Google Reader Send To Remember the Milk Lists

This isn't perfect yet, and that makes me angry. But it's getting there, and I'm hoping someone can help me finalize it in the comments.

What this trick will do: Allow you to send articles to specific Remember the Milk lists (I set up a Mad Science Monday list, and another one to add things to my Personal to-do on RTM, and one for food-related articles, and another for work-related articles) from Google Reader.

What you'll need:

• A bookmarklet from Twitlet (follow their instructions).
• An account on Remember the Milk. Set up any lists you want to use there. Your life will be easiest if you make these lists all one word (for example, I used "msm" for my Mad Science Monday list).
• A Twitter account.
• The Remember the Milk rtm Twitter trick.
• A list of things on Google Reader that you want to sort into to-do lists.
• At least a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Do you have all of that set up? Ok, open up your Twitlet bookmarklet (right click and Edit it, most likely, depending on your browser), and copy that mass of confusion in the URL field. All you really want out of that is the part after ?a= and before &t=, which will be a jumbled mass of letters and numbers (that's your personal code for Twitlet).

Now go to Reader, and click Settings, and then Send To. Down at the bottom, click Create a custom link. Name it something to remember it by (for example, I used MSM and To-Do for mine). For the URL field, you want this:

http://www.twitlet.com/updates/?a=YOURCODE&t=d%20rtm%20${title}%20${short-url}%20%23LISTNAME

Obviously, swap in your code for YOURCODE and the name of your list for LISTNAME. If you have spaces in the name of your list, replace them with %20's.

For the Icon URL, enter this: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/favicon.ico (that'll put a RTM icon on it).

Now save it. Make more as necessary. Enjoy.

Oh, you'll have to tell your browser to allow popups from Reader (you need to do that for any Send To), and (here's the annoying part) the window that pops up is pointless; you can close it again after it loads. It just needs to load for this to work. I guess I might be able to kill it with a user script, but that's a bit overboard. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Mad Science Monday, 9/7/2009

I'm under the weather today, so I'm going to keep this week short. This week's article also isn't "mad science," per se, but simply "science" that makes me mad. It also happens to be about drug studies, so I thought it was fitting to give it a look while I'm sick.

What makes me mad isn't so much the study, but that it gets worse every time it's passed through another filter on the web. Today's "Placebos Are Getting More Effective" headline on Slashdot drove me over the edge.

Placebos are not getting more effective. Several factors are combining to make the placebo effect larger compared to the "real" drug in the same studies, but it isn't that something magical is happening with placebos.

First, the studies are getting better. For example, imagine if you were studying a drug in the 1930s (in a world where 1930s researchers knew to do placebo-controlled studies), and this drug was supposed to decrease the incidence of lung cancer. You would create two groups, a placebo control group and an experimental group, making sure to balance for factors you expected to affect the results--age, gender, etc. By chance you might end up with more smokers in your control group than in your experimental group (because why bother controlling for that, if you don't think it has anything to do with cancer?). After your study, you'd likely find that your experimental group had a lower incidence of lung cancer, and thus that your placebo had very little affect compared to your drug. Of course, if you did that same study today, you'd be able to balance your groups for all kinds of known factors, including genetic risks for lung cancer, not just for the smoking bit. More and more, any improvement in your experimental group vs the random improvement of your placebo-controlled group would decrease, which you could choose to see as your placebo magically getting stronger. That's not what it is, though; you're just doing better science. See this great article over at Mind Hacks for more on this side of the effect.

Second, we're getting better at making placebos. We know strange things about human psychology, such as the wondrous bits in the graphic about half-way down the page on Wired's version of this news. We can make the placebo green in an anti-anxiety study, for example, because green pills work better for anxiety medicine (or we can at least make the placebo and the real drug the same color). That doesn't mean something magical is happening, either; it means we know how to harness psychology to boost the effectiveness of the pills, even if the medicine doesn't actually do anything beyond what the placebo does.

Third, the medicines being tested are, very often, just marginal improvements (or potential improvements) on existing drugs. We don't see as much of an effect because there isn't much of an effect to see.

So, if you see the headline I'm expecting this to morph into, something about placebos proving that medicine is unnecessary or some other similar nonsense, be sure to take it with a grain of salt. The pharmaceutical industry is still making improvements to our health, it's just doing so with better scientific practices.

Mad Science Monday, 8/24/2009

Today I'm taking part in a blog hop to wish a happy birthday to UnderstandBlue. I met UnderstandBlue through my sister, Stampin Libby. We took part in the first ever "This Is What a Tweetup Is, Libby" tweetup at Phil's Icehouse (warning: that site makes annoying noises).

So, given that I met UnderstandBlue through Twitter, and I'm taking part in a blog hop, it seemed like a good day to look into the science behind how crap spreads around the internets.

