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Cameron Neylon shared an item on Google Reader

World Bank data now available through APIs

yesterday at 1:39 am - Link

Nick Lothian, Deepak, Marcin and Pawel Szczesny liked this

From Jon Udell - a lot of data now freely available from the World Bank through its API. The possibilities for map based mashups alone look like fun - Cameron Neylon

DeWitt Clinton posted a link

A Good Foundation for OpenSocial: Get Involved!

Thursday at 11:49 am - Link

Nick Lothian, Hassan Ibraheem, Dave Johnson and Atul Arora liked this

""As promised a few months ago, the OpenSocial Foundation is up and running. This organization seeks to ensure that OpenSocial will remain implementable by all, at no cost, in perpetuity. This Foundation will also help nurture the real power behind OpenSocial: the community of developers, containers, and everyone contributing to the specification." -Dan Peterson - DeWitt Clinton

Come and join as a member (it's free, and open to everyone), and nominate fellow members to represent the community on the board. - DeWitt Clinton

Paul Buchheit posted an entry on FriendFeed Blog

Simple Update Protocol: Fetch updates from feeds faster

August 27 at 3:12 pm - Link

Richard Bradshaw, Andrew Perry, Igor Poltavskiy, Tanath and 81 other people liked this

"For example, if a site such as FriendFeed switched from polling feeds every 30 minutes to polling every 300 minutes (5 hours), and also monitored the appropriate SUP feed every 3 minutes, the total amount of feed polling would be reduced by about 90%, and new updates would typically appear 10 times as fast." - Paul Buchheit

That's a very interesting idea! I think that for the case of push-generated feeds it will show nice improvements over the current polling approach (which is definitely not scalable). I am wondering if there would be a way to employ the same idea for poll-generated feeds (feeds that are retrieved on request only) though. - Alex Popescu

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That's correct Alex. SUP works very well for most common feeds, but it's not ideal for more dynamic feeds such as a search (e.g. http://friendfeed.com/search?q... ). However, the vast majority of the feeds consumed by FriendFeed and others map into the SUP model very easily. SUP does not solve all problems, but it provides a very simple solution that should work for 90% of feed publishers. - Paul Buchheit

I like the name "SUP"... - Clare Dibble

Isn't this somehow similar to the conditional GET? I might be wrong though as at this hour my head might not be fully functional :). - Alex Popescu

sup? ;) - Tyler Gillies

Yeah...Sup? - Rahsheen(isSoAwesome)

Alex, a conditional GET applies only to a single URL. SUP allows feed consumers to simultaneously monitor many thousands of feeds with a single GET. - Paul Buchheit

I've told you I might not be fully functional :-). You're right SUP is a container for updated feeds. Should I post any other questions directly to the room? - Alex Popescu

Paul this SUP technology is HOT!! I am totally awed by this disruptive innovative idea.... very impressive and incredibly brilliant!! wow!! - Susan Beebe

Thanks Susan! - Paul Buchheit

Your welcome Paul, you guys inspire the heck out me...American techie dream in real time...neat! - Susan Beebe

my flickr upload appeared much faster just now... are you guys using XMPP for flickr? - Travis Parsons

and written in .py :)- but if we throttle "generate_sup_update(db, 120)" and "SUP feed: {"since_time": "2008-08-12T01:44:49Z", "period": 120," [[..|..]]" , so if we take "120" and make it lets say "30", wont this make the load even more to both sides ? - Peter Dawson

Peter said throttle. - Russellreno

It's nice to see FF innovating things... its what I miss about livejournal back when it was just danga interactive. - Dave Dash

just curious, how to read SUP? pronounce sap or soup or syoop? - huixing

'sup, like the shortened version of "what's up?" - Tudor Bosman

So, where's the "omg it's not XML you idiots" backlash? - ⓞnor

Atom streams look more effective performance-wise and just a little bit harder to implement on both sides. See SixApart's: http://updates.sixapart.com/ - Alex Kapranoff

More than a little bit harder! Dealing with never-ending XML streams is a massive pain (see: XMPP), and keeping connections open is trouble. Also, the sixapart updates stream is a firehose that gives you all of the content being posted, you have no opportunity to filter out only those feeds you care about. The FF design is pretty much totally more awesome. - ⓞnor

work with feedburner to give you a ping every time one of the feeds changes and you can replace 5h with 'whenever it occurs' ;) - Nicole Simon

