Lazy Sunday Links
So, last night we had a ridiculously out of season snowstorm, which dropped almost a foot of snow on us over night.
Yes, I am writing this on Easter weekend. Yes, it is April.
And yet still I saw this when I looked out the window this morning:
The one upside of this is that I got to go out and spend an hour playing in the snow with Sarah. Based on the gigantic snow throne we constructed I conclude that she A) has some engineering tendencies, and B) is possibly a megalomaniac. Good times.
Now that she’s napping, after all that exertion, I will spend a few minutes closing some tabs with a little link post:
- Next time I’m in Montreal, I’m going to have to see if I can find this headstone.
- I keep hearing these “blogging is over” comments, but then I keep seeing these crazy theme blogs, like the guy who’s watching all the Criterion DVDs and blogging each one, or the guy who’s reading 2000AD from the beginning, in order, and blogging about it, etc. While it may be true that we’re past the peak for generic personal blogs (like this one1), I suspect that niche blogs are with us forever.
- I quite enjoyed reading Richard Dawkins’ take-down of postmodernism, cleverly disguised as a book review. I can’t wait to see how my wife’s PhD class (who seem to be currently under the novelty-glamour of the deconstructionist ideas) react to it.
- Have you LiveJournal users all seen Trustflow II? It looks at your friends, and their friends, and their friends, etc, and builds up a web of trust with you at the center. Then it tells you which people aren’t on your friends list that are within the web. The results for me are interesting: pretty much the first four levels of people are all Vhive-types that I “know”, but don’t have on my friends list. The rest of the list is still dominated by VHive people, but at the fifth level some local links show up, and some SF community stuff, and some Minneapolis friend stuff. Pretty cool tool, anyway.
- Scott Morse, some of whose original comic art is in my collection, just had a gallery show, and some of the original pieces, and some prints, are still for sale via the Web. If they are not sold yet by mid-next week (when I get some more disposable cash), I’m going to buy one of: The Inciting Incident of the Circle “T” Ranch War, Their War was Years Ago 1, or Their War was Years Ago 2.
- I am totally tempted to apply for this job, just for the name comedy value. I am certainly more than qualified.
- I saw this post about a house in Tennessee that combines some of my all-time desires, with the all-time desires of some of my poker friends. Me, I like the idea of a house with secret tunnels and huge secret complex under it, and a relatively distant emergency exit from the underground complex. Some of my friends2… well, they would see a different appeal.
- I love the weird little things that make the world more interesting than we sometimes think it is.
- I love interesting visualizations of complex data. Take, for instance, the housing prices of US homes over the last 100+ years. While the simple graph does a lot to tell you the story, the people at speculativebubble.com have gone a little further–they’ve used the data to create a railroad simulation with some old game software. Check it out… and make sure you stick around for the payoff at the end, where the final turn lets you look back over the rest of the track. It’s certainly an effective visualization for driving home the point they want to make.
- Which, by the way, I am not at all bored of yet.(back)
- Hey Smiley: check this out as well.(back)
Tags: art,blogging,Dawkins,economy,housing bubble,postmodern,sarah,trust,urban legends,visualization,weather
Kira
