“Amanda Doerty”

she went to Vassar...Amanda Doerty is a name like no other. In fact, I don’t think it’s a real name at all. After becoming interested in Hot Abercrombie Chick I decided to do a little follow-up research to see what the Internet had to offer on our enigmatic blogstress. Of course a google search for her real name, Amanda Doerty returns just about nothing. It appears that her debut on the web was her first post to Hot Abercrombie Chick. Nothing on usenet, but then again I’d be surprised if a 19 year old had heard of such antiquated things.

In her first post she mentions two friends, one Mr. Daniel Zeigenbein and another Sebastian Bach (not the lead singer of Skid Row). While there’s no mention of Amanda on anything related to Sebastian, I did find a gleaming review of HAC by Daniel which confirms that not only do they know each other, but they’re acquainted through a mutual college friend. Daniel is wearing a Vassar cap on his website and Amanda claims her residence is Poughkeepsie, NY, so they must be chums through Vassar, right?

So one would think. I called the Vassar Registrar’s office to get to the bottom of this. It turns out that Daniel Zeigenbeim was once a student there, never graduated, and apparently no longer is. Amanda Doerty on the other hand, well, they’ve never heard of her.

So I’m assuming that HAC and Amanda Doerty are in some way a creation of Zeigenbaum and/or friends.

Game my system and pay the consequences, beeatch.

7:30pm: Foster reports that Amanda has a vanilla Movable Type site setup

8:11pm: Amanda responds to these questions, revealing her name is a pseudonym. I have responded in her comments.

April 22: Jason Carter has uncovered an original Hot or Not post circa 2002 (click 1083 votes) for a familiar face named Ashley. Props to the hive mind.

Hot Abercrombie hoax

hot abercrombie chickAnyone watching Blogdex over the past few months knows Hot Abercrombie Chick, a.k.a. Amanda Doerty. This site has popped into the top 10 least 5 times since I started noticing. I became interested last week when I saw it for the third or fourth time, and delved a little deeper. As it would turn out, all of the sites that Amanda was posting to were weblogs that posted their most recent comments on their front page, hence exposing comments to Blogdex. In other words, Hot Abercrombie Chick has been gaming Blogdex.

The notion that this attractive college freshman was spending all of her time trolling weblogs looking for exposed weblogs seemed implausable to me. But looking through the comments themselves, it appeared that most, if not all, were at least marginally on topic. In addition Abercrombie Chick was interacting with hundreds of commenters on her own site, and doing quite a good job of it. A person this prolific would have to be unemployed and completely focused, which anyone who has been unemployed knows is impossible.

Something was amiss, and I had to prove that Hot Abercrombie Chick was either a) a totally different girl, b) a guy or c) some team of people creating an identity. And I was devoted to outing this fraud. It turns out that Julia Set beat me to it:

Just received an inside tip that the recently famous Hot Abercrombie Chick is really a male college student capitalizing on cute pictures of his girlfriend (previously unbeknownst to her) in a rush of “beggars” trackbacks. In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious that he is quite the player. Over the course of the last couple of months, “Mr. Abercrombie” has played every text-book trick for raising his popularity on the blogosphere.

Unfortunately there’s still no reference to this indictment on Amanda’s site, and still very little evidence beyond Julia’s post that this inside tip is true. Recent links to the site on Blogdex reveal that someone else is using Amanda’s tactics to call her out ("Comment Spamming Bitch Riding High On Blogdex!").

And I feel like a tool… she’s a man, duh!

Continue reading “Hot Abercrombie hoax”

Choice Cubicism

artist's rendition of the time cubeFor those of you not familiar with the Time Cube, it’s no surprise, you’re living in an illusion just like everyone else. Discovered by Gene Ray, this is the Theory Of Everything (TOE). Academics have spent years trying wrap their heads around the 4-corners, 1-corner, 1-corner concept, but they have (of course) been educated stupid for too long and still don’t get it.

Well it’s time to let the cat out of the bag. Gene Ray may have invented the Time Cube, but we invented Gene Ray. He is actually an Artificial Intelligence program devised by me and my colleague late one night many, many years ago. And then, before our very eyes this adolescent mind discovered the Time Cube. We were in shock, since we can’t even understand it ourselves.

Well, now that the truth is out there, we might as well make him available. You can chat with Gene directly using AIM. Just send him a message at his handle cubicism. He’ll be happy to entertain you with his theories of the Time Cube, TOE, or just about anything you’d like to talk about.

And if you’re still having trouble understanding the Truth, take a look at the song NIGGAZ BE FEARIN’ THE TIME CUBE TRUTH on the Insolitology site. It’s a very accessable introduction that is endorsed by our AI.

Redesign

After staring at my site for 2 years, and needing some serious procrastinatory work, I decided to redesign overstated.net. My goal was to remove as much of the cruft as possible from the interface and focus on the readability. My main inspiration were Tufte, hence the use of whitespace in layout and small caps for various typographic functions. There’s also quite a bit of Dean Allen in there too because he’s the man when it comes to weblog layout.

The image in the header of the page was ganked from a 17th century map by Fredrick de Wit. I had originally intended to use one of Jesuit scientist Athanasius Kircher’s engravings, but this king was too badass to pass up.

Let me know what you think and of course if you encounter any bugs

Harvard sucks!

