"The game is also more than happy to bribe players for participating in its viral spread: cute lonely animals will show up on your farm periodically and as a player you face a dilemma in sentencing them to virtual abandonment and death unless you post on your Facebook wall that you need one of your friends to start playing Farmville and "adopt" the adorable little self-promoter. "
- bob
True - these things are popular and addictive, but hardly social and you don't learn anything. (And I would have said so as a comment on the blog post, but woo-wee that's a lot of information they want for a registration!)
- Ciaoenrico
I'd have not problem sentencing an IMAGINARY animal to the death chamber. It's make believe! Then again, I don't spend my time playing these silly time wasting games either....
- Jeff P. Henderson
Nice review. Now I don't have to figure out what Farmville is :)
- Peng-Toh
"One unnamed “prominent media executive” leaned toward Auletta at the 2007 Google Zeitgeist Conference and whispered a rhetorical question in his ear: What real value, he wanted to know, was Google producing for society? Wait. What real value? Come now, my prominent executive friend. Have you not glanced at Street View in Google Maps? Have you not relied on the humble aid of the search-box calculator, or checked out Google’s movie showtimes, or marveled at the quick-and-dirtiness of Google Translate? Have you not made interesting recherché 19th-century discoveries in Google Books? Or played with the amazing expando-charts in Google Finance? Have you not designed a strange tall house in Google SketchUp, and did you not make a sudden cry of awed delight the first time you saw the planet begin to turn and loom closer in Google Earth? Are you not signed up for automatic Google News alerts on several topics? I would be very surprised if you are not signed up for a Google alert or two."
- j1m
from Bookmarklet
"...Have you not searched? Because, let me tell you, I remember the old days, the antegoogluvian era. It was O.K. — it wasn’t horrible by any means. There were cordless telephones, and people wore comfortable sweaters. There was AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves..."
- j1m
Am I the only person who absolutely despises Knuth's "Computer Modern" font? I don't know what it is about it, but it just looks awful to me. And I'm one of those people who used TeX for everything including drawing finite automata and analytic tableaux back in college.
- Jim Norris
I'm with you, Jim. That's why, following the book _TeX Unbound_, I used other fonts in my LaTeXed thesis. From the colophon: "I used mathinst to make a mathematical font family of Monotype Bembo Semibold (from Agfa-Monotype), MathTime (from Y&Y), Chantilly (from Softmaker, similar to Gill Sans), Typewriter (from the Electronic Font Foundry), and a few others, with which I typeset this dissertation."
- Ruchira S. Datta
I always had \usepackage{times} in my LaTeX documents.
- Tudor Bosman
Times is almost as bad though. At one point I figured out how to use Adobe Garamond, but it was kind of flaky.
- Jim Norris
I didn't like Computer Modern or Times. I used Century Schoolbook for my stuff, I think (\usepackage{newcent}).
- Amit Patel
I heard that real-estate prices are going up like crazy in Argleton. A supply/demand issue ;)
- Henner Zeller
Are you thinking of moving there? Or just visiting?
- Jim Norris
Not me - but my sack person avatar seeks for a home in Little Big Argleton. I wish him good luck - maybe in that universe there are places to live there.
- Henner Zeller
I liked this part: ---Users specify high-level desires: *“99%ile latency for accessing this data should be <50ms” *“Store this data on at least 2 disks in EU, 2 in U.S. & 1 in Asia”
- Ahmet Alp Balkan
I confess I don't understand the "Bayesians against discrimination!" sign. As Ng and Jordan have shown, Bayesians can make good use of both discriminative and generative methods.
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
"Support vector machines" is my favorite sign :)
- Simon
"So taken is the fashion world by Tavi, who describes herself as 'tiny dork that sits inside all day', that newly relaunched style bible Pop magazine placed her on the cover of their latest issue."
- ௸ (k2g)
from Bookmarklet
I wonder how she got the name (never heard Tavi as a jewish name).
- ta√i
It rejected advice to hire retired generals to curry favor with the agencies and hired young government analysts frustrated by working with slow-footed technology.
- Gregor J. Rothfuss
"The new research suggests that the stomach tells the brain when to eat and that establishing a regular schedule of meals will regulate the stomach’s release of ghrelin. “If you eat all the time, ghrelin secretion will not be well controlled,” said Silver, the paper’s lead author and the principal investigator of the study. “It’s a good thing to eat meals at a regularly scheduled time of day.”"
- ௸ (k2g)
from Bookmarklet
All yellow in front of my house and red if I head your way.
- Louis Gray
They started doing this a couple of weeks ago. Very useful in figuring out traffic patterns especially in the PA/Menlo areas where traffic can get intense.
- Mark Interrante
And six or so major thoroughfares in DC as well. But their data is still pretty poor, and estimated times between locations need DOUBLING during poor DC rush hour time.
- derikp
"Recently Google has been slamming locksmith spam so hard it appears to me that the situation is going to the other extreme." good work guys :)
- ௸ (k2g)
from Bookmarklet
We only had a 1 year lease for the old office and we managed to get this new space with 2 months free rent, so we moved before the 1 year was up. Bloomspot (the startup we were incubating) are still in our old space.
- Jess Lee
Dang. I wish we were in MTV with everyone else!!! :)
- Elad
I don't believe peach beer is a celebration of anything. Walk yourselves down to the Tied House. ;)
- Cristo
I like this one in the first comment: "My strategy: Buy problem books instead of text books!" I heartily agree..
- Daniel Swan
I have spent nearly 2/3 year to study Walter Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis, and resolved almost all the exercises; but another 1/3 to attack Hungerford's Algebra, where I got stuck since then. I haven't been doing math for long. Seems I shall try it now? Thanks, Michael!
- Juvenn Woo
this would allow the setting of negative nominal interest rates. about time some country does this.
- Gregor J. Rothfuss
Interesting tidbit: "Nevertheless, the country remains a wholeheartedly cash-based consumer society. Currency in circulation is about 16 per cent of its GDP, compared with the levels of 2 to 3 per cent in most developed countries."
- ta√i
Dream: some disaster had happened and people were liveblogging it on friendfeed. Passing around post-its with data. I joined in late and was made to read Bret and Jim's rules for how to liveblog things. Post-it with rules #18 and #19 was missing and I had to walk back to the city to read it but then I woke up. No joke!