I can't wait for a DUDE or YO companion protocol. - abacab

Nice idea, one thing to include would be the information if a resource (feed) has been deleted, whereby one can build a mirroring system over RSS. - Christian Sonntag

Christian: no need; "deleted" is a special case of "updated". If a feed is listed as modified in SUP, the feed consumer will try to refetch the feed, and notice that it no longer exists. - Tudor Bosman

Dave Johnson bookmarked a page on delicious

Deng Ching: Generating RSS Feeds with Rome

August 26 at 6:16 pm - Link

Nick Lothian and Robert Cooper liked this

"What I liked about Rome is how it’s so easy to understand and use" - Dave Johnson

Sam Pullara posted an entry on Javarants

2008 Olympic Medal Counts by Population

August 24 at 12:25 pm - Link

Nick Lothian, James Williams, Dion Almaer and Atul Arora liked this

Looking at China's totals really makes you think for a sec about how many of the kids taken from their families as toddlers to enter those athletic academies DON'T make it. - James Williams

Karen Padham Taylor posted a link

Ikea to Sell Solar Panels by 2010

August 19 at 8:46 am - via Reshare - Link

Clare Dibble, Nick Lothian, Kishore Balakrishnan, Dave Dash and 17 other people liked this

"Ikea's innovation was to cut storage and transport costs with flat-pack furniture, and at the same time bring some simple and attractive design to mass manufacturing. Now the Swedish company plans to bring this buying power to alternative energy. Johan Stenebo of Ikea spinoff company Greentech will invest $75 million in solar companies and wants the retail giant to start selling the products in Ikea store in two to four years." - Karen Padham Taylor

DeWitt Clinton bookmarked a page on delicious

YouTube - TopGear's Channel

August 18 at 10:03 pm - Link

Nick Lothian liked this

TopGear has an official channel on YouTube! - DeWitt Clinton

Nat Torkington posted a message on Twitter

“@bbogens I was just saying this weekend how Princess Bride is one of the few timeless movies. Love it to pieces.”

August 18 at 2:34 pm - Link

Nick Lothian, Christopher Granade, Deepak and Michael Nielsen liked this

Adewale Oshineye bookmarked a page on delicious

btail - a bayesian log filter

August 17 at 2:56 pm - Link

accesine and Nick Lothian liked this

"Btail monitors a logfile for specific events. To do this it uses a bayesian filter to determine what events are worth passing through and which should be suppressed. So it filters out all of the routine stuff, but passes through anything important or out of the ordinary." Nice idea - Adewale Oshineye

very impressive. bayesian - accesine

I haven't actually tried it but in hindsight it seems like one of those blindingly obvious ideas. - Adewale Oshineye

Paul Buchheit posted a link

Auto Facial Attractiveness Enhancement Engine

August 17 at 5:13 pm - via Reshare - Link

Laurent Dieterich, Paul Winch, Tai, Nikhil Dandekar and 122 other people liked this

This is amazing. I think we should automatically apply it to all profile photos ;) - Paul Buchheit

Facial discrimination? - Jason Brooks

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Impressive. - j1m

Can I get one for the body as well as the face? - Dion Almaer

Very interesting. Hope they post the download link soon so that we can all play with it. - Brady Brim-DeForest

It seems as if the main problem with most people in the examples shown is their forehead is too short or too narrow. Wonder if there's a subtle clue that big brains are beautiful there! :) - Lindsay Donaghe

@Jason - that's an interesting concept. Would you be more likely to trust the girl on the left or right? Would you be more likely to talk to either one of them at a party (or more intimidated by either one?). - Lindsay Donaghe

Right one looks more dumb... - Phil Smirnov

Notice that for all the women they soften the jaw, while squaring it for men. Everyone also gets a slightly thinner face and upturned almost smiling lips. - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)

@SB yeah and the forehead adjustment... almost like there is a triangle with the forehead at the point and they flip it so the chin is the bottom of the triangle... weird. - Lindsay Donaghe

They are different women! Blame Paul! : ) - Erhan Erdogan

impressive - accesine

Lindsay: whenever sketching generic faces, the face starts as an inverted triangle and the eyes appear a third of the way down from the top of the forehead; lips and nose appear below and above (respectively) a line 1/3 up from the chin. Looks like these pictures are rearranged to meet that particular school of drawing. - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)

