May 2007
40 posts
“Other coping strategies by agents include entering phantom bookings — in...”
– “Bumped Fliers and No Plan B”, on the practice of overbooking airline flights
“It pains me that many children now grow up eating little besides golden-brown...”
– David Kamp, “Don’t Point That Menu at My Child, Please”
“There is a fundamental shift in rules from manual-based work (where you follow...”
– Seth Godin, Who should you hire? (which goes on to make a point that I do not fully agree with)
“…Americans who returned a product that was too complicated for them had...”
– James Surowiecki, “Feature Presentation”
Holovaty receives a Knight Foundation grant →
He will be leaving the Washington Post and “founding a Web startup, EveryBlock, that focuses on making local news and information useful.”
“It dawned on me that there are more reporters covering the Sox, just one...”
– William Arkin, If Only War Reporting Were More Like Sports Reporting
24 hours of flickr, closed
This is disappointing. Flickr was running an event and invited submissions of photos taken on 05-May-2007. I was going to post one of the photos I took that day. They had said that submissions would be accepted until 21-May-2007, so I figured I would have until midnight ET (or perhaps midnight GMT or midnight PT) to submit a photo to the pool. Not so.
Flickr decided that no more submissions...
“Novelty plus dread equals overreaction.”
– Bruce Schneier, Rare Risk and Overreactions
Indian Mangos Reach New York →
[Update to this earlier post]
“The first 100 boxes of Alfonso mangos finally arrived at Patel Brothers yesterday, but were sold in a flash. However, another shipment is expected tomorrow. The store’s located on 74th street, near the Jackson Heights subway stop. A dozen mangos are retailing for $35.”
$35/12 mangoes = $2.92 per mango, which is less than I expected, given the...
“It is possible to beat the market consistently with investment decisions based...”
– Customer Satisfaction and Stock Prices: High Returns, Low Risk, as reported on Consumerist
“Because the honeybee colony (enterprise) has permanently continuous disease...”
– Dan Geer on monoculture vs. diversity, “The Evolution of Security: What can nature tell us about how best to manage our risks?”, ACM Queue, April 2007 [via Schneier]
Google Experimental Search →
Google’s Universal search results might be the big news, but the “experimental” search views here present some interesting perspectives on search results. I especially like the timeline view.
“…the gap between “scratching your own itch” in free software...”
– Andy Oram discussing the ideas of Fred Brooks, in “The desktop I’d like to see”
“Either way, [the patent] cost us time and money, bought us nothing but...”
– Mark Pilgrim, “Outrageous”
Flatland: Inhabiting Two Dimensions →
“…what would it be like to share a four-story, clear vinyl tenement no wider than your shoulders?”
What’s on Sale There? Confusion, but It’s Cheap →
Art installation in Lower Manhattan. From the article, “The storefront repeats five times, like a hiccup in reality’s hard drive, a little crimp in the space-time continuum secreted away on Maiden Lane between a florist’s shop and a Dress Barn.”
“
all ubiquitous systems should default to harmlessness.
ubiquitous systems...”
– Five ethical guidelines for the design of ubiquitous systems, from notes on Adam Greenfield’s keynote talk at the Pervasive 2007 conference
“The hard “k” often forces the face to smile (say...”
– Richard Wiseman, A quirky look at our quirky species, New Scientist
I like Tricks of the Trade, a blog which presents a brief tip each day related to a certain role or professions. I am glad to see the blog back after a hiatus, and also glad to see that it has a full content RSS feed instead of truncated content in the feed (oftentimes, a tip’s last few words would be cut off in the truncated feed). I am certainly not about to unsubscribe.
However, this...
“It seems that most people and organizations have two modes online, silent or...”
– Five ways to build and defend your reputation online
“The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the...”
– Richard Parsons, CEO, Time Warner, at a cable industry conference [via O’Reilly Radar]
“The businessman wants to create something for everyone, which leads to products...”
– Robert Brunner, former director of industrial design for Apple, quoted in “The Secret of Apple Design”
The Five-Second Rule Explored, or How Dirty Is... →
“…slices of bologna and bread left for five seconds took up from 150 to 8,000 bacteria. Left for a full minute, slices collected about 10 times more than that from the tile and carpet, though a lower number from the wood.”
Use Copilot for free on Sunday, May 13 →
“Why not fix your mom’s computer?” asks Joel Spolsky, and announces that FogCreek’s remote tech support product/service Copilot is free for Mother’s Day, May 13, 2007.
“A huge portion of our lives (as marketers, as consumers, as voters, as citizens)...”
– Seth Godin, “Longer and shorter”
Next Google NYC Speaker: Chris DiBona on May 16th →
“…Chris DiBona, Google Open Source Programs Manager, will talk about ‘A Year of Open Source at Google’.” I filled out the RSVP form and the acknowledgment email I received said I was signed up for the talk on April 5th (the date of the last Google NY talk). I emailed Google about this problem.
Slashing Subjective Time →
Tog: “JetBlue is a company that understands subjective time. American Airlines is not.” He then goes on to discuss how to make web apps more like JetBlue.
Seeing through walls - viewing LCD monitors... →
Like Van Eck Phreaking but for LCD monitors: observing a monitor’s image remotely by “tun[ing] into the radio emissions produced by the cables sending a signal to the monitor”
Yahoo To Shut Down Yahoo Photos In Favor Of Flickr →
“Yahoo is not forcing transition to Flickr - instead, users are being given the option of choosing among a number of top photo sharing sites. If you are a current Yahoo! Photos user, you will be given the option to export all your photos into Flickr (a one-click process) or you will be able to export to a few other services such as Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly…. ...
Cherenkov Radiation →
“…The blue glow is created by the Cherenkov Effect which describes the electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle, giving off energy, moves faster than light through a transparent medium. The temperatures of the capsules are as high as 330 degrees Fahrenheit…” [via BoingBoing]
“Thanks to the Long Tail and to competition and to a billion websites and to busy...”
– Seth Godin, Reaching the unreachable
Humans [are] hot, sweaty, natural-born runners →
“humans likely practiced persistence hunting, chasing a game animal during the heat of the day, making it run faster than it could maintain, tracking and flushing it if it tried to rest, and repeating the process until the animal literally overheated…”
Pogue: "In-Flight Annoyances"
I hear you, Mr. Pogue, and I wonder the same thing myself, sometimes.
Indian mangoes now legal in US →
“Since India first applied to ship mangoes to the United States in 1989, the fruit has been barred because it can harbor the mango seed weevil, a pest absent from North America. A solution emerged in January 2006, when the Agriculture Department allowed the importation of produce treated with low doses of irradiation to kill or sterilize insects…” Now to try to find some in...
The Great Package Race, 2007 →
The Georgia Institute of Technology Supply Chain & Logistics Institute sent packages to various far-flung destinations (e.g. Tikrit, Iraq) via UPS, FedEx, and DHL. Their findings: DHL won the competition by delivering first to 3 locations and “a close second” to the other 2. [via Consumerist]
How soon before today’s xkcd (a clever and amusing map of online communities) ends up on the Strange Maps blog?
[Update: 23 days later, it has hit Strange Maps]
“You can’t annoy someone into liking your brand.”
– Harley Manning, Forrester Research (in “Just Cancel the @#%$* Account!”)