General

For the last several years, I, like almost all of my nerd brethren, have set aside their blogs and moved their rants, raves, quips and puns over to Twitter. When I first moved over to Twitter, I fell in love with the novelty of the 140 character limit. It felt like a Hemingway master class in brevity. It forced me to refine my thoughts and to make them punchy.

However, unlike Hemingway, Twitter discourages nuance and subtlety. Because the entire thought must be limited mostly to one sentence, you are rewarded for brutal simplicity. I’m coming to the realization that nuance and subtlety are ignored of at our own peril. Personally, I want to take a bit more time to work out my thoughts even if no one sees them.

Generally, I avoid joining protests, but occasionally there are ideas so bad that I can’t stay away.  Such is the case with the Protect IP Act (PIPA) which is coming up before the Senate next week.  The goal of protecting intellectual property is certainly a laudable one, but the means to achieve that goal must not come at the expense of the 1st amendment, nor should it fundamentally weaken the technological structure of the Internet.  The Protect-IP bill does all of this with a vague and poorly thought-out bill.

Literally unbelievable footage of the 2005 Japanese Yo-Yo Champion.

[Via: 2005 Yo-Yo Champion]

Here’s a fun little optical illusion for this Thursday morning:

Pacman Optical Illusion [Via: hoboclips]

I sure wish I had the courage and skill to drive like this:

Here’s an interesting little article about a classical Greek computing device that was discovered around 1900:

At the beginning of the 20th century, historians were shocked to learn that Greek thinkers had built a rather sophisticated analog computer in the neighborhood of 82 B.C. and then, astonishingly, left no record of its existence.

[Via: Interesting Thing of the Day: The Antikythera Mechanism]

I’ve always been fascinated with knowledge that has been made and then lost for centuries. I remember seeing a great documentary by Nova on the history of the Archimedes Palimpsest in which he toys around with many of the concepts of integral calculus some 2000 years before Newton and Leibniz. Ah, it just breaks your heart to think of the knowledge lost of the numerous fires of the ancient libraries.

I’ve signed up for a neat dual purpose service called AudioScrobbler. Essentially, it tracks every song you play on your local machine, uploads them to their server and builds a musical profile of your taste. They then use that information to sell to record companies to help them market their new music to the appropriate listeners. They do that through a great little radio station tied in called last.fm which, once you have a nice profile built up it really does a great job of introducing you to new music that doesn’t drive you completely nuts.

I’m unforgivably late on this post. However, my step-father, Mark Price, has a play about Edgar Allen Poe entitled Le Corbeau that is currently being produced here in Oklahoma City by the Oklahoma City Community College.

It is a bizarre and poignant tale of Poe’s last days when he is visited by those he has loved and lost along with, for good measure, the devil. It is an ambitious project that I’ll be extremely happy to see performed.