Author: gulley

You may never have heard of RSS aggregators before, but someday you will, although eventually I’m sure they’ll have a sweeter name. If you’re the least bit of an information junkie, read on. Bloglines may well be the place for you to jump in and see what the fuss is all about.

I have complained in the past that I don’t care for most of the RSS aggregators I’ve tried. I like Aggie, but it’s old and it seems pretty clear that nobody’s moving it forward. I emailed Aggie author Joe Gregorio, and he confirmed this. As he put it, “The three-paned aggregators really took the wind out of our sails.” But then he went on to recommend Bloglines, which he uses. That was a good enough recommendation for me, so off I went to set up a Bloglines account. And sure enough, I like it. It’s still somewhat like a three-pane aggregator, but has the key features that I’m after. I can sort the blogs however I like, and I can mark them all as read in a single quick button click. And since it’s an online service (rather than a browser that runs only on my machine), I can view from anywhere, and I can show you my reading list. Voila:
Bloglines | Ned’s Blogs.

Nick Denton of Gawker Media has got a similar online blog aggregator experiment going on: kinja.com. It’s a simpler, more stripped-down tool, designed to bring weblogs to the masses. As it says on the site, “Kinja is not aimed at early adopters.” Read: “RSS geekboys need not apply. We don’t need your whiny noise around here.”

This is a marvelous thing. Paradigms collide when a Dutch astronomer builds a web page that uses Javascript to calculate the positions of the sun, moon, and planets based on Ptolemaic methods dating back to the second century AD: Almagest Ephemeris Calculator. That is to say, you will get answers as accurate as possible given the knowledge of the universe 1800 years ago. That’s way before Copernicus, way back when epicycles were the order of the day and the Earth was safely fixed at the center of the universe. Ptolemy could have worked out those epicycles much faster with Pentium-based hardware (although the IEEE sexagesimal floating fraction standard is pretty dodgy). Here’s a quote from the site.

When the web page is loaded the ephemeris calculator automatically selects the epoch date for the tables in Ptolemy’s Almagest as the default date. This corresponds with mean noon at the meridian of Alexandria on 1 Thoth 1 Nabonassar (or 26 February 747 BC in the proleptic Julian calendar, around 10h UT).

You will certainly remember that 747 BC is at or about the time that Sargon II conquered the Hittites. Remember? And then they came out with that lame sitcom about it, Sargon’s Heroes? I’m sure you remember.

Remember the great whale-oil age? Of course not. It started in the eighteenth century and was over by the end of the nineteenth century. But for a time, whale oil was among the world’s primary lubricants and illuminants. Society’s need for light and lubrication has grown exponentially, but thankfully for the whales a new source of oil appeared just as whale stocks were crashing toward extinction: petroleum. A few hundred years from now, our age will seem just as primitive and remote, because in less time than it took our ancestors to boil down almost all the whales, we will have sucked all the oil out of this planet. Whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist with respect to existing petroleum reserves makes only the difference of 40 years or so between now and a serious supply crash. Exponential growth in demand and finite supply will ultimately bring this terrific free lunch we’re enjoying to a close before this century is out. As Kenneth Deffeyes says (see below) “Fossil fuels are a one-time gift that lifted us up from subsistence agriculture and eventually should lead us to a future based on renewable resources.”

Here is a good National Geographic article on the topic with some fun facts and pretty pictures: The End of Cheap Oil.

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Here’s a book (Hubbert’s Peak) written by oilman and geologist Kenneth Deffeyes that does a good job explaining why even at this very moment we are at the peak of the peak of worldwide oil production. Demand will rise, but supply must inexorably fall. Take-home lesson: if you REALLY want that Hummer, buy it now.

I gave a talk this morning about the MATLAB Profiler at the Applied Behavioral Analysis Convention (see the listing here). In order to explain how profiling code works, I wanted one of those Family Circus cartoons where little Jeffy goes wandering all over the neighborhood. I thought I’d find them all over the net, but I only found one. I guess the Family Circus lawyers have been doing their work. For the purposes of my talk, though, this was just fine.

The Family Circus is as lame a comic as you are likely to ever run across. Even so, I was surprised by the depth of the hatred that exists for it out there. In my search for the “real” images of cute li’l Jeffy and Billy, I came across dozens and dozens of anti-Family Circus sites. After a while, I started to have more respect for FC creator Bil Keane. He clearly knows exactly how to poke a sharp stainless steel dental tool into the receding gumlines of Goth punks all across the country. To inspire that kind of loathing is no small achievement. Go Bil!

Anyway, my favorite anti-FC site was over at the Progressive Boink. This is the kind of critique I enjoy. Instead of saying Family Circus = LAME, he really deconstructs it. For instance:

In the comic presented here, Billy explains that he is “mousebreaking” Jeffy. Perhaps Billy meant to say “housebreaking,” because “mousebreaking” is not a word. But even if he did spell “housebreaking” right, it doesn’t make any sense, because Billy is teaching Jeffy to use a mouse, not a toilet.

The great thing about pop culture is that if you love it, then you love it, and if you hate it, then you can sit around and talk about why the hell so many people love it. Either way is a win.

Very simple and nicely designed, 300 Images From 1800 Sites has a clip-art-ish collection of icons gathered from sites all over the web. The juxtaposition of, say, 87 shopping carts makes a lovely little magpie shell collection… so many designers struggling to be original in a tiny 16-by-16 pixel space! You can almost hear the conversations: “Can you punch up that tiny mail envelope icon so it looks a little more edgy, so it’s all floaty and fast with a little dangerous-looking zing to it? Like this would be the envelope your parents wouldn’t let you date, you know, but not in a scary way? Could you do that by tomorrow? Thanks!”

Question: can you spot the ugly Amazon shopping cart?