That is interesting yet odd. Seems that the faces are slendered with the software. - Jim Goldstein via twhirl

I wonder what would come out of applying their algorithms to face of black or asian person? Different countries have different concepts of beauty. - artemy tregubenko

This technology should be made available in eye glasses, just imagine how much better your work day can be! - Claude Betancourt

Paul - Think you should definitely add the option. "Click here to be beautiful without the expense of plastic surgery! .... and you may even get more 'Likey's" :)" - Charlie Anzman

Some of the stuff coming out of Siggraph this year is really freaky. How about combining this with the automatic video editing stuff? ;) - Joe Beda

without a doubt amazing. It's incredible how subtle the changes are yet massive difference. - Zee at WeDoCreative

Huh, that's pretty crazy. Creepy, but cool. :) - felix

I haven't read the paper, but I wonder if it adapts to different notions of "attractive" (that changes from culture to culture ...) - Rui

+1 @Claude I was thinking the same thing! Incorporate this software in wearable monitor glasses, and the whole world would be beautiful! I'll bet we can look for these on the shelves in the U.S. just before November. Social media and reality enhancement software have put Winston Smith out of a job. - Chris Kim A

Isn't this something these Japanese photo booth do since years? - minus3

do i sense another manga-style meme starting? - anna

So, if it turns me into Gilbert Godfried... what does that mean? - l0ckergn0me

You know, if these guys had gotten together with the realtime video+photo enhancement folks and approached the Beijing Olympic Comittee then that singing girl in the opening ceremonies might not have had to been replaced with a body double. (Yeah, I just brought three of this week's biggest memes together. I'll be here all week.) - Kevin Fox

The artist proportions were laid out by the Greeks as the perfect human, that's not being used here. This beautification engine, I think, builds on top of a previous study where some students tried to mathematically identify attractiveness. They had participants rate the attractiveness of head shots from yearbooks. What they found was there was a high correlation b/w the geometrically "average" face and high attraction. That "average" is based on the proportions of the di - xero

stances between the individual elements of the face and their relative sizes. IIRC the software adjusts elements so they statistically/geometrically complement each other. It's not actually working toward a golden set of proportions, but a set of proportions appropriate for the individual as defined by the masses. I wouldn't think of it as "facial discrimination" so much as "deviation from ones potential". - xero

imagine if this were available in real-time installed into special glasses. sober beer goggles. - Jess Lee

I'm not fussy. I'd take either out for a romantic dinner. - Andy C

Or maybe both. - Andy C

I'm waiting for the first Facebook application that automatically enhances your profile picture like this. Every social network should run this on the avatars. Beautiful people! - Benedikt Koehler

Can you imagine the controversy if dating sites got a hold of this? - xero

@paul automatically apply it to all profile photos, huh? are you sure you ready for results? check my picture - try to see wonderful cossacks writing infamous letter to Turkish Sultan :) - silpol

I wonder if they'll turn Mickey Mouse into Mighty Mouse - Dave Q

@Lindsay; A)Maybe/? 1=Left 2=Right 3=N/A - Jason Brooks

this will have a lot of practical applications to create a (virtual) world of beautiful (or more acceptable facially) people. - Apostolos Tsompanopoulos

Just a complicated high tech implementation of beer goggles. - Hayes Haugen

Chris' comment is sooo tempting - Charlie Anzman

Meryn Stol bookmarked a page on delicious

I bet you look good in the book store from Guardian Unlimited: Culture Vulture

August 16 at 1:33 am - Link

Nick Lothian, Thomas Brox Røst and Michael Nielsen liked this

According to a survey of over 2,000 adults carried out by internet pollsters YouGov for Borders bookstore, books play a crucial role in influencing our opinions of strangers. Half of those asked admitted that they would look again or smile at someone on the basis of what they were reading. - Meryn Stol

Jonathan shared an item on Google Reader

PJB: Blowback from Bear Baiting ::: Patrick J. Buchanan - Official Website

August 16 at 3:15 pm - Link

Dmitry Skavish, Phil Smirnov, Nick Lothian, Mario Romero and 6 other people liked this

I have no love for the Russians, but it's becoming pretty clear what actually happened. - Jonathan

