Category: link ‘o the day

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Changes?

So, I’m getting a bit bored with my old WordPress theme, so I’m looking around for other options… This one is called Mandigo and seems to have plenty of options, including a 1024 px setting, rather than simply 800 px (i.e. it fills the screen now…). I have yet to figure out how to really streamline all the links to the right-hand side of the blog, however, so I’ll have to toy with that…

Look okay? Or is the old one better? This one is “widget-enabled,” which theoretically allows me to add some nifty plugins (like a plugin that will randomly rotate photos from my Picasa site…).

Anyway, we’ll see…maybe I’ll switch back…but for now, I’m giving it a try… I’m sure you all care tremendously… 😛

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Internet Culture War

So, there’s a blurb on Slashdot mentioning this article that talks about class divisions between users of MySpace and Facebook. It kinda talks about the history of each, especially how Facebook used to be exclusively for college students and, because of this, seems to be almost more “elitist” in its constituents. For example, Facebook users hated the idea of high school students joining their ranks late last year, and even with the infusion of “younger blood,” the site still seems to contain more educated users, while MySpace users tend to be even younger and less-educated.

One of the more interesting points in the article (about mid-way down) discusses the U.S. military, and more specifically how they banned the use of MySpace, but allow the use of Facebook. This is particularly interesting because officers tend to have Facebook accounts, while lower ranked soldiers have MySpace accounts upon military entry.

So yeah, the article talks about methodology and data recovery to a minor extent, and personally I think some of the “data” may be suspect, but it still brings up an interesting point or two… On a related note, I loathe MySpace… I hate going to MySpace pages and seeing terrible web design, horrible pictures in the background that make a given page nearly impossible for me to read, and I think it’s too easy for people to be able to access someone’s page. Now, on the other hand, I think it’s quite useful for getting your music “out there,” but a better-designed web page would be more useful…

Are different socio-economic classes using each site? Perhaps… I’m not sure this site represents anything definitive, but it does bring up a few interesting points and things to think about. I really don’t use MySpace, so I can’t attest to it… Facebook, however, is very clean and easy to use. I’d almost go so far as to say “elegant.” So, my bias toward Facebook is moreso about useability and access restrictions, rather than “the people that use it” (I’d like to think). Then again, as I scanned through some user groups around the time of the last election (Fall 2006), there were a lot of poorly educated high school students making up all kinds of “science” about stem cells…let alone frequently misspelling things…

Thoughts?

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Political Compass

So, on Facebook, some of you may have added the “Political Compass” application… The problem with this thingie is that it gives you 10 questions, all of which really only determine your political views based on social issues, rather than financial. As in, it’ll ask you about abortion, but nothing about “fiscal responsibility,” a traditionally conservative issue (not so much in today’s political climate, of course…).

Brooke shot me a link (from Liz?) to the real Political Compass, however, a separate website with 6 pages of many different questions that have a bit more range. Here’s how I fared:

My political views...

Here are how other political figures are depicted to fall on the graph:

Everyone else...

Needless to say, I’m rather glad I’m on the complete opposite side from Bush… 😛 The other interesting thing is that Brooke and I had different answers for some questions, yet we still fell in nearly exactly the same place…

So yeah, if you do the survey, lemme know how accurate it is for you. Personally, I think I’m in good company…

Yet, I do take exception to the “Right” being “Neo-Liberalism”…

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Of inspiration and life-direction…

So, as many of you may have heard today, “Mr. Wizard” Don Herbert died today at age 89 of bone cancer. Slashdot reported on the death and, if you read through some of the comments after the posting, you can see what this man meant to a lot of geeks and scientists, let alone the general public. I, personally, remember watching the show back in the 80s on Nickelodeon, but can’t remember specifics, really. I can certainly visualize the studio set and the kinds of experiments he did, but not necessarily specific ones like others can…

Reading through those Slashdot comments, you can see how much of an effect Mr. Wizard had on generations of scientists (his first show was in the 50s…had another in the 80s…), and that for many, he is solely responsible for their interest and fascination with science, much in the same way Carl Sagan is for others.

I guess it makes me wonder how many people can point to a single event, TV show, book, etc. that determined their careers and course in life. It’s the kind of thing you put in your college admission essay, really… For me personally, it was probably “Star Trek: The Next Generation” that piqued my interest, then other science fiction writings/shows after that, but these really only affect “scientific” careers. And moreover, even people that like “Star Trek” or science fiction don’t necessarily become scientists, engineers and mathematicians. What about people that have “always wanted to be a lawyer,” “always wanted to be a banker”, or “always wanted to be a doctor?” Are these people just as inspired by celebrities, books, television shows, and the like? Or are they getting their career direction more from parents and people they know? Are there kids out there that are inspired to become doctors because they watch Zach Braff every week on “Scrubs?”

Either way, much like Carl Sagan, Mr. Wizard brought science into the homes of millions of children, making it accessible to them and their parents. I just hope he knew the effect he had on the world as a whole.

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Of Generation Gaps and Twitter…

So, before yesterday, I’d never heard of Twitter…I had to learn about it from an NPR podcast I listened to… It’s apparently a new social networking phenomenon (a la Facebook or MySpace…) that tells the world what you’re doing at any given time. You can post, IM or use a cell phone with text messaging to post a short blurb giving everyone an update, and then you can subscribe to these updates by various means… For example, I could subscribe to your Twitter account and anytime you’d update it, my cell phone would vibrate and I’d receive a text message letting me know what’s up. You can write any message you want, from “looking at websites” to “eating a ham sandwich”…

According to the Wikipedia article, Twitter has been around since October of 2006… NPR and the New York Times, amongst others, have done articles about it… Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world use it, apparently…and this leads me to my point:

Why did it take until May for me to hear about it?