Mad Reference: David Liben-Nowell and Jon Kleinberg. (2008) "Tracing information flow on a global scale using Internet chain-letter data." PNAS 105(12): 4633-4638. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0708471105 (full text available free online)

Mad Background: In 1976, Richard Dawkins introduced the word "meme" in his book The Selfish Gene as a way to describe the cultural equivalent of a gene. A meme is a a replicator, like a gene; it carries an idea, but must be copied to be transmitted. While genes copy through DNA replication, memes copy by being repeated. They still seem to evolve by natural selection, though; as they're copied, sometimes they change a little, and the ones that "work" better (from the meme's perspective, at least) spread.

Mad observations: The word "meme" is, itself, a meme, and has gotten a lot of use lately, specifically in the form of Internet memes. It seems entirely random, though, which things take off on the internet, and which fizzle. But science has a knack for finding patterns and explanations in the seemingly random. Maybe models developed for the spread of diseases will work.

Mad hypothesis: Perhaps internet memes spread "with a rapid, epidemic-style fan-out." If internet chain letters spread like disease epidemics, most people should spread it to several people, most of whom spread it to several people, etc.

Mad experiment: The researchers used an online petition that spread mainly in 2002-2003. Each recipient of this petition was asked to add their name to the end of the petition, and then forward it on to their friends. They collected 637 copies of the petition from mailing-list archives, each representing a distinct chain of participants, totaling 18,119 distinct signatories. They repeated this procedure for another petition that circulated in 1995. They used the multiple copies of each petition to construct a tree diagram, tracing the routes that the letter traveled. This was complicated by "noise," such as rearrangements of the list of names, deletions, insertions, mutations (changing a name on the list to a political figure, for example), and even hybridization when a user apparently received two copies of the petition and merged them together (interestingly, these are all things that happen with genes). Both petitions resulted in similar structures. They then followed all of this up by computationally modeling different patterns of forwarding (including modelling different patterns of the information being posted in a form that they could evaluate, ie taking into account the fact that they couldn't see everything), and seeing which pattern matched the observed trees (if any).

They all laughed, but: The hypothesis that these internet memes would spread in a similar manner to disease epidemics was (at least for these two examples) disproven just from the initial tree constructions. The trees were much longer than they would be for disease epidemics (the average distance between a given individual and the "root" of the tree was much longer than for diseases), and more than 90% of the nodes had exactly one child (ie, most people only spread the meme to one person).

The modeling experiments showed that two parameters had to be added to the disease model in order to get results that matched the petitions. First, not all recipients respond in the same amount of time. Some respond right away, and some take months to respond. This would be similar to a disease with a very widely varying incubation period (the memes don't match real diseases because real diseases don't have such widely varying incubations). Second, some recipients would send the meme back to either the person they got it from or the people the original person sent it to. This also doesn't happen in quite the same way for real diseases, and thus doesn't match known disease spreading patterns.

Of course, this was just a model. It would take more research to determine if the model was correct.

Mad follow-up: Researchers in Spain did the additional research. They started a meme through the IBM company newsletter, and were able to more exactly track its spread, and they found that the spread matched the model's prediction. Moreover, given a small set of initial data on the spread, they were able to predict how far and fast the information would spread (by calculating the parameters used by the model).

Mad engineering applications: Combined with the Spanish research, this is getting close to a way to construct messages to spread far and wide (such as, for example, your Manifesto on Why Everyone Should Bow to Your Will). It definitely isn't there yet; they can predict how far it'll spread given initial information about its spread, but they can't predict it before it's released into the wild. But, given that ability, more experiments are now possible; they don't have to wait until the meme has spread to see how effective it is, they only have to know initial information, so now they can construct slight variants of memes and see what makes different ones spread. Perhaps soon we will know what to include in your Manifesto to get it out there.

BTW, if you want to see the rest of the UnderstandBlue Birthday Blog Hop, start here.

Multi-Parameter Firefox Keywords and Chrome Search Engines

By far, my most popular post is my guide on Firefox Keywords and Chrome Search Engines. I recommend reading that one to get caught up if you don't know what Firefox Keywords and/or Chrome Search Engines are.

Shortly after I wrote that, I found this post on Lifehacker explaining how to combine bookmarklets and keywords for some very clever and useful tricks, but it didn't work on Chrome as written, and I never got around to figuring it out. Tonight I finally took the time to figure it out.

