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Poker players can pay each others' entry fees, then have them collude to help them win later (via the freakonomics blog)
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Ran into this just the other day. handy.
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One of the only ways I've seen to do a right/left alignment in CSS with dots.
A Whole Lotta Nothing
Matt Haughey's Personal Blog
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December 2005
December 31, 2005
links for 2005-12-31
The Genealogy of Math
I've never seen The Mathematics Genealogy Project until just now. It's pretty incredible, covering the professional history of almost 100,000 mathematicians. I did some searches on the math PhDs I know and they were all there. The math greats are there and they even offer posters of anyone's entire genealogy.
I love magnificent obsessions like this one -- that someone went to the trouble to create it and that they keep it up to date (one math geek I know just finished summer 2005 and he was there), eventually creating this IMDB.com of math.
December 30, 2005
Advice
As I've gotten older, I've noticed that I'm increasingly coming back around to old cliches and sayings -- stuff grandparents and parents and parents of friends' would tell me back when I was 15 and I never believed a word of it. Some of it is profound, life-changing stuff that I ignored all those years ago.
Then it dawned on me: maybe I've already gotten all the great advice I would ever need in a lifetime.
People from all walks of life and every age have at one time or another given me their life lessons that gave them some understanding of how the universe works. It's likely how one generation passes knowledge onto the next generation. The problem is I wasn't mature enough or smart enough at the time to recognize it or understand it. I'm hearing myself say things my grandfater would say, and it gives me pause. It's not the standard worry that I'm turning into my parents, but more a worry that I've let all of life's truths slip through my hands when I was younger and I'm just now starting to catch them and pass them on. I hope my hunch is correct -- maybe life isn't a journey to uncover new truths in far off places, but instead to simply gain enough to experience to understand what is all around you, all the time.
Of course, I've got to remind myself of this when I start handing out sage advice to toddlers. They'll be ignoring me until well after 2035.
December 29, 2005
Pave the Planet
I'm impressed with Google Earth. I hadn't totally got what was cool about it until I built my first Google Earth app earlier today. The documentation is pretty slight (it'd be nice if they simply broke down which elements are required and which ones are optional) but they have a good demo file you can simply copy.
After about an hour of hacking and I had a nice kml file with nearly 4200 points on it, direct from the MetaFilter user database. It's great that Google Earth launched the client with this robust API already in place.
The results are pretty cool. I've only offered lat/long values for a week or two, and already there are loads of people in far off places showing up. It's a good feeling to give the old globe a spin and see points all around, and to hear stories of people getting to know each other offline as a result.
December 28, 2005
Ten Years
In spring of 1995, while using a borrowed computer (I didn't own one myself) in the undergraduate lab, I noticed a new icon in the main window. It was a blue globe with a snake-like S shape around it. It was labeled Mosaic. It was an early version and you couldn't type addresses in the URL field, so I took to just navigating from the start page, which was some generic NCSA welcome page. It was difficult to get very far, but eventually I found all sorts of things that interested me.
In Fall of 1995, I had a BS degree under my belt but felt I needed to know more, so I started work on a Masters. My parents bought me the first computer I'd had in many years, and with a Netcom dialup at home, I began to explore. Soon after, I felt I could do more than simply read stuff online -- I wanted to create stuff as well.
About a week before christmas, I searched for HTML books and ended up buying Creating Your Own Netscape Web Pages for myself. On a lonely Christmas night, I cracked open the book at 11pm and began to read it while seated at my desk, in front of my computer. It was the only computer book I ever read every single page of, from start to finish, in a single sitting. It taught me HTML, the basics of FTP, Paint Shop Pro, and the Hot Dog Pro text editor.
There's this moment somewhere around 3am on December 26, 1995 that I can recall vividly. I've only had a handful of moments like this in my entire life. I'm sitting there writing code for a couple hours. A bunch of special words bounded by greater than and less than symbols -- stuff that seems meaningless. I press save, open a web browser, and suddenly it's a rich and colorful page with all sorts of stuff on it. My first web page wasn't a simple Hello World -- I had graphics, backgrounds, colors, and loads of links. It took a few tries to get just right, but when it was complete, I was transformed.
I recall a similar moment the first time I used two-point perspective in a 9th grade art class. You follow some rules and go through some motions that feel mechanical and suddenly you end up with art.
By 6am that morning, I was exhausted and went to sleep. Soon after that night I remember telling a friend that I wasn't sure I should be in grad school -- that maybe this new web thing was taking off and I could somehow make a living building websites. I finished grad school, but soon after I got to quit my first job and do just that. Follow my dream building websites.
It's now been ten years since that day and thanks to a mixture of luck, patience, and perseverance I'm in a wonderful place. I'm happy, content, and fulfilled. My personal and professional life are better than they've ever been.
