May 11 2007
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Blogfest Design Competition

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The Apartment has kindly offered Design Blogfest their Crosby Street window for the duration of New York Design Week. We thought it would be fun to show some indie design… are you a designer with a prototype that we could put in the window? If yes, please upload an image from your website or Flickr, a brief description and the keyword “designblogfest” here in Wists. All the entries will be available at wists.com/everyone/designblogfest. The Design Blogfest bloggers will create a shortlist on Monday afternoon after which we’ll ask you the readers to vote on the best design. Yeah, we know, it’s short notice, but then that’s what blogs are all about. 😉 Important dates: – Now, upload an image from your website or Flickr to Wists and tag “designblogfest” – Monday May 14, 12noon EST, deadline for entries via Wists – Tuesday May 15, shortlist of finalists, voting begins –…

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May 08 2007
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RIP Allan Woolley

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Dr. Allan Wooley was my school Chemistry teacher and ‘Form Master’ as they called the teacher that was responsible not just for your academic performance, but your general well being. And he really cared about people’s well being. Making it all the more tragic that he apparently took his own life last week. He was a great and memorable teacher. Nobody can have a more widespread, meaningful and lasting legacy than a great teacher.

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Apr 26 2007
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Hilarious Ernst & Young Teambuilding Video.

Posted by | business | No Comments

Beans Beans, who found this leaked corporate video, where a group of dorky Cool-Aid sloshed employees sing along, gospel style, to ‘O’ Happy Day’, puts it well: “Ernst & Young teambuiding video – holy shit I nearly pissed myself” Corporate accountants singing Soul; once more with feeling. I’ve just watched it 5 times in a row and cannot stop, each time there’s one more priceless gem to notice. Effing hilarious.

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Apr 24 2007
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The real bubble

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The real buuble. Four words: Hedge Fund Private Equity. I hear these too much. I don’t really understand hedge funds and private equity, but more frighteningly I get the impression that some of the people involved don’t either. My one theory about the rise of Private Equity, is that its a natural reaction against the increase in communication due to things like the Internet, and the reduced arbitrage or spread that it creates as more people have access to information, more quickly. One way of countering this and the recenty tightened financial regulation in the US is to deal in private companies and investment, where the information is more opaque. James Simons, hedge fund manager, earned $1.7 billion last year…. (kottke.org)

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Apr 23 2007
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The Limits of Computing

Posted by | darwinism | No Comments

The Limits of Computing Lecture 5 notes I found the above notes on Information Theory as applied to the limits of computing in my never ending quixotic and pretentious quest to look for a possible physical law of natural selection. They are from a series of lectures at the University of Florida by Michael Frank, and are of staggering clarity. Its worth reading the whole lot. Amusingly, the most interesting lecture seems to have been the one that students were most reluctant to hear. “When I handed out the student information sheets, I asked you all to point out the particular topics you were most and least interested in. I tallied these ratings, adding 1 for each “most” rating, and subtracting 1 for each “least” rating, with no change if the item was unrated. All of the topics received positive scores, ranging from 5 (for physics-based theoretical models of computation)…

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Apr 23 2007
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Dawkins on OReilly

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The excellent One Good Move beats everyone to the punch with a clip of Dawkins on OReilly. Except there were no punches and the whole thing was rushed along as if it were a Gong Show skit. onegoodmove: Richard Dawkins – Bill O’Reilly

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Apr 20 2007
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Microsoft’s Live Search Is No Longer Live

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Microsoft’s Live Search Is No Longer Live ResearchBuzz has found this hilarious gem. Apparently Microsoft couldn’t create a way (huh, as RB suggests – what about captchas after repeated queries?) to stop data mining of their advanced live search – so they killed it. Live Search’s Statement

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Apr 19 2007
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Bill O’Reilly to Interview Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins will be interviewed by Fox’s Colbert style, fake, sensationalist newscaster, Bill O’Reilly, on Monday, April 23, at 8.00pm EST on FOX. The program will be rebroadcast at 11.00pm. Should be fun. Bill O’Reilly | The O’Reilly Factor – FOXNews.com

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Apr 18 2007
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If I were a VC this is a startup I would back

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If I were a VC this is a startup I would back. If the money in a gold rush is made from selling picks and shovels, then Openfount are selling stainless steel Web 2.0 tools for the price of plastic ones. They have built value-added products upon Amazon’s excellent S3 storage and EC2 pay as you go grid computing. The most interesting is the distributed file system product. They give you a disk image to load onto S3. From that you can instantiate as many clustered machines as you want and have them share the same disk, with infinite capacity. Simple and elegant. Stuff that used to cost six figures for a grand or so. Enabling web 2.0 where the metal hits the meat | openfount

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