"Americans have many fine qualities. A capacity to see ourselves as others see us is not high among them." - Paul Buchheit

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@paul: it think "empathy" is the word you're looking for - .LAGizmoto

@.LAG -- well, that's a specific kind of empathy. - Jeremy Raines

Agreed, though I was actually just quoting the linked article. - Paul Buchheit

It pains me to agree with Buchanan, but in this instance he's right on point. The arrogance underlying the hypocracy of Bush's stance is unbelievable. - Andrei M. Marinescu

If it wasn't this it would have been something else. Russia just needed an excuse to exert some regional hegemony. Georgia got the ball rolling but the Russians were more than eager to run with it. - Peter Simard

mike seyfang published photos on Flickr

August 16 at 8:59 pm - Link

Nick Lothian liked this

Ryan posted a link

Top 10 Hubble Pics

August 16 at 11:29 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Sat, Nick Lothian, Yaroslav Nikolaev, Daniel Swan and 6 other people liked this

Ginger Makela favorited a video on YouTube

We Met At Starbucks

August 10 at 10:06 pm - Link

Jason Shellen, Leslie Poston, Mike Doeff, Sacca and 19 other people liked this

Best In Show is the greatest and so is Parker Posey. Her performance is devastating in this movie. The way she hisses at her husband when they forget their dog's toy is perfect. - Todd Nemet

I just watched the Busy Bee clip on YouTube. Turns out that the guy is hissing at his wife. Funny how I remembered it wrong. "Mommy and daddy were just having a discussion." I think I've actually said that :-/ - Todd Nemet

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I *love* Parker Posey. - RAPatton

She's the queen of the indie screen :) Well, was, till she went mainstream hehe. I recommend Fay Grim for recent work, and The House of Yes for disturbing but powerfully good older work. - Michael W. May

Awesome movie, posey is the icing on the cake. Just watched Broken English, too - Jason Kaneshiro

oh, and don't forget "party girl" ... Shwarma - Jason Kaneshiro

Awesome movie. - Benjamin Golub

Love parker posey... She is really trippy :) - Bindu Reddy

"we were so lucky. we were so lucky to have been raised amongst...catalogs." lol. and i love how they're both wearing braces. - edythe

Parker Posey is awesome! - Bren

I never realized that was Parker Posey - Lindsey Smith

My favorite movie of all time! Absolutely love Parker!! - Joyce Goh

Dion Almaer posted a message on Twitter

“Steve Yegge is back with "Business Requirements are BS" http://tinyurl.com/6gluwt”

August 12 at 8:59 am - Link

Nick Lothian, Adewale Oshineye and Atul Arora liked this

Short version: Customers don't know what they want, so you're better off building something for yourself, and make sure you have a clear idea of what you want when you do. (Inflate with flippant funny, salt with anecdotes to taste, serve warm.) - ⓞnor

Karen Padham Taylor posted a link

Olympic Medal Count Map - 2008 Beijing Olympics - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com

August 11 at 10:02 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Lyn, Tom Stocky, Alex Lomas, Lyndsey McGrath and 12 other people liked this

"Circles are sized by the number of medals that countries won in summer Olympic Games. Use the slider to view past Olympics, or click on a country to display a list of its medal winners." - Karen Padham Taylor via Bookmarklet

This is just amazing infoviz. The most telling elements to me are how much being the host country influences the number of medals you win (presumably a 'home court advantage' and a larger number of competitors), and how many more countries have been participating in the games in the last 20 years compared to previously. It's really amazing. - Kevin Fox

That's pretty damn cool. I thought 1936 was especially interesting. - Cyrus Lendvay

It's cool to see that as time passes, especially from 1988 on, there are a lot more countries winning medals. - tim

This is amazingly cool. I love when I can bend time and space to my will. - Jonathan Terleski

It should be possible to produce this with the Google visualization tools. I'd love to see this with a population size and/or GDP axis. - Nick Lothian

Benjamin Golub posted a message

“Dopplr is really smart; it looks at my Flickr account for photos taken during the time I told it I would be on vacation and displays them on that trips page in within Dopplr.”