And I'm still spending much of my day, every day, building web pages.
Most Improved, 2005
This is a long time coming, but I've really been enjoying Jalopnik the past few months. When Jalopnik and Autoblog and others like it launched, I was disappointed that these new car blogs were so boring. Cars are one of the most universal of hobbies, and you'd think it's easy to find someone nuts about it that could write. And yet, the first year of car blogs was a blur of warmed over press releases from Detroit and Japan. Yaawwwwwn.
At some point this year, Nick Denton roped in a superfreak car geek that sounds like he wrote for magazines or covered cars for a newspaper or something. His enthusiasm is infectious and his knowledge deep -- he loses me sometimes but for the most part it's still accessible for the average fan of cars. Me, I'm mostly into new car design and custom tuner cars, and the site doesn't disappoint these days. I'd go so far as to say it's the most dramatic turnaround I've seen in a blog, as it went from boring to must-read almost overnight by simply getting a new writer.
Slightly related -- the one thing I thought was annoying about the new author is the fixation on posting a silly car video of the day. They're usually a 30 second shaky short of some mulleted dork (the author calls them "hoons") trying to do a burnout. Sometimes they're funny. More often they're kind of boring. But sometimes they're incredible. I've come around on the "hoon" posts there too.
And while this is the intellectual equivalent of "Man Getting Hit By Football (in the nuts)", Redneck Surfing just might be the greatest hoon video ever uploaded. Watch it about twenty times like I did today to understand what I'm going on about. It's an instant classic.
December 26, 2005
links for 2005-12-26
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Reminder to self: swap these out for those ugly xml buttons
Yule Log
= MM_contentVersion;
} else if (navigator.userAgent && navigator.userAgent.indexOf("MSIE") >=0 &&
(navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Win") != -1)) {
document.write(
' \non error resume next \n' +
'MM_FlashCanPlay = (IsObject(CreateObject("ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash." & MM_contentVersion)))\n' +
' \n');
}
if (MM_FlashCanPlay) {
document.write(
'' +
' ' +
'' +
'');
} else{
document.write('
');
}
//-->
(plucked from the amusing login screen at gmail)
December 24, 2005
links for 2005-12-24
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ouch
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Want to buy one ticket, and see loads of back-to-back movies? Use this tool to see what plays back to back in your local theaters
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A music video made of flickr images, all CC licensed
December 23, 2005
You learn something new everyday
Let's say you take a trip out to your mailbox a few hundred yards away, and you know there are big packages in the box, and it's a downpour. So you grab an umbrella (knowing that true Oregonians never use umbrellas, but you make an exception for the sake of dry christmas presents). When you return to your front door with packages in hand, you place the soaking wet umbrella outside the front door to dry.
The next day, when you go out to a restaurant and it's been raining off an on, you take the umbrella, just in case, because you don't want the baby to get soaked while going to and from the car. The umbrella sits by your side for a couple hours while you eat. Then you head home, and on the way into the house, dump all the jackets and scarves and the umbrella on a chair.
Several hours later, around 11pm, you hear a ridiculously loud and strange noise, coming from the chair which is inside the house. The cats are confused. The sound comes and goes for the next ten minutes. It's natural, but also unnatural. It's not pleasant. It's quite loud, this sound coming from a chair in your house.
So here's the lesson: when you bundle your umbrella back up after it's been drying overnight, you might want to open it up and peek in real quick or you just might be carrying around a live tree frog for most of a day.
links for 2005-12-23
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mod_security and other useful pre-built modules for Apache on windows
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wow! half-price! what a bargain! and it goes with *everything*!
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badass old school rodney mullen style
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Cool designs and shop -- kind of like Threadless, except, you know, it's women's underwear.
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This is soooo fucking pre-ordered
December 19, 2005
One freaky year
According to the NYT, Freakonomics was the most blogged-about book of the year, which isn't too surprising considering how much I read about it on pretty much every blog that mentions books. It is impressive that it beat Harry Potter out this year, since everyone I know seemed to mention that book at least once on their blog as well.
I enjoyed Freakonomics in the audio version and then without really thinking about it, I kind of followed some of the advice and points made in the book in my own life.
We sold our first house and bought a new one this year and in the process learned that we really could do without a realtor, just as the authors described. We staged our old house ourselves, and pushed our realtor to get us on the weekly home tour. I took photos for our listing and helped write it, keeping in mind the lessons from the book and removed every empty phrase like "fabulous" and "wonderful" and replaced them with descriptive terms like "open" and "large". We did all of our new home shopping online and by canvassing the city and calling builders with works in progress. We found and bought our new house without any realtors involved at all. It was surprisingly easy -- whenever I was wondering what we were supposed to do at a stage in the financing/offer/escrow process, I could just punch up google and get all the info I needed. Google searches lead me to offer letter templates, legal ramifications for each document we signed, and how to find the best financing. While I like my realtor and consider her a personal friend, if we ever sell our new home, we'll do it ourselves and save a few grand next time around.