One of the wonderful things about being an MIT student is witnessing all of the nerd pride and anti-Harvard sentiment. Like this beautiful piece of hackdom:

harvard sucks sign
Harvard Bridge construction sign (photo by Johnathan Wang)

Apparently the photo was edited and a 4-letter word removed from the third line of the sign. I guess us MIT students aren’t just nerds, we’re also a bit witty.

The MIT Tech: Photograph, Tuesday, April 6, 2004

Political Googlebombing

While giving a Blogdex demo today I was startled by the fact that the third site listed was the Wikipedia entry for Jew. After looking at the citations I realized that its position in Blogdex is only a side-effect of a much larger movement to readjust the PageRank for an injustice in the current Google results, namely that a horribly anti-Semetic website maintains the top position for the query.

This strikes me as a fascinating use of the Googlebomb. I’ve known PageRank to be used in jokes, hoaxes and for advertising, but this is the first example I’ve come across where the goal is to correct what most would consider an act of discrimination captured by Google’s index.

I’m sure that most people would agree that hate speech does not deserve top results for common words, and webloggers will adjust the statistics and impart justice on Google’s index. But what happens in the case where a debate is more hotly contested? Take abortion for instance. The first four results are unbiased representations of the debate while the fifth is the leading website for the pro-choice movement. Pro-life ranks in at number 10.

To me this implies one of two things: that the authors on the web are generally more liberal than conservative or that PageRank is skewed towards the left end of the political spectrum. I wouldn’t be surprised if this sort of political Googlebombing becomes a more regular part of weblogging, adding to the set of identity tools already incorperated into most blogs (blogrolls, link lists, etc.). Add one more list to the sidebar: political words I endorse.

Green tea soymilk

vitasoy green stuffI’ll admit that I’m a total sucker for supermarket sale items. I’m not an avid coupon-clipper but when someone puts a giant yellow sign with a price on it next to an item it greatly increases the odds that I’ll buy it.

My latest impulse purchase was a product called Green Tea Soymilk at a price of $0.99 (on sale from $1.99). I was a bit skeptical when I pulled it out of my grocery bag, but d-dang this stuff is the bomb and I can’t hype it enough. It is obnoxiously green and quite creamy, but it tastes just like the green tea ice cream. Every time I drink it I can’t help but feel like I’ve just eaten a large and satisfying sushi meal.

It’s smooth, not too sweet, and has the perfect amount of tea flavor. It’s healthy and I fancy it for a hangover cure. And yes, I work for Vitasoy.

Vitasoy: Green Tea Soymilk

My chat with a Nanniebot

chatbotA week ago I read an interesting article in the New Scientist about a savvy conversational robot that was watching chat rooms to make sure that everyone was on their best behavior. Reading the dialog generated by the robot, I was floored by its sophistication and savvy. With nuanced jokes, the ability to parse colloquial language and a substantial knowledege of the world this thing blows most of my friends out of the water. I had to talk to it.

After emailing its creator Jim Wightman, we agreed for the robot to meet me in the #chatnannies room on an irc server at 4pm EST today. I shot the breeze with the nanniebot "Caroline" for about a half hour asking her about her childhood, some real world problems, and introduced her to my friend Nathan, a human pretending to be a rival chatbot. You can read the full transcript if you’d like.

I’d like to discuss exactly what I think it would take for a computer system to achieve the interaction we had from a 50,000 feet. This is not meant to prove I was talking to a human, indict its creator, or be slanderous in any way. I just want to unpack this interaction from my limited knowledge of artificial intelligence, information retrieval and computer science. Since an analysis of the entire dialog would take days, I’ll focus on a small passage where I interact with Caroline about a hypothetical predicament I’m struggling with.

Continue reading “My chat with a Nanniebot”

T9 Roulette

your phone is smarter than you thinkI have invented a game to use up the massive number of text messages that T-Mobile allots me every month. It’s called T9 roulette. It goes a little something like this:

  • Pick someone in your phonebook, preferably not mom or your boss. For the purpose of this description we’ll call her Maurice.
  • Write "Maurice is a"
  • Mash buttons until you have constructed a word of desirable length
  • Send

I’ve had countless hours of fun already, and apparently it is so awesome that it inspired Rusty Foster to upgrade his 4 year old phone. Give it a try!

Radio Vox Populi

a group of webloggersOver the past week I’ve been working on turning weblogs into an art installation. I really wanted to visualize in some way the current activity within the weblog world. Riding an early title from blogdex (“wired vox populi“), I thought it would be interesting to see what the voice of the people actually sounded like. To accomplish this feat, I enlisted some simple off-the-shelf linux tools. The result is Radio Vox populi.

The system takes the update monitor from blo.gs and crawls them using a simple perl robot (LWP::Parallel); in the event that RSS feeds are provided to blo.gs, these are crawled immediately, and for others RSS autodiscovery is used to find RSS feeds. The first post from each RSS feed is then saved.

The text of these posts is cleaned up (and abbreviated in the case that it’s exceptionally long), and run through the Festival Speech Synthesis System using a number of different voices. These corresponding voice-posts are sent out to the sound card in the order that they were received, punctuated by a few different radio-tuning noises (thanks to Andy). The output of this sound is streamed to the web in real time using the Icecast streaming media server.

Continue reading “Radio Vox Populi”