happy chaos freedom machine

This is somewhat off-topic (as if I actually have a topic to stay on) but Stephen Colbert is a hero of mine, and this article is really quite fascinating. I agree with Jon Stewart’s comment in the article, about Colbert interviewing subjects while in character: “[The whole show] depends on Stephen’s ability to process information [...]

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 Over at Mutating Pictures, Philipp Lensman started wit a pool of 1000 randomly created images, and is asking people to rate how much each image looks like a face. He put the site up yesterday, and look how far it’s come. There’s also a forum at Google Blogoscoped, where technical details and the implementation  are [...]

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Fascinating chart over at Businessweek depicting online activity. It validates my instinctual reaction to the common criticism about the Web, especially in the late ‘nineties and early oughties – that the minority of people will want to be active creators. That was an age-biased view, born of the passivity bred into the boomers by mass [...]

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What I like best about 37Signals, poster child of the Web 2.0 “movement” because in an odd, tangential way, it captures the essence of the Internet-flavored gung-ho attitude that is fueling the trend. As a complete aside, check out the etymology of phrase gung-ho. Who knew that the most reproduced GI Joe figure was named [...]

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I’ve heard rumblings from some quarters about a return to the salad days of the ’90′s for the IT industry, this time with Open Source and Web 2.0 inflating the bubble. Setting aside the question of whether the dot-com bubble was something to which we’d actually want to return (it isn’t), the possibility of a [...]

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I am the product of two extremes – my father’s family only gets together once a decade, at most, and if they are in contact with one another in between those instances it is an occasion for maximum awkwardness, guilt and discomfort. My mother’s family has organized weekly teleconferences in order to plan for an [...]

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