The luckiest kid on Earth.
What if you could arrange it such that people who are really lucky married other people who are also really lucky? (You could measure luck in all sorts of ways....
Category: ideas
epistemology, philosophy, theology, religion
Dungeons & Dragons vs. Google Wave
The Complete Guide to Google Wave: Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that’s notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Her...
The Craigslist market rate for…
It would be cool to know what the recent market rate is on your local Craigslist for a particular item before posting the same or a similar item for sale. Altho...
Like “Rock Band” for the “Dog Whisperer” set.
A video game that captures not just your movements but also those of your dog. Fun for the whole family. Come on, Kinect developers, let’s see what you...
Yes, your mind is playing tricks on you. It’s how it works.
People who are in the business of selling things have always tried to make the leap from observation, “People who like X also like Y”, to prediction...
Investments in a well run society.
In a well run society, there should be no difference between doing work that benefits yourself in the future and doing work that benefits others immediately.
Countering the real threat of fake news.
Short version: To counter the real threat of fake stories – e.g., “Right-Wingers Stand By Their Fabricated Mexican Drug Cartel Raid Story” – it̵...
Movies: Inception, a parade of ornate MacGuffins.
Movies look like dreams because we make sense of movies the same way we make sense of dreams, ignoring the gaps between scenes, the discontinuity, the leaps in ...
Rituals of defilement and purification.
The New York Times: “[The Gulf of Mexico] has been the nation’s sacrifice zone, and has been for 50-plus years.” Mother Jones: Last week, the emcee ...
Can online reviews reveal anything new about popular restaurants?
I recently came across a restaurant on Yelp.com, Mitchell’s Ice Cream in San Francisco, with nearly two thousand reviews. I guess the average number of re...
Tracing urban migrations from Census and city records.
Can the price of homes tell you anything about who will gravitate to a neighborhood; will they be young or old? With or without children? Double or single incom...
art: automatic summaries of books.
AutoSummarize by Jason Huff: “The top 100 most downloaded copyright free books summarized using Microsoft Word 2008’s AutoSummarize 10-sentence function a...
Brisk read on agents, asymmetric information and the financial meltdown.
A few weeks ago I wrote that market crashes are a form of feedback, but also a very inefficient one. I suggested that a more transparent financial marketplace w...
The “got it” rule for passing and AI chess.
My friend Matisse E. taught me a great trick: when you’re carrying something heavy and you are going to hand it over to someone else, you don’t let ...
Paging Cato Fong: on interacting with a doppelgänger.
I’m being tailed by a Google AdSense agent. Everywhere I go, the agent is there, hiding behind a billboard or a kiosk poster, reminding me of questions I&...
Clever marketing by LaRoux’s tour publicists.
Putting up posters all over town that say your concert is sold out.
Bald men of the world unite, you have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Hairstyles don’t just frame faces, they frame facial gestures. I wonder if having a shaved head – as I often do – doesn’t have a subtle but lasting ...
The last mile: the human answer.
In retail, the last mile, the human touch, is the most important. Especially when you’re trying to launch a new kind of product, one that requires consume...
Should Haiti exist?
Nation-states are important, even necessary fictions. But they are fictions. (For example, the U.S.A. is nearly a century older than Italy.) David Rothkopf asks...
Mirrors in forests.
Superficial by Michel de Broin Tree hotel by Tham & Videgård Hansson Arkitekter