It’s my birthday, I can sleep late if I want to. Yay! Happy birthday to me! (I’m really starting to take to this weblog thing)
Ever since George Soros announced that he would be donating $3 million to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, debate over the e-journal versus traditional journals has been heating up. An article today from the BBC points out some a few critics attacking the net journal initiative.
In many ways, these criticisms are the same ones being made in the debate surrounding peer-to-peer journalism versus Journalism-with-a-capital-J, arguments that probably shouldn’t be made so hastily because the two media aren’t necessarily competing. As the Physical Review Letters has proven, online journals can provide an entirely different type of information (namely late breaking results) that augments, rather than undermines traditional journals.
I went to the gym today, which is strange because I’m typically a Monday/Wednesday/Friday gym person, and was surprised to see all the same people that I see on my normal schedule. Until now I had expected that all of them, the I-like-coffee-with-my-weights guy, the older-but-fitter-than-thou couple, and the attention-deficit-fitness kid were just like me, but instead they’re getting 5 days to my 3.
It’s the same realization that Chris Eigeman makes in Barcelona when someone reveals to him that men typically shave their faces with the grain, instead of against it (of course, he’s been shaving against the grain his entire life). I just assumed that everyone was on the same schedule that I was. Now that the bubble has burst, I guess I have to start going every day.
Google is currently testing distributed computing as an option of its toolbar. Sergei Brin (Google co-founder) says that the initial use of the computation will be for the Folding@Home project at Stanford, but also says that it might be aimed at internal search problems. It seems awkward for a company who has sold themselves on doing one thing, and one thing well, to suddenly branch out just to “give something back to science.” I’d say that Google has either got something up its sleeve, or lost the plot.
Perhaps I need to see someone from an Internet/Computer Addiction Service. My job might necessitate anti-depressants.
I’ve always been fascinated by SMS as a technology to spread memes. Given that people have the attention, the instantaneous push nature of phone messages coupled with group distribution lists could lead to immediate information epidemics. But the phone service has a long way to go since, as the BBC reports, many messages go missing. Transmission rates need to be above some threshold before we can reach a tipping point, and perhaps the necessary technology has not arrived yet.
It’s sad when you’re dealing with the difficulties of life outside your blogdentity to watch your blog go fallow as a result. Someone should invent some technology to cache ideas so that when you’re too sad to even turn on your computer, your blog continues blogging by itself, keeping people interested. Needless to say, I’m back.
People are marginally happy, at best, according to Google: “I love my life,” 8280 pages to “I hate my life,” 8070.
One of the great parts about having friends in town is the excuse it gives you to drag them to all sorts of places you always want to go, but never have the time. At the top of my list was the MIT Museum, which is just down the street, and offers free admission, but somehow kept slipping through the cracks in my schedule.
The space is equally divided into five areas: robots, Arthur Ganson, Harold Edgerton, holography, and MIT history/culture. Every exhibit is fascinating, and could easily be in a gallery or larger museum, but without a doubt, Ganson takes the show. Some of the highlights:
If you’re ever in the Boston area, this exhibit is well worth checking out. Many of his gadgets are so surreal (Inchworms, Machine with 23 Scraps of Paper) are truly indescribable, and need to be seen in person. At $5 (or free if you’re with an MIT student), it’s money well spent.