Shack Attack

Not Voting for Obama Because He's Muslim

Makes sense...

A Bearded Badass

(Props to Emily for the pointer) This gangsta grows his beard out each winter, and trims it into a different facial hair style every spring. Highlights:

A La Souvarov- "A sideburn / mustache combo where the sideburn curves downward toward the corner of the mouth and then curves upward into the mustache. Similar to a curvy version of the Franz Josef."

Fu Manchu-

"A moustache that extends downward on the sides, usually extending off of the chin." The Klingon- "A full beard where the upper lip is shaved clean, but the connectors from the beard to the mustache are left in tact. Popularized by Klingon characters from the Star Trek series"

See all of them @ A Quest for Every Beard Type

 

For the intersection of Burning Man and Totoro fans

PS if you want to go to Burning Man, think about booking with the Green Tortoise, an awesome no-frills, hippie travel agency where I'm working this summer.

props to Neatorama for the pointer.

Every week, "V for Vendetta" becomes less and less a work of fantasy

I've been shocked by the amount of civil liberties encroachment and big-brother government in the United Kingdom lately. The most recent offense, from BoingBoing:

Academics at the UK's Nottingham University were arrested as terrorists for downloading Al Qaeda documents from a US government server in the course of research into a Master's degree convering terrorist tactics. The two UK-born profs were released, but the student faces deportation to Algeria under the Terrorism Act, where he believes he will be tortured. The university -- which encouraged its staffers to rat out people they thought were involved in researching terrorism -- refuses to acknowledge that anything is wrong with any of this.

This hurts my brain. Full text of the story.

Missing the Forest for the Minor Flaws in the Implementation of Mini-Feed

Industry Interactive says that facebook is "pretty good for the beginners, but fails for [tech-savvy] people like me." His points, my thoughtss:

1) Facebook is great at connecting people. It’s the first “social network” that I’ve ever bothered to use. I was able to find people I went to elementary school with, identify them, and connect.

Well, yeah. Good point.

2)Facebook sucks at playing well with others. There are Facebook Apps to integrate things like Flickr and del.icio.us, but they really blow, and why isn’t Facebook building that functionality right in anyways? My prime example is that the only way I can integrate my blog posts into Facebook is by importing them as notes. This starts an entirely separate conversation thread, instead of just letting the conversation take place on my blog. This is the dumbest implementation I’ve ever experienced.

Just like Myspace, friendster, yahoo! 360, orkut, and all of the other failed social networking services have perfectly integrated third-party and web 2.0 applications. Facebook may not be perfect, but before it came around, unless your friends used RSS readers or checked your Livejournal, flickr, and Myspace pages religiously, they'd never see what was going on in your fake internet life. Facebook actually just added integration of flickr, digg, youtube, and a shit-ton of other stuff into mini-feed, so while it's got room to develop, it's still tops in terms of integrating a bunch of services into one place.

3) Facebook does a lot of it’s peripheral stuff very poorly. The photo albums? Crap compared to Flickr or Picasa. Messaging? How many people prefer dumbass Facebook messaging to e-mail?

Clearly this guy doesn't hang out with hot chicks. If he did, he would take pictures with them, tag himself in those photos, and feel like a badass. He makes the point that he hates having to upload photos in two places (flickr and facebook). I don't mind it in the slightest. Flickr is the place for carefully shot and processed photos. Strangers browse galleries and comment on them. The community is about sharing art.Facebook is not flickr, it never tried to be. It's a SOCIAL application, and the photo function serves that purpose well. You take photos with your friends in them, tag them, and let a graphical representation of your life emerge. It's not facebook's fault this guy's friends are ugly.

4) Facebook is turning into AOL circa 1995 in trying to build their own private little Internet (except they have a platform!) It’s pretty crappy trying to get your data in or out of Facebook.

Easy to get data in (through apps or mini-feed import you can bring in basically any RSS feed, and you can upload photos, grab contacts from email accounts, etc.). It does suck getting it out, but most of the time, I don't need to. Facebook is not a place for intense, mission-critical academic or business work. I'm not all like, "Oh shit! I did my final project in a wall-to-wall with my friend, and now I can't export it!" or "Why won't Microsoft Outlook sync itself to all these beer pong tournaments?". Really? What data is living on facebook that you so badly need to grab?

This post is what happens when adults hear about something that's a big part of a lot of students' lives, try it out, realize its domain of applicability doesn't quite match their lifestyles, and therefore say it's a bad thing. If you took away the crude humor, superficial conversation, and vouyerism, Facebook would probably get boring, and maybe that's the reason it doesn't appeal to an adult, married man, but it is a huge, thriving community, it works with other services better than almost anything out there, and it's constantly updated based on user input. I guess I recognize a couple of his tech-oriented frustrations, but I'm too busy being amazed by the badass feed imports, draggable profile boxes, chat system, and photo tagging to care.

Full Industry Interactive post here; props to Brooke for finding it.

Shadow of the Giant

I just finished Orson Scott Card's Shadow of the Giant, the last book in a series that started with a companion book to the amazing Ender's Game. I can't do justice to how intense, fun, thoughtful, and universal Ender's Game is, so I'm not going to try. You need to go read it now. Don't sweat the sci-fi backstory; it's accessible to anyone.

The sequels (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind) weren't, though. They weren't bad, in fact, they were above-average as far as science fiction goes. But the writing was looser and more ponderous, and the plot was slow and philosophical. Not drunk, musing, and cynical like Hemingway, more just slow. I made it through Xenocide, and wasn't inspired to go on to the fourth.

