Laughing Meme » quotable

Armory Data Mining

Kellan — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:26:51 +0000

“It is time for some truth in advertising. If I will present my thesis adviser with this analysis, she will probably hang me, rez me, hang me again, and then /gkick me out of my PhD program.” – Armory Data Mining.

Great, accessible look at population stats.

Dens: First thoughts on Google Buzz for mobile (Alex is telling me the web version is a whole new can of worms)

Kellan — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:28:15 +0000

“#3. Is Google Buzz the Facebook / Twitter / foursquare killer? No. Using Buzz requires more thought / more work than Facebook or Twitter and comes with less reward … For social apps the feature overlap is irrelevant – it’s about the motivation to use the product and the culture that drives participation.”

Quotable

Kellan — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:39:27 +0000

It’s cheating to start a blog post with a quote from Winston Churchill. He was that good. – Fred Wilson

I’ll probably steal that line some day.

I missing blogging.

Kellan — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 23:03:31 +0000

Like anyone who used to blog with frequency pre-2005, I’d like to post here more often — not just to fill up bits and bytes, but to write again. Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here. – Dan Cederholm

This is the idea I’ve been trying to place with again, really starting just this week, rejecting the consensus about how to blog that’s emerged over the last couple years, and holds up Digg-ability and Techcrunch-i-tude as good indicators. Dan, of course, said it better.

It’s probably an indicator of slipping into my dotage, but a new stray link and I’m happily back wandering through those early archives, even my own, having stumbled across a rather odd review of the rather minor Ruled Britannia, circa 2003 earlier this evening.

Mobile computing device grids

Kellan — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:37:52 +0000

Power rises linearly with the number of processors, but as the square of the speed of a processor. – Greg Pfister

Which means the best hope for extending the battery life of your iPhone is grid computing.

Hope vs Optimism

Kellan — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:44:57 +0000

One of the most interesting workshops at the NYC Anarchist Book Fair this year was Matt Hern’s talk “Against Tolerance”. And one of the most useful ideas I took away was an off hand comment on hope vs. optimism, which he attributed to Cornel West, who attributes it to Havel.

You have to draw a distinction between hope and optimism. Vaclav Havel put it well when he said “optimism” is the belief that things are going to turn out as you would like, as opposed to “hope,” which is when you are thoroughly convinced something is moral and right and just and therefore you fight regardless of the consequences. In that sense, I’m full of hope but in no way optimistic. – Cornel West

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. – Václav Havel

I’m finding it useful.

Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: If it looks like a leaderboard, and quacks…

Kellan — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 04:40:05 +0000

“…social software is a medium turns all communication into a self-representation game…”

Company Town

Kellan — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:24:19 +0000

“[New York] is the company town for money” – Richard Lefrak

Zach Klein: “My astonishment upon discovering this is similar to that one time I found a 2-month old bologna sandwich in the fridge ripe with dozens of mold cultures, spawned while it sat neglected on the dark, bottom shelf.”

Kellan — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:02:50 +0000

My work here is done.

Yahoo: Do What You’re Great At

Kellan — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:08:07 +0000

“… snort news off the tits of more news.”

Khoi Vinh: Investing Strategies for iPhone Customers

Kellan — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:04:14 +0000

“It’s certainly not as steep a trend as my iPhone’s devaluation, but it’s significant. In the year since I bought my first iPhone, AAPL has gained roughly 50% in value. If I’d spent that original US$599 on Apple stock instead, I’d be able to buy a new iPhone 3G and have about US$599 in assets to my name. Oh well.”

John Waters: “Moving [to New York] proves that you believe in irony”

Kellan — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:10:41 +0000

On New York’s facsimile driven aesthetics. via Buzz

E.B. White: “There are roughly three New Yorks.”

Kellan — Sat, 24 May 2008 19:08:22 +0000

“There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. […] Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.”

Steve Loughran: “How do you know you have a SPOF (single point of failure)? You always have one. How do you find it? You don’t: it finds you”

Kellan — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:26:38 +0000

Truer words…

Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster

Kellan — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 23:52:11 +0000

“If a fish market in the right Manhattan neighborhood today could get hold of “wild native oysters” and market then as such, because this is how New York operates, it would probably be able to charge outstanding prices and have New York Times readers, after the article on wild oysters came out, gladly paying the price. [...] And for all that, they would taste like cultivated ones.” – Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster

Inefficiency

Kellan — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 01:32:13 +0000

“…it should take energy and thought to push issues upstream due to the associated costs of having to deal with them once they are propagated… when you optimise something you always do so at the expense of something else.” – Bill de hOra

“Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention. Cost does not have to be about money. … Spending time with someone is a valuable signal that you care.” – Danah Boyd

Photo by bowbrick

Aidan: “I am annotating a 17 page article on an Indian cricket player.”

Kellan — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 15:37:42 +0000

“I think I understand why India is so interested in cricket these days: the one thing that could possibly make cricket more arcane and confusing is Indian names.”

Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian 1: Civilization and its Discontents

Kellan — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:34:33 +0000

“I think we all woke up one day to find ourselves living in the software factory. The floor is hard, from time to time it gets very cold at night, and they say the factory is going to close and move somewhere else.”

Aidan: “the increases in human intelligence that have evolved since our split with living relatives have been driven significantly by specific need for social processing skills rather than a drive toward general intelligence.”

Kellan — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 18:11:07 +0000

Also points to how complicated and difficult the social is, something we encounter everyday trying to replicate social patterns into software.

Jakob Nielsen: “In 1997, I chose to suppress similar findings…”

Kellan — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 23:31:56 +0000

The truth about this dreadful cover up is coming out.