Plaidophile

As part of my ongoing crusade to get Google out of my life as much as possible, I have switched my search engine to DuckDuckGo. It is mostly pretty good (and a lot easier to do in Firefox by installing the search plugin), although there are still a few rough edges.

One of the more annoying things is that it still tries to overcorrect things that it seems as errors, which can make it pretty difficult to look up pages on programming things.

However, there is also a pretty troubling thing in the way that they've implemented SafeSearch; rather than simply filtering the search results to remove adult content, they also remove potentially-adult-material-generating terms from the search phrase itself. They try to whitelist non-adult-oriented uses of words based on phrase matches, but it's pretty clumsy, and anyway it's a pretty stupid way to try to sanitize results. Annoyingly enough, it's also all-or-nothing; you can turn off SafeSearch entirely, or you can try to figure out how to get a phrase through the rather arbitrary filter.

So of course I've taken screenshots of what I'm talking about.

I'm too lazy to actually design it just yet, but this is a thing I've had rattling in the back of my mind for a while.

Even without a successful Kickstarter funding campaign, Mark still finished his Net Neutrality PSA. Go take a look, and if you're in the United States, write your congressperson!

From Ars Technica, Literacy may have stolen brain power from other functions:

The decreased activity in response to faces seemed to occur in those who achieved literacy during childhood (it was one of the only differences between them and adult learners). The authors suggest that the area that responds to faces normally expands with age, and learning to read may limit this expansion by putting nearby brain areas to other uses.

This isn't to say that you're going to be worse with faces if you know how to read well, although the authors indicate they're going to look into that to find out. But it does indicate that literacy involves a new specialization in some areas of the visual system, which ensure that the centers involved with processing language become just as active as if they had heard the words spoken.

According to my mom, I taught myself to read at a very very early age (she says that at 18 months I got obsessed with letterforms and reading the cereal box and so on, and I certainly remember being able to read at the age of 3 and wondering why all the other kids needed the teacher to read storytime books out loud), and I am also profoundly bad at facial recognition. So, while an anecdote is no substitute for data, it's certainly something to think about.

Frankly, I feel that it's been a reasonable tradeoff for me.

We are all tiny and insignificant.

The Swinger is a simple Python app which uses a music-analysis web service to automatically convert any straight-rhythmed song to a swing rhythm. Of course, my music tends to be a bit weird in the rhythmic department, so I decided to try a few of my songs through this.

I especially like what it did to Baby, Be Quiet — it completely changed the song's character. Run Faster didn't fare as well (although it gets better once the guitars kick in). &counting actually worked pretty well; it's a bit ironic that it had an easier time with the beat on that than with some of my other songs. And of course, Sometimes It's Hard To Keep Yourself Moving was conventional enough that it worked out.

I did try a few other songs, which just became unlistenable (due to stretch artifacts) and didn't even get any rhythmic modifications (such as Sorry To Inform You and Double Take).

My good friend Ken just pointed me to Kickstarter, which is sort of a venture capital system for creative talent. If you're a musician, filmmaker, animator, artist, author, etc. who needs funding to get a project off the ground, Kickstarter could be a useful way to go about doing that.

So maybe this project will fare better.

Ryan raises a good point, so I donated.

Do these things actually sell?

From an article about Tina Fey's portrayal of Palin:

Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidate John McCain's adviser Carly Fiorina said she found Fey's portrait "very dismissive" of Palin.

"The portrait was very dismissive of the substance of Sarah Palin, and so in that sense, they were defining Hillary Clinton as very substantive, and Sarah Palin as totally superficial," Fiorina told MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell.

(emphasis mine)

Suddenly it's all making sense. I just hope Fiorina does to McCain what she did to Hewlett-Packard.

This one is very easy to take, though: it just analyzes your browser history.

My results: 50% female, 50% male. GO FIGURE.

Buy 2, Get 1 Free.

Apparently, the new hotness is making fake video reviews on Amazon.

This is a tale explaining the manner in which my way of life was rotated along a Y axis until it reached a position roughly 180 degrees from that which it started. If I could have 60 seconds of your time, simply place your posterior in the selected location, and I will relate to you the details of how I was made the male monarch of the district of the City of Los Angeles, California located at coordinates 34.08333 -118.44778.

here are several examples of one of the biggest problems we had on Kindle. I'm having especially strong flashbacks for pages 6, 15, 16, 18, 19 (holy crap!), 23, 24 (way to break conventions just for the sake of breaking conventions!), 25, 29, and 30.

Also, I'm sure 10 would have probably broken things in an interesting yet subtle way.

(One might say that seeing this gave me a TOC-tic.)

Not only is it jarring and confusing, but it turns out that it doesn't save energy at all.

Yay, maybe my iPod Touch will actually become a useful Internet device soon-ish.

Oh, so this is the difference between bloggers and traditional journalism.

Amazon Kindle completely 0wned