August 11 at 11:00 am - Link

Michael Kuhn, Aaron Myers, Todd Harris, Deepak and 2 other people liked this

I am really liking Dopplr as well. I just started using it on the advice of a well traveled friend. I didn't know about the integration with flickr. - Mathew A. Koeneker

Always hearing good stuff about Dopplr. I'd use it if I went overseas more than once every 5 years :) - Neil Saunders

I'd say this is another testament to Flickr's API, too. They really got the ball rolling and in doing so have facilitated many new creative projects. - Todd Harris

bob posted a link

EXILED ONLINE - MANKIND’S ONLY ALTERNATIVE » War Nerd: South Ossetia, The War of My Dreams - By Gary Brecher

August 11 at 1:02 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Sean McBride, Sam Harmon, Jeremy Raines, John Lam and 11 other people liked this

"There are three basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin’ little war in Ossetia: 1. The Georgians started it. 2. They lost. 3. What a beautiful little war! Saakashvili just didn’t think it through. One reason he overplayed his hand is that he got lucky the last time he had to deal with a breakaway region: Ajara, a tiny little strip of Black Sea coast in southern Georgia. This is a place smaller than some incorporated Central Valley towns, but it declared itself an “autonomous” republic, preserving its sacred basket-weaving traditions or whatever. You just have to accept that people in the Caucasus are insane that way; they’d die to keep from saying hello to the people over the next hill, and they’re never going to change." - bob via Bookmarklet

nice read - Alex

Excellent commentary and superb antidote to the neoconservative propaganda currently flooding the MSM. Georgia's invasion of South Ossetia, which triggered this mess, was a big mistake. - Sean McBride

Paul Buchheit posted a link

Twitter / why the lucky stiff: when you don't create thing...

August 8 at 11:24 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Dread Pirate PJ, Andrew Bonventre, haron (ничего личного), Jason Wehmhoener and 19 other people liked this

"when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

mike seyfang posted an entry on Learning with the Fang

Speaking of Science

August 8 at 10:35 pm - Link

Nick Lothian liked this

Seb Paquet bookmarked a page on delicious

Stefano’s Linotype » Blog Archive » Peer Review vs. Citation Network Topology

August 7 at 9:32 am - Link

Nick Lothian and Michael Nielsen liked this

The use of citation networks as a ranking methods is not free from problems, but it’s, IMO, a vastly superior approach to scientific value discovery and would yield a much better service to the scientific community in general than the current peer review system and given the fact that the value of content found on the web is, in some fields, more valuables than what you find in expensive journals, I think the fate of those journals (at least in some research areas) is doomed and it’s just a matter of time before people’s research starts to be judged with different and way more objectively meaningful and less personally influenceable criteria. - Seb Paquet

Euan posted a message

“Double checking the social network portability issue. Is it really very hard? Answer is yes, definitely. Bad idea to do anything unilateral.”

August 6 at 7:52 am - Link

Nick Lothian, Cameron Neylon, Neil Saunders, Bora Zivkovic and 3 other people liked this

Is this something you could elaborate on a blog post ? :D - Pedro Beltrao

It would certainly help me if I wasn't recomending things that are difficult, impossible or dumb :) - Cameron Neylon

I wrote a little back in April: http://nicklothian.com/blog/20... - Nick Lothian

@Nick : nice. We were looking at bloom filters too. - Euan

@Euan - the bloom filter thing _seems_ like it should have potential. - Nick Lothian

DeWitt Clinton posted a link

Is OpenSearch on life support? - OpenSearch | Google Groups

August 4 at 1:17 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Hassan Ibraheem, accesine, Adewale Oshineye, Joshua Allen and 5 other people liked this

I got called out for letting the OpenSearch community languish a bit. So languish no more! Development getting rebooted over at http://code.google.com/p/opens.... - DeWitt Clinton via Bookmarklet

Woot! OpenSearch fans rejoice! =) - Brandon Paddock

Thanks for kicking me in the arse, Brandon. : ) - DeWitt Clinton

Simon Kahl posted a message on Twitter

“Looking forward to heading west tomorrow. @nlothian as soon as I find a computer up to it I will upload some pics of the trailer for ya”

August 2 at 10:55 pm - Link

Nick Lothian liked this

Has it held together well? - Nick Lothian

Lars Trieloff posted a link

Just Browsing » Mozilla Prism Update

July 30 at 1:24 am - via Mento - Link

Nick Lothian liked this

Mozilla Prism gets an API for creating more feature-rich SSBs. Allows creation of tray icons, dock badges, etc. - Lars Trieloff via Mento

Sam Pullara posted a message on Twitter

“ok, i admit it, spending 4 hours on this was entirely too long, but BOSS+CUIL= YUIL: http://sampullara.appspot.com/...”