The other big takeaway from the book was that life insurance is another industry that only commanded high prices by hiding information. I actually got a great life insurance policy for myself using the site mentioned in the text, accuquote. It was lower than a couple estimates I got from small town agents, since accuquote seems to be a front for a zillion agents that can sell you a policy from any company.
A lot has been written about co-author Steven Levitt asking questions no economist ever has before, but I think his real gift is finding just the right dataset that teases out noise and gets at answers to impossible queries. Someone, somewhere has done a sociological survey of pretty much everything on earth, but few social scientists ever use the data outside those issuing the surveys -- but Levitt seems to somehow find them. I became a huge fan of the book because it rekindled my love of the scientific method and I hope the book inspires a generation of students to take an unconventional look at their area of study, ask impossible questions, then find the right dataset to help answer them.
December 18, 2005
links for 2005-12-18
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Wow. Now *that's* a garden shed.
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high-larious
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Awesome, fiona will love this.
December 17, 2005
December 16, 2005
links for 2005-12-16
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For the love of god, someone in the dental industry please try a few things Paul proposes here. Dentist visits are unbearable for millions.
December 15, 2005
Odd
Five undergraduate programs are being dropped: civil and environmental engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science, computer engineering and exercise and sports science.
Tulane University got rid of their Civil Engineering program in the wake of Katrina. Doesn't that seem odd? At the time when New Orleans needs to be rebuilt, the biggest university there dissolves the training for people that build things. I'm sure a lot of graduates helped build and rebuild the levees all these years.
links for 2005-12-15
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how to run powerpoint/keynote slides with a color ipod, just in case.
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Filed under things I should never need, but you never know: How to detect a hidden night vision camera in a room.
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nLite lets you streamline windows xp installs to the bare minimum of services and drivers
December 14, 2005
The zeitgeist
12/10/2005 - Saturday Night Live does a joke commercial on the complexity of the Medicare prescription drug plan, and the joke includes a bit about RSS feeds and podcasts.
12/12/2005 - Arrested Development episode has a joke where the twin brother Oscar is told he can't update "but i'm oscar dot com" and he replies with something like "ok, I was thinking of trying a podcast."
It still surprises me when I hear "blog" on TV without a definition attached. "Podcast" being used in jokes on mainstream shows kind of blows my mind.
December 13, 2005
links for 2005-12-13
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Nice site, somewhere between dictionary.com and urbandictionary, great design and amusing, detailed write-ups of slang words(tags: dictionary)
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You practically can't give VHS tapes away these days...
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holy crap
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the "fuck the south" guy on xmas, and the imaginary culture war
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This sounds like good news to me -- new compliations don't necessarily constitute new works worthy of extra pay to freelancers
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a nice tiny FF extension that does one thing I wish the browser did by default.(tags: extensions firefox)
December 11, 2005
links for 2005-12-11
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heh
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whole lotta santas
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heh. I've had that exact conversation over IM three times now.
Jingle Bells
"one horse, soap, and sleigh" is what I thought the lyric was until today.
Posted at 12:00 AM in Uncategorized | Permalink
December 10, 2005
links for 2005-12-10
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Whoa, cool.
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Australia is so cute and tiny
December 09, 2005
links for 2005-12-09
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from the looks of the screenshots, this is the MT plugin I always wanted. Looks totally kickass, letting you create your own custom UI for MT fields(tags: movabletype plugins)
December 08, 2005
links for 2005-12-08
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cnet buys the tag-based dating site consumating!
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You'd think the box sitting in your house that you paid money for would be yours to do with what you please. Apparently not, thanks to "trusted computing"
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Colbert again on Fresh Air, getting all meta about the Colbert Report. Amusing.
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Which is environmentally friendlier for xmas? Killing a real pine tree or buying a fake one?
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A non-PVC fake xmas tree
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My current favorite DIY show on TV.
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TiVo started as a smart home concept! And they whittled down 1600 names to arrive at "TiVo"
December 07, 2005
links for 2005-12-07
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handy reference
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155mph motorcycle hits the side of a car, all three people die instantly. Amazing how much force a motorcycle can carry.
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hmm, I bet GM could sell a few of these if they were available in the US
December 06, 2005
links for 2005-12-06
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Levitt on the recent claims that his abortion/crime study conclusions were false.
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best found photo ever. I would love to hear the backstory on this one.
December 04, 2005
links for 2005-12-04
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I want.