Disillusioned by the sequels, I was a little skeptical about Ender's Shadow, a "companion" to Ender's Game. The skepticism was baseless; besides the fact that Card's tight, fast, lucid writing is no longer a surprise, Ender's Shadow retained most of the magic of his definitive work. If you've read Ender's Game, you'll remember Bean, Ender's diminutive, spunky, genius companion.  Ender's Shadow follows roughly the same main events as Ender's Game, but from Bean's perspective, tracking his own trials and tribulations in battle school.

I didn't expect a sequel to Ender's Shadow, but there was one, and then another, and then another. Rather than the odd metaphysics of the sequels to Ender's games, the "Shadow" series (Shadows of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant) feels a lot like Ender's Game: Earth faces a crisis in the not-too-distant future, and battle-hardened kids are forced into adult roles. The fun is in the geopolitical intrigue (China v. India v. Russia v. a Muslim Empire), the fantasy of being a badass teenage military commander, and the ease with which we can identify with the very human characters playing their parts on the world stage. Orson Scott Card figured out what made Ender's Game so wonderful, and kept it in mind as he penned its companion series.

Bumper Stickers (From one of my favorite blogs, Stuff White People like)

"Though there is no conclusive evidence about the effectiveness of these stickers, white people show no signs of abandoning the campaign.  In fact, there is a popular tale in white mythology that tells of an unenlightened man driving on the freeway who saw a bumper sticker on the back of a Subaru station wagon that said “Go Veg.” The sticker was so moving that he threw the hamburger he was eating right out the window and became a vegetarian on the spot.  Two days later, he affixed the same bumper sticker to their car and the process began anew until enough people had changed their views to form what we now know as the city of Portland, Oregon."

I am rolling on the floor, laughing. Full post at Stuff White People Like.

Summer Project: All the 二級漢字. My Tool: Mnemosyne

In preparation for going abroad, I decided to tackle memorizing a ton of Japanese kanji, those alien little picture-characters that turn Japanese from an easy, gramatically regular language into a frustrating, foriegn stone wall. Whether you study in the US or in Japan, kanji just don't naturally absorb the way vocabulary, grammar, and conversational ability do. They take hours of boring alone-time, trying to figure out mnemonics and little stories for the weird heiroglyphics (安い? Women under your roof are cheaper than the ones you have to take out. Okay, the politically-incorrect explanations are kind of fun).

Fortunately, I've discovered a tool that makes learning these things a heck of a lot easier. It's called Mnemosyne, and it's based on the theory of memorizing facts through "spaced repetition." According to the authors:

When you have memorised something, you need to review that material, otherwise you will forget it. However, as you probably know from experience, it is much more effective to space out these revisions over the course over several days, rather than cramming all the revisions in a single session. This is what is called the spacing effect.

During the past 120 years, there has been considerable research into these aspects of human memory (by e.g. Ebbinghaus, Mace, Leitner and Wozniak). Based on the work of these people, it was shown that in order to get the best results, the intervals between revisions of the same card should gradually increase. This allows you to focus on things you still haven't mastered, while not wasting time on cards you remember very well.

It is clear that a computer program can be very valuable in assisting you in this process, by keeping track of how difficult you find an card and by doing the scheduling of the revisions.

The program is extremely elegant and zen in its operation: a card shows up, you guess, click "show me," and rate the card based on how difficult it was to  guess. A zero is for if you've never seen it before, one is for when you've missed it this time but need to see it again soon, and a five is for cards you have completely memorized and never need to see again. 2,3, and 4 are in between. All you need is the spacebar, the number pad, and your brain. The way you can mark cards as "memorized" and have them completely go away is great, because the 2,3,4-kyuu compilation includes plenty of elementary vocabulary that even students with a few months of study will have down pat.   

I'm using it with a compilation of 4300 vocabulary, which includes all the 1-kyuu, 2-kyuu, and 3-kyuu words and kanji. There are ways to make multi-sided cards with all the readings, bushu, and technical crap of the characters, but my cards have a single reading- the 訓読み for a single character, and the singular reading for any multi-character vocabulary words. I forget where I got the vocabulary pack, but e-mail me and I'll send it to you.

I've been using the program about a week now, for somewhere between half an hour and an hour a day. While I've got an intimidating ass-load of kanji to get through, I'm definitely making progress- characters that were completely unknown to me a week ago are starting to become familiar, and just the fact that I'm reviewing kanji I kind-of-know is rooting them deeper in my memory.

The Japanese Inspiration for NBC's "The Office"

Or maybe the BBC version? Anyway, this hilarious skit should delight lovers of all things odd and Japanese, especially those with a little experience with the language.

This is one nifty little blogging tool.

Facebook readers: why are you seeing this in Facebook notes? Because facebook has a nifty little feature that lets you choose an external RSS feed and create notes from it. It essentially posts any blog you keep into your mini-feed.

My internship at Six Apart hooks me up with a blog on Typepad, which appears to be a blogging package a cut above livejournal/blogger/etc. I'll still be maintaining my LJ, most likely, but I'd like to see what this thing can do. I'll be using it to post updates on life in San Francisco, including but not limited to Six Apart, the Green Tortoise, swing dancing, photography, cheap, tasty, ethnic food, and goings-on around town. When I go to Japan in September, I'll probably also use it to log my travels there.

Anyway, let me know what you think- please be curious, witty, engaging, and brutal in the comments section.