Erik’s Blog

The other day, I was reading this Slashdot article about a study personally commissioned by Dilbert author, Scott Adams, to survey 500 economists about the economic policies of McCain and Obama. The results of the study are somewhat interesting; the most interesting part being how honestly Adams dealt with the inherent bias in such studies.

Even more interesting to me were two particularly perceptive comments left on Slashdot. While I have not verified that their central theses are correct, I highly suspect that they are.
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I just had a “Wow!” moment while chatting with a friend who made the comment “Isn’t technology amazing?”, or something similar. So I evaluated what technology was doing for me at that instant. I was, simultaneously:

1. Chatting with a friend over Google Talk using a Jabber-compatible client (iChat)
2. Viewing the screen of a coworker on another continent
3. Having a VOIP telephone conversation with said coworker
4. Hosting a development web server for another coworker to make some database updates to
5. Downloading and installing an operating system upgrade for my iPhone
6. Downloading, via BitTorrent, two albums (that I already own, Mr. RIAA!)
7. Streaming live video from a helicopter flying over Houston during the attack of Hurricane Ike

All without peaking much over 300 kibibytes per second of bandwidth. Pretty amazing.

I had a Twitter Moment this afternoon. It was communication that would not have taken place on any other communication platform, but Twitter made it work. For several months now, I’ve been following the Bad Astronomy blog. I visited it several years go when investigating the prime "skeptic" websites (Bad Astronomy has long been the best source of reason against the cultural tragedy that was that stupid FOX TV special that started the moon landing hoax theories), and again when I was a regular listener to Astronomycast, where they would sometimes talk to Phil Plait.

Phil Plait is the guy that runs Bad Astronomy, and he’s awesome. Think of your favorite science teacher, that one that was so enthusiastic about the subject that you kind of wondered if he should be in a straitjacket, but that his enthusiasm was so infectious that the entire class got excited about the material. That’s Phil Plait, except that when he’s not out energizing student bodies and attending geeky sci-fi conventions, can reach millions with YouTube and his blog. (more…)

Last December, I participated in an international blogosphere Sandwich Party, put on by two lovely hostesses, Elsa and Jane, in which all the participants made and ate a sandwich and photo-blogged the process. This concept may seem very strange, but I am absolutely certain that this kind of thing will become more and more prevalent in the coming decade: strangers from around the globe banding together via the internet to participate in a creative project.

Well, the second Sandwich Party is this weekend, and I have prepared and consumed my entry. My regular readers won’t be surprised by what they find at the bottom of this post, but perhaps some of the other Sandwich Partiers that happen by will.
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The other day, someone found my blog from google.bg. Rather than think, "Oh, that’s Bulgarian Google. I know someone who is moving to Bulgaria," the first thought that I had was, "Hey, lowercase ‘bg’ has a rotational ambigram equivalent!" For those of you that are not typeface junkies and haven’t read Angels and Demons, an ambigram is a word that, when written down, has some symmetry. It can be mirror symmetry, like "MOM", where the left side is the mirror image of the right, or "BOID", where the top is the mirror image of the bottom. Or it can be rotational, where the word reads the same way if you rotate it 180º. What follows is all about rotational ambigrams.

So I challenged myself to figure out what the rotational ambigram of "bg" was without rotating a piece of paper. I’m rather disappointed to say that, although my brain had immediately recognized that there was one, I went though several guesses involving "p" and "d" before figuring it out. The answer, is, of course, "6q". And it still took me another hour to realize that "bg" is just a slight variation on the most famous numerical rotational ambigram of all. (more…)

You may have noticed some weirdness on this blog this week. On Monday evening, some of my coworkers, for solid business reasons, had to reinstall the server this blog runs on. They backed up the database, reinstalled the operating system, restored the database, and brought the blog back up. The only real problem my blog experienced was with the character encoding of the database. The odd Spanish characters like "ñáéíóú" weren’t showing up properly. Today I managed to fix it, and there were only a couple comments from Tuesday and Wednesday that were lost. Below I’ll share a few interesting things that happened throughout the process.
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Google is really funny sometimes, mainly because it provides an unbiased algorithmic mirror of society. While chuckling about people that find my blog by asking google 20-word complete sentences, I was going to run a search, for the sheer irony of it, for "Should I search with complete sentences?" But the suggestions that popped up distracted me. People are seriously asking Google questions about how to lead their lives in the first person!
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Finally, some competition for TinyUrl! TinyUrl provides one of those services that is so useful that you slap yourself for not thinking of it first. You give TinyUrl a long web address, like “http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/blog/” and they shorten it. The way they shorten it is to generate a unique code which they store in their database with your url. Then when someone goes to their website with the code (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/5c8tsq) it will look up the original url in the database and forward you there.
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During the recent Twitter outages, I checked the Twitter Status Blog a few times. I noticed that it was running on a platform called Tumblr, so I investigated a little further. Here, I plan to explain what Tumblr is, why its creators think it’s useful, what you can do with it, and what I’ve decided to use it for.
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I’ve been wanting to try my hand at writing a Greasemonkey script for a while. For those of you that don’t know, Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on that lets you run any javascript that you want as if it were part of the web page you are viewing. The main point of this is to modify the document content somehow to make the page more to your liking (removing ads, adding useful buttons, etc.). The only site that I use very often that has a fairly wide selection of Greasemonkey scripts available for it is Flickr. So, without further ado, I present you with my script…
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