I guess it means I’ve reached something of a turning point… Up until now, I’ve kept up with technology and websites relatively well – Truman students knew about Facebook before it was even available for them to join, and well before news organizations jumped on it as a “phenomenon”… And I keep up with geeky things like that pretty regularly looking at sites like Slashdot and Engadget… So do we all eventually reach a point when our knowledge of the world becomes antiquated? You hear stories from parents beginning with “when I was your age…” all the time, and at some point, all of our parents probably realized that they were knowing less and less about the generation(s) that were coming after them… My generation is just barely involved in the whole “social networking” thing, but the high school students at church are all over MySpace – I simply have no interest in it. Back in college, I’d hear about stuff from friends in classes and new sites to visit, but we don’t really talk about such things in grad school…I’d assume that “real world jobs” would be similar…

I guess I just wasn’t planning on hitting this realization just before turning 25… I figured it’d happen after I had kids, and after they got a bit older and started getting into their own interests… I wasn’t thinking that I’d reach a point where I can visually see the generation just behind mine gradually distancing itself from mine…if only in this one sector of our lives…

I’m sure I’m just over-reacting, but with the world moving faster and faster and more information becoming available over the internet, it makes you wonder if the number of years between each generational shift is decreasing… For example, I’ve never thought that my sister and I (separated by 3 years) were in different generations, but maybe we are…

Has anyone else heard of or used Twitter, or is it just me?

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Make your own Will Ferrell movie!

Some of you may have already seen this, but I certainly haven’t… It’s the Will Ferrell Movie Generator at Collegehumor.com, and it’s rather sad how true it is… It even gives you an estimate of opening weekend gross and allows you to pitch the idea to your favorite movie studio…

So, I haven’t seen a “Will Ferrell” movie in awhile…no, I didn’t see “Ricky Bobby,” “Anchorman,” and I certainly haven’t seen “Blades of Glory.” While I’m sure all of these are funny, I’m not sure they’re worth my money…mostly because, as this generator illustrates, they stories tend to be somewhat predictable and pointless.

Funny? Yes. Good movie? Only perhaps… Try the generator and make your own instead… 😛

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Ridiculous…

Yeah, so I woke up from my nap to this article in Newsweek that polled Americans about a variety of things, one of which was evolution. 91% of Americans believe in God, which isn’t terribly surprising, however 34% of college graduates believe in the Biblical account of creation. When asked “‘Is evolution well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?”, 48% of Americans said no.

As I’m sure my views on this are pretty clear, I won’t go into an extended rant. Let me just say, however, that this is very disturbing. It’s disturbing primarily because 48% of people believe in a lie (yes, the vast majority of credible scientists believe in natural selection) and also that 34% of college graduates believe that women were created when a rib was taken from Adam, and that it’s more likely that we came from mud rather than monkeys. I’ll quote a comment off Slashdot, because I think he said it pretty well:

“America continues to worry about losing its edge in the high-tech industry. But that couldn’t possibly be related to poor science education, could it?

“Note: I’m referring specifically to the 48% who believe that evolution is not well-supported by scientific evidence and that it is not widely accepted within the scientific community. Well, and the people who think the universe is less than 10,000 years old, despite all the evidence to the contrary. You can believe in God and have an understanding of science, just like you can have morals without being religious. But thinking that evolution isn’t supported by evidence, or isn’t widely accepted by scientists, is just plain ignorance.”

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Wal-Mart…saving the world again…

Who’d have thought it? As some of you may have noticed when buying light bulbs at Wal-Mart recently, they’re starting to make a big push to sell more compact fluorescent bulbs (linked from a New York Times article…you may need to log in…). From the article:

“A compact fluorescent has clear advantages over the widely used incandescent light — it uses 75 percent less electricity, lasts 10 times longer, produces 450 pounds fewer greenhouse gases from power plants and saves consumers $30 over the life of each bulb. But it is eight times as expensive as a traditional bulb, gives off a harsher light and has a peculiar appearance.

“As a result, the bulbs have languished on store shelves for a quarter century; only 6 percent of households use the bulbs today.

“Which is what makes Wal-Mart’s goal so wildly ambitious. If it succeeds in selling 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs a year by 2008, total sales of the bulbs in the United States would increase by 50 percent, saving Americans $3 billion in electricity costs and avoiding the need to build additional power plants for the equivalent of 450,000 new homes.”

Now that Brooke and I have moved to a new apartment, and since AmerenUE is trying to hike electricity rates in Missouri, we’re going to try using compact fluorescent bulbs wherever we can. We got a set of 10 from Sam’s Club a few months ago for $15 (give or take…) and, personally, that seems like a pretty reasonable price to me. That, and I don’t really see much of a difference in the light emitted from them.

Anyway, if you’ve never used the bulbs before, you ought to give them a try. While I generally dislike Wal-Mart, they are certainly a “force of nature” when it comes to retail, so hopefully this push of theirs will result in more people using the bulbs and maybe make some kind of difference in global warming. As the article goes on to discuss, Wal-Mart basically told their suppliers “we’re going ahead with this, so come along or be left behind”…a few of those companies were very much against changing their manufacturing to make more of these “more expensive” bulbs. Maybe if we all start buying these bulbs, such manufacturers will get the idea, eh (cue light bulb going off above their respective heads)?