Links

Things I run across that I find to be interesting, but might not have the time or inclination to craft a fuller post around it. Generally, short little “go here, look at this, isn’t it neat?” posts.

Darwinian Poetry

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First off, a disclaimer: in general, poetry is just not my thing. The only poet I’ve ever really enjoyed reading is e. e. cummings, very rarely has any other poetry caught my eye.

That said, the Darwinian Poetry project that Chris Boese mentioned caught my eye, and sounds like a really fun little experiment. So, what’s Darwinian Poetry?

Ok, here’s the idea: starting with a whole bunch (specifically 1,000) randomly generated groups of words (our “poems”), we are going to subject them to a form of natural selection, killing off the “bad” ones and breeding the “good” ones with each other. If enough generations go by, and if the gene pool is rich enough, we should eventually start to see interesting poems emerge.

The cool part is that YOU are the arbiter of what constitutes “good” and “bad” poetry. Once you start, you will be presented with two poems. In all likelihood they will both be abysmal pieces of nonsensical garbage. That’s ok. All you have to do is read them both and pick the one you find more appealing, for whatever reason. Your decision might be based on a single word that you happen to like. It doesn’t matter. Just pick whichever one strikes your fancy.

Once you choose a poem, your vote will be recorded and two more poems will appear. Keep doing this for as long as you like, and definitely come back frequently.

Over time the poems picked by you, and I hope by thousands of other people, will interbreed and more and more interesting poems will emerge. It could take a while. Weeks…months…I don’t know. It all depends on how many people participate, and how often.

The funny thing is, after clicking through a few, I’ve seen some that are entirely nonsensical, and others that rank right up there with some of the “official” poetry I’ve read.

But then, given my aforementioned views on poetry, that may not be saying much. ;)

Hoaxing Bambi

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The jury’s still out on this one, but I’d be willing to bet that the Hunting for Bambi ‘business’ (in which men dress up in camo, grab paintball guns, and go running through the woods ‘hunting’ naked women) is nothing more than an elaborate spoof. While most media reports have been long on hype and short on investigation, the Urban Legends Reference Pages are extremely skeptical.

We’re still investigating, but we’d be quite surprised if this scheme was hatched as anything but an attempt to sell videos. (After all, \$19.99 tapes and DVDs, and not \$10,000 hunts, are the product advertised on the site’s opening page.) Our estimation is that the whole “hunt” concept was a phony promotional dog-and-pony show staged for credulous reporters, but now that Hunting for Bambi has attracted plenty of free publicity from the media, they’re attempting to make the concept work for real.

Always On

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The ubiquity of technology in the lives of executives, other businesspeople and consumers has created a subculture of the Always On — and a brewing tension between productivity and freneticism. For all the efficiency gains that it seemingly provides, the constant stream of data can interrupt not just dinner and family time, but also meetings and creative time, and it can prove very tough to turn off.

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Some people who are persistently wired say it is not uncommon for them to be sitting in a meeting and using a hand-held device to exchange instant messages surreptitiously — with someone in the same meeting. Others may be sitting at a desk and engaging in conversation on two phones, one at each ear. At social events, or in the grandstand at their children’s soccer games, they read news feeds on mobile devices instead of chatting with actual human beings.

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These speed demons say they will fall behind if they disconnect, but they also acknowledge feeling something much more powerful: they are compulsively drawn to the constant stimulation provided by incoming data. Call it O.C.D. — online compulsive disorder.

The New York Times article The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive? describes perfectly something I’ve been noticing all over the place, creeping up for a few years now — and something that I hope I’ll never fall prey to.

This actually ties in to some of my earlier rants about cell phone usage (and rudeness). Everywhere I go, people are constantly so obsessed with being in touch at all times with everyone and everything possible, that the real world practically ceases to exist for them. At the very least, it becomes far less important to them than any of their gadgets, which is my primary frustration. Conversations with someone standing right in front of you are suddenly interrupted for a cell phone’s ring, or a PDA’s beep, or any number of other electronic distractions, and suddenly the person who’s right there becomes secondary to checking the gadget to see what the beep is for.

When did it become so easy to blatantly shrug off real people for e-mail, pager beeps, or any number of other online distractions? And why do so many people accept it so easily? It drives me up the ever-loving wall when I’m being set aside for some gadget, and I make a concerted effort never to do that to others.

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Linky love

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After getting a comment from Iki about the Homeland Security Chokers, I wandered over to her site (er…his site? I think Iki’s a ‘she’, though, this being the ‘net, Iki could be a secret super-evolved marmoset [which, incidentally, would probably be really cute] and I’d never know) and noticed that I’d been chosen as Iki’s Aortal site of the week (you can see the link midway down the sidebar)!

I thought that was fairly cool, and, never being one to let a good deed go unpunished, I wanted to promote sending a little traffic Iki’s way, too. So, here you go Iki — with my readership, you might get, oh, three or four more hits from this! ;)

And for what it’s worth, I think Entertainment Weekly temporary tattoos could be the new trend for the summer season.

Harry Potter Uno

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Ooers — there’s a Harry Potter Uno game that looks really cool! I found this review from sirriamnis:

Game Review: Harry Potter Uno is more vicious and high-scoring than the normal Uno game. This is due in part to:

Draw 2s are now Draw 3s.

There are two new cards, the Howler which is wild and will let you see all of another player’s hand (Ok, technically they’re supposed to shout out their entire hand, but with the sizes of the hands we were accumulating last night, not really practical) and the Invisibility Cloak card, also wild, which lets you cancel the action of any card played on you like Draw 3s, Draw 4 Wilds, Reverses, Skips, what have you.

I think the Howler contributes most to this. As it was used multiple times to let us see what an Uno-ed player’s remaining card was, and then we heaped on the new cards with glee.

We had some massively big scoring hands last night. But a good time was had by all.

I’m ordering one for me right now…

BlogShares (what's the point?)

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I just got an e-mail from Blogshares telling me that I’d been given 50 shares of The Book of FSCK as Jonas empties his portfolio. This gives me a cash balance of \$1,106.43, and my portfolio totals \$152,415.64 with shares in four blogs (two of which are mine). The funny thing is, I really haven’t got the faintest clue what all that means.

I signed up for BlogShares a few months ago, when it first appeared on the weblog scene. At the time, I didn’t bother making any sort of announcement about it — I just added the BlogShares button to my site, figuring that I’d come back to it later and figure it all out. The thing is, since then, I’ve more or less just ignored it — I’ve stopped in a time or two and poked around at my statistics, but little to none of them ever made much sense to me. So, I just kept ignoring it.

End result? Not the foggiest! My share price seems to have been fairly stable, though my valuation has been bouncing up and down drastically. Why? Beats me. It’s all voodoo, as far as I can tell. Kirsten and D have both given me a bit of advice from time to time, but none of it ever really sunk into my head. Guess it’s a good thing I don’t try to play the real stock market, huh? ;)

Jonas seems to be pulling out due to the introduction of artefacts. What they are or what they do to the game, though, I can’t tell you, the explanation made just as much sense to me as the rest of this whole thing.

I guess for now, I’ll just keep ignoring it. It doesn’t seem to be helping or hurting me — it’s all funny money, anyway — and it gives me something to poke at when I’m bored.

Hm.

\<poke>

\<poke>

Nope. Still clueless.