My former professor, Peter Cook's building in Graz, with an outer skin which is a media facade that can be changed electronically. See it on Wists in [architecture]
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I haven’t seen details of Google’s ‘newsrank’ patents, but am pretty sure that Moreover’s ‘source rank’ which does pretty much the same thing, by the sound of it, and which has been made public to clients since 2001, would constitute prior art. BetaNews | Google Plans to Rank News By Quality: “Patents recently filed by search giant Google reveal that it plans to soon rank news stories by the quality and credibility of the source, rather than just by date or relevance as it currently does in its searches.”
Ars Technica takes apart a story in the Independant that has spread widely on blogs, which claimed that a huge number of ancient texts by people such as Sophocles were about to be deciphered. The “classical holy grail” or unholy hype? The Original Story pre-fisking: “Decoded at last: the ‘classical holy grail’ that may rewrite the history of the world. Scientists begin to unlock the secrets of papyrus scraps bearing long-lost words by the literary giants of Greece and Rome… In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod… They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels…Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a “second Renaissance“. “. Ars…
“By the time Kerry announced the news in person at a Pittsburgh rally 45 minutes later, Democratic and Republican Web sites were ready with dueling videos, fact sheets and statements. But they were all 12 hours behind the air-travel Web site USAviation.com, where on Monday night a visitor wrote that John Edwards decals were being fitted to Kerry’s campaign plane in a Pittsburgh hangar.” CNN.com – Edwards news was on Internet first – Jul 6, 2004
“Just because kids like him, doesn’t mean that he’s good for them. How many parents plop their kids in front of the tube and then have their brain sucked right out of their skull by this big purple beast. Next thing you know, the kids love Barney more than their own parents. Barney doesn’t teach kids how to deal with reality. Dad wrecks the car and Mom loses her job and Barney solves all of this by singing a happy song.” eBay item 5904745417 (Ends Jun-26-04 21:41:41 PDT) – Barney ActiMates Complete TV & PC Pack Annoying Box via Who Would Buy That which is still my favorite website.
Chatango is an instant message application that allows people to post links on Craigslist, Ebay etc. and have people chat anonymously with sellers with no signup. If you have trouble using IM with people behind corporate firewalls, Chatango will work. Signup, grab your username before anyone else does and send someone buried behind a firewall a link in an email. Its a new product, rough around the edges, but looks like there is quick, free alternative to the enterprise dodads like Liveperson. http://david.chatango.com Disclaimer: I helped Alec, the guy who did this, with some product design.
Andrei Tarkovsky: The Mirror My favorite Tarkovsky film. An autobiographical portrait of his childhood
With the holiday season coming up, I know what my friends’ kids are getting this year: Alternative T-shirts for Infants and Toddlers
The Enola Gay has been reassembled and put on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, under the curatorship of Dr. Strangelove Dik Daso. Whatever the justification, killing 140,000 civilians with an atomic bomb, 42 times the number that died during 911, is nothing to be celebrated. Surely an exhibit based on this event is an opportunity to demonstrate the gravity of the situation that lead to it, along with a pertinent reminder of the seriousness of weapons of mass destruction? “The current text for the Enola Gay exhibit does not include casualty figures from Hiroshima or show any photographs of the devastation the bomb caused. Daso told Reuters that death toll estimates varied widely and the exhibition space did not lend itself to a complicated display including details of the human cost.” Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage
Don Park reveals the future of Blogging – writing on a note pad. How about a Rube Goldberg (Heath Robinson) device for this. Imagine a retractable ballpoint pen with built in moblogging and character recognition – click the top, start writing and everything is posted to a weblog as a new post when you click and retract the ballpoint.