters International", I often ask myself how I could be better self-actualized -- while at the same period in my grandfather's life, he was probably wondering how he'd feed his children on Thursday. - Erik Dafforn
At first I thought you used FriendFeed on the treadmill, and I was going to ask about that, because I've tried a couple ways to surf the net from an exercise machine without much luck. It seems to be hard to type while bouncing about. Then, of course, I realized FF meant something else. - ⓞnor
Oops, sorry! Yes, the "original" FF -- fast-forward. - Erik Dafforn
"This is my voice (west coast American English with hints of mid-west and Canadian here and there). This is a semantically plausible (not to say 'predictable'), declarative sentence containing no proper names." - ⓞnor
Rob says spectrogram reading is hard. He being a cunning linguist and all, I tend to believe him. - Clare Dibble
Yeah, if good recordings of simple, clearly enunciated statements are "mystery of the month" material, then clearly this is not an easy task. - ⓞnor
No proper names? It says, "Paul is dead. I killed him." - j1m
Much to my surprise, someone actually bought one of these for me. (Apparently it was one of the more plausible items on my obviously ridiculous wishlist.) I was very amused. - ⓞnor
That Shared Items bug can get ugly sometimes. - ⓞnor
From my Google Groups response: "We are so sorry for this embarasssing technical issue, and we will fix the problem ASAP. The background, as you know, is that in certain error conditions, Google Shared Stuff returns public data in someone's feed rather than that user's shared stuff. There is no HTTP error code or any other way to detect the error. We have been told that they fixed the problem, but it appears to have been reverted... Google has been notified, and they have acknowledged our notification every time we have contacted them. I will forward you those emails rather than list Googlers' names in this public forum... If we can find a way that we are confident will detect this error condition on our end, we will do that... If we cannot, we may disable Google Shared Stuff until we are absolutely confident the problem is fixed on their end... We are sincerely sorry for your having to deal with this potentially very embarrassing technical issue, and I want to assure you that we take it very seriously." - Bret Taylor
I am disabling Google Shared Stuff right now until we have a long term solution to this problem. - Bret Taylor
Nice Bret, I'd hate to have this happen to me. Sorry Dan! - Benjamin Golub
In my case I think it's OK in the end -- I have 24 friends on FB with the FF app installed, and they're all people I don't mind seeing that stuff followed by my explanation. And I'm not easily embarrassed by this sort of thing. - ⓞnor
So, Google Shared Stuff has been completely disabled. The accounts haven't been deleted, but are "hidden," and no new entries will be published until I change that flag, which I will only do once we are more confident. So sorry again... - Bret Taylor
"ultrasonic laughter has been recorded during groundbreaking rat-tickling experiments" - ⓞnor
"...Compounding the conundrum is the fact that it is impossible to tickle oneself. In 1998, scientists at the Institute of Neurology in London constructed a tickle-o-matic robot to explore this facet of tickling, and found that a person controlling the robot arm could not tickle themselves unless a delay of at least 1/5 second was introduced..." - Sanjeev Singh
"A: "Did you hear about that series of illogical events that occurred involving a duck? They turned out to be congruent in some unexpected way!"" - Jonathan Betz
does this duck repel tigers like lisa's stone? - paulm
Ahhh, reporters. I was explaining to her what Reactivity did, and somehow that became what Jim and I were building. Oh, well... Just an innocent mistake -- at least it did not say FF was security software. - Bret Taylor
Pitch fork, okay. I thought you wanted green beans as a present. Btw I found my corn. Remember that time we drank tea and I looked for the corn for 10+ minutes? It was in a bag. - niniane
added two products to the Amazon Wish List Wish List