July 30 at 1:14 am - Link

Christian Sonntag, Tad - just Tad, Donato (ricin), Mark Trapp and 9 other people liked this

4 hours, and maybe a little less that $31 million? Nice... - Nick Lothian

wow, just like Cuil - only with relevant results :) wonder how much Y! could get from MS for this - Adam Kazwell

Sam you rock, this was my first thought on seeing cuil, "someone could write something better using yahoo's search apis in an afternoon" - Jason Wehmhoener

"Searching enough web pages" - brilliant - Michael C. Harris

Don't take it down Sam! - Charlie Anzman

Michael Nielsen bookmarked a page on delicious

Kasparov versus the World

July 29 at 2:02 pm - Link

Todd Harris, Jen Dodd, NatBlair, Jo Vermeulen and 8 other people liked this

Kasparov: "It is the greatest game in the history of chess. The sheer number of ideas, the complexity, and the contribution it has made to chess make it the most important game ever played." - Michael Nielsen

I think that's possibly the most important piece I've read this year. It's the most convincing argument I've seen against the tragedy-of-the-commons, the sum-of-the-whole-can't-be-smarter-than-the-sum-of-its-parts meme. - Nick Lothian

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One of the best posts I've read in a long while. - DeWitt Clinton

Agreed, Nick. I love the tale of the power of a focused public, and Kasparov for being so magnanimous in victory. And I also went back and started replaying the game to understand Irina Krush and move 10. - DeWitt Clinton

Loved the post. I've always been fascinated by Chess masters like Kasparov. There's a great documentary about his career. Can't recall the title. Michael, I found a small typo here: "...an extraordinary young chess _played_ named Irina Krush." - Ricardo Vidal

Interesting. I see that this post is a year old. Thank you, Michael, for resurfacing that again. Cheers to the power of FriendFeed for making the serendipitous discovery possible. - DeWitt Clinton

Very cool, although I was very cheesed off to hear that Kasparov supports McCain over Obama! - Dion Almaer

Thanks all. Ricardo, thanks for pointing out the typo! - Michael Nielsen

Nick - you hit the nail on the head. It's important to have examples where large groups produce something that is the equal or better than what any individual can produce. - Michael Nielsen

This is essentially what I'm hoping will happen with people suggesting reactions we do to solve our Ugi precipitate problem http://precedings.nature.com/d... - Jean-Claude Bradley

These essays are nice appetizers for your book, I am looking forward to it! - Jo Vermeulen

Thanks for the great link, Jean-Claude! Somehow, I'd missed seeing that article previously. It's now on my to-read pile. - Michael Nielsen

The wikipedia article is great, too. It's quite clear that the world team struggled in the end game because they didn't have the analytical capacity the Kasparov did. However, it looks like the outcome would be different now, because we now have 7 piece endgame tables generated, which weren't available in 1999. Even ignoring their availability, it would seem to me much more likely now that the world team could bring too much raw computing power to lose that endgame. - Nick Lothian

Nick - I first heard about this game from the Wikipedia article. It's a beautiful article in my opinion - reads like a thriller - although I later discovered a few minor errors in it. To my shame, I was too lazy to correct them at the time, and now don't remember the errors :-( Check out http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~re... as well, which includes commentary from Krush. If you can find it, Kasparov's book is really interesting. I got a copy secondhand, I think from Amazon.com. - Michael Nielsen

http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~re... regarding the end game analysis is interesting. It appears that as they got deeper into the end game an increasing proportion of the effort was spent in technical, software related discussions regarding vote stuffing, non-responsive websites, etc... - Nick Lothian

The same was true, though in a different way, of Kasparov. His team (he was working with some other gradmasters) made increasing use of endgame databases and chess computers (including Deep Junior) as the game went on. - Michael Nielsen

Yes, but they didn't have the disadvantage of the meta-discussion syndrome, which all social software seems to fall into when stressed. Perhaps ultimately that was the winning advantage? - Nick Lothian

Bob Lee posted a message on Twitter

“Paul Tyma on NIO vs. IO: http://tinyurl.com/2m6nvr FWIW, one of his side projects handles ~1250 emails/sec w/ one server.”