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Did I post this to delicious weeks ago? Insanely detailed economic study of whether or not a prius is worth the sticker price (though it doesn't matter to owners if you ask me)
December 03, 2005
links for 2005-12-03
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dial numbers directly from Address Book using this applescript
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heh
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depressing overview of politics today in the US
December 02, 2005
Subscription vs. piecemeal pricing of music
This week I actually suggested to someone that they avoid an iPod and instead buy something from Creative or iRiver. I know, I was shocked to hear myself say "well if you want unlimited music, no version of an iPod will work with that."
Here's the weird part -- at first I only suggested avoiding the iPod because they wanted to use Rhapsody, but the more I think about it, choosing to go with an unlimited music service seems like a smarter choice. I was glad to see Chris Anderson, editor of WIRED, talk about this last week as well.
For me and my maladjusted alpha geek friends, the idea of nearly unlimited music for the iPod is totally doable in the age of bittorrent, mp3 blogs, mp3 groups on usenet, and iTunes hacks like Ourtunes. We get almost all the music we want for free, and buy a few on the iTunes Music Store (and we go to rock shows and buy shirts and find other ways to repay the band) when we're not spending time ripping our large CD collections to high bitrate mp3 and swapping that with each other.
But for regular people that just use the internet for web information and email, locating tons of free music is a difficult task. When Yahoo or Napster or Rhapsody offers 1+ million songs for ~$10 a month, the iPod and iTunes Music Store starts to look like a ripoff in the long run.
This could be the undoing of Apple's cornering of the mp3 player market -- for a long time people have advocated a compulsory music license, where you pay $50 a year and you get all the music you want for free. The thinking behind it is that $50 x millions of broadband subscribers = more money than the music industry gets in album sales. And that's basically what these unlimited music services offer. Sure, you're merely "leasing" music because when you stop your membership, the music disappears, but all-you-can-download is what napster used to be back in the day, only this time it's crippled with DRM and there's a monthly fee. But it's still all the music you want, all the time, like napster used to be.
It seems like the music labels are always at war with Apple over pricing and I think I can see why. They prefer the subscription model where no one "owns" anything and files only work as long as you pay into it. Apple insists on letting people download copies (crippled with DRM yes, but you still get to keep the files and play them long after you pay for them) but you have to buy them ala carte, which can quickly get expensive for any music fan. And I think I see why the music industry wants to move to a subscription model -- selling albums or song downloads requires constantly coming up with new music to keep sales up. Sales are unpredictable without a constant stream of new stuff to buy, but if you get every listener on a subscription plan, that's money in the bank you can count on every month, regardless of whether or not Sting or Coldplay or 50 Cent ever do another album. Heck, most subscribers would still be paying ten bucks a month to hear old Steve Miller band tracks, as the back catalog would be the main draw in a subscription-based music business instead of the newest stuff.
Maybe I'm finally realizing that if I had to legitimately pay piecemeal for all the mp3s I've ever owned, I'd be spending thousands of dollars a year instead of the couple hundred I spend at the iTMS. Having unlimited downloads of over a million songs starts to sound pretty attractive at only ten bucks a month.
(totally weird sidenote: in my recollection, the big proponents of compulsory music licenses come mostly from the copyfight world but everyone I know from there uses an iPod)
Posted at 12:00 AM in music | Permalink | Comments (12)
December 01, 2005
AVIs worth downloading
I've enjoyed a bunch of movies/shows in the past couple weeks and figured I might as well share. I like to watch a lot of documentaries and I like small films that never play where I live that I have to remember to catch up with later.
I love watching behind-the-scenes movies on the craft of comedy (I loved Comedian a few years ago). The Comedians of Comedy (only available as a rental from Netflix but it's also on Showtime now) and The Aristocrats were both great glimpses into the mind of comedians.
Murderball, Mad Hot Ballroom, and Rize followed the classic documentary formula of showing a world the viewer never knew, and following the subjects of the story through a competition. All had their strong points but if I had to choose one, I'd say Murderball was my favorite.
On the TV front, I have to eat my words and agree with Michael that The Office has reached a level the original series did. The last couple episodes have been fantastic and Steve Carrell is as unwatchable as David Brent was in season two of the BBC series. My other favorite TV show right now is My Name Is Earl. I love anything Jason Lee does, but I really think he's hit a groove on this one. The stories aren't always tight but every week but there's always one moment that reaches the genius of something you might see on Arrested Development. And finally, Drawn Together on Comedy Central is really pushing the censorship limits. Every episode this season leaves me dying with laughter while at the same time horrified that they got the jokes onto TV.
Hi, I'm Matt Haughey and this is my blog. I created MetaFilter, co-created Fuelly, started many other sites. I also ride and race bikes. I am battling a benign brain tumor currently but I'm winning. Some kind strangers wrote some nice things about my life at Wikipedia. You can always contact me via email at matt@haughey.com or give me a ring at (503) 465-4522.