July 28 at 3:18 pm - Link

Nick Lothian and Robert Cooper liked this

Sanjeev Singh posted a link

We are all tetrachromats

July 25 at 11:00 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Mario Romero, Darren Daz Cox, Erhan Erdogan, Derek Collison and 31 other people liked this

According to the article, our photoreceptors respond to four different wavelengths, but our lenses block the lower wavelengths (the shaded portions in the picture). Surgical replacement of biological lenses with more transparent ones might allow us to see into the UV A range. - Sanjeev Singh via Bookmarklet

FriendFeed is slowly discovering all the links that I've been collecting for my future blog post, “We are all color blind.” - Amit Patel

Show 16 more comments

This appeals to be in a bizarre fashion. - Jerry Welch

"Note that the above optical density is for a human lens of about 5 mm thickness. The optical density is proportional to the thickness of the lens. As will become apparent below, smaller animals have better ultraviolet visibility than humans because of their thinner lens. Larger animals have even less sensitivity in the ultraviolet and even blue regions for the same reason." - bob

And the fourth color look like pea soup? ;-) - Jim Norris

Yeah but I'm guessing the lens blocks UV A for a reason, which has something to do with keeping your retinas from being fried. Just a guess though ;-) - Karim

How would we process the data, though? (For that matter, how do X-chromosome heterozygous tetrachomats process the data?) Our retina and visual pipeline is pretty set up for trichromacy. - ⓞnor

nor, that's interesting, where could I learn more about "our retina and visual pipeline is pretty set up for trichromacy"? - Jason Wehmhoener

j1m probably has some more technical references, but I very highly recommend reading http://www.handprint.com/HP/WC... if you are at all into geeking out about the fundamentals of color. From http://www.handprint.com/HP/WC...: "Evolution could arrive at a more complex visual system, but it would require modifying a visual cortex specialized to receive and interpret the three cone outputs; adding a fourth cone would mean reengineering the brain as well." - ⓞnor

So has anyone had these new lenses installed? I thought that was a relatively common procedure. Maybe they use uv blocking replacements? - Paul Buchheit

I've heard of experiments where people (probably Army "volunteers") had their vision extended into near-UV, but with the predicted retina-burning results. - Gabe Schaffer

Cataract surgery and the use of replacement intraocular lenses has been around for a while. I am not sure, but I am under the impression that originally people were encouraged to wear sunglasses or UV-blocking lenses to block UV, though lately the replacement lenses seem to block UV (see http://archopht.ama-assn.org/c...). This is to prevent retinal damage. - Karim

There is a fascinating article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/scie... that confirms my suspicions that UV looks like the color white under a black light: whiter than white, tinged with blue or violet. If you have ever seen someone's clothes or teeth glowing under a blacklight, you might have an idea what being able to see into the near UV is like. - Karim

I am not of the opinion that a fourth cone would require re-engineering the brain, so much as it might involve co-opting the existing channels. UV might be perceived as a change in brightness (luminance) rather than a new color (chroma). - Karim

paul, egnor: the studies that this article refers to involved people who had their lense in one eye replaced. One of the investigators is himself akaphic and can see UV: http://starklab.slu.edu/humanU... Karim's link is good too. - Sanjeev Singh

@Karim, the problem is that the perception of brightness will continue to be needed for (a drum roll) actual brightness. - j1m

:-D good point, j1m. i guess i am thinking of UV looking "unnaturally" bright, glowing, the way the color white does under a blacklight. so the perception of UV would be of things being radioactive ;-) just a guess, mind you... - Karim

I think you might actually need to have one normal eye to see uv light: you'd need to compare the differences between the eyes and if your UV eye sees a whitish blue that the normal eye doesn't, then it's UV. - Sanjeev Singh

Well, think about how you see violet -- you don't need a violet-sensitive and a non-violet-sensitive eye, just a violet-sensitive cone, whose signal can be compared to a few non-violet-sensitive cones a few microns away from it. - j1m

From the sound of it, there is no UV cone, it's just that the regular cones are uv sensitive (though the blue more so), which is why it looks like a bluish white. - Paul Buchheit

The reason you can't "see" UV directly might be due to the processing circuitry, not the cones themselves. - Sanjeev Singh

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