The problem (besides the Lifehacker example being overly complicated) is that Chrome doesn't like {}'s in keywords. Those aren't really necessary unless your keywords are very complicated, though, so I got it to work. This is the code we'll be working with:

javascript:
var s='%s';
url='YOUR URL, WITH %s's FOR EACH TERM';
query='';
urlchunks=url.split('%s');
schunks=s.split(';');
for(i=0; i<schunks.length; i++)query+=urlchunks[i]+schunks[i];
location.replace(query);

As it says in the code, all you need to do is insert the url you want to use, with the usual %s's anywhere you want to insert a search term. You then set it up like any other keyword or search engine (see the other post for how to do that; note: you can just copy/paste the multi-line code into Chrome or Firefox, they don't require that you condense it down to one line first). To use it, just separate your search terms with ;'s.

This fairly simple code can let you do some very cool things. Here's an example for mapping between any two points in Google Maps:

javascript:
var s='%s';
url='http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=%s&daddr=%s';
query='';
urlchunks=url.split('%s');
schunks=s.split(';');
for(i=0; i<schunks.length; i++)query+=urlchunks[i]+schunks[i];
location.replace(query);

I set this up as a Chrome search engine with keyword "mapp" (although something like "directions" might be easier to remember). If I type "mapp NYC; DC", I get a google map between New York City and Washington, DC.

A warning: if you include a space after the ; like I did in that example, you technically get a space before your second search term. I could probably over-complicate the code and clean that out, but it works fine for Google, and I can learn to avoid it once I set up ones that don't tolerate it. Oh, and if you include more ;'s than the keyword has %s's, the extra stuff will just be tacked onto the end (for example, "mapp NYC;DC;Other" tries to generate a map between "NYC" and "DC Other"

If you use this, please let me know in the comments if you come up with any clever ones. Remember: this works for any url that you want to insert something into, not just searches, so there are definitely some interesting possibilities out there waiting to be discovered.

Have a Horrible Day!

Today is the one-year anniversary of the release of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. If you have not yet seen it, watch it now. If you have seen it and love it like I do, show them some love in return.

Remember: It's not about making money, it's about taking money.

Subscribing to Specific Labels

I'm sure most of you reading this like to read everything I write, regardless of whether it's about politics, mad science, or food. However, some of you may only want to keep up on one aspect of my blogging. If so, here's how to subscribe to a specific label (aka tag) from my blog.

1. Figure out which label you want (they're over there on the right), and note it. Make sure you have the spelling right. Click the label to see if there are any special characters you need (for example, "mad science" is actually "mad%20science", because the space has to be encoded as %20 so browsers can understand it; %20 is currently the only special encoding you need for any of my labels, but that could theoretically change in the future).
2. Add that label to the end of this url: http://jonthegeek.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/ (for example, http://jonthegeek.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/mad%20science).
3. Add that url to your favorite RSS reader

That's all it takes. Enjoy!

Note: The same trick works for any blog here on blogger, just replace "jonthegeek" with the url of the blog you want.

Shared Google Reader Items, 6/20/2009

It's that time again: let's take a look at my favorite shared items from Google Reader for this week.

Car-Powered Supermarket Check Outs [Popular Science]

High-flying kites could power New York [Mongabay, via Slashdot; the original article won't load for me in Chrome, which is almost bad enough form for me to not link to it]

I love ideas about "free" energy--not the crazy, fake kind, but the kind where we find way to use energy that's already there to be harvested. These two stories definitely fall in that camp. The first one presumably steals a little gas to get the power, but, since the customers would be slowing down already, it's probably gas that would be used anyway. The second would take a lot of work to set up, but I love the image I get in my head trying to envision a city powered by kites.

With Iran Protests in Mind, State Department Blocks Twitter's Maintenance Outage [Popular Science]

Twitter had scheduled downtime for maintenance this week. That downtime was going to be during the day in Iran. Iranian protestors are using Twitter (among other things) to organize, so the US State Department asked Twitter to move the maintenance to the middle of the Iranian night. Mostly what I love about this is the chance (however slim) that Twitter (and other Web 2.0 sites) could help end the Islamic Revolution in Iran. It was interesting, for example, to hear a discussion last night (I think on Rachel Maddow) about how when Iran cracked down way back in 1999, they could cut protestors off from the world, but not so much in the 21st century. It's a strange world when things can be this different this quickly.

Network of Wi-Fi-Enabled Cyborg Insects Hunts Down WMDs [Popular Science]

I had read about insect detectors several years ago. In short, insects have amazingly good senses of smell (way better than dogs), and can be trained to react to the presence of certain smells (the example I read about was sarin gas, the stuff used in the 1995 Tokyo subway attack). But in the example I read, the insects were put into boxes, and their movements would set off the detectors. This article is about taking that process way to the next level.

In the new scheme, the twitching associated with the insects finding their target scent is detected by a chip mounted on the insect, and information about this can then be sent to other insects. Combined with systems that have already been developed by DARPA (is there any surprise that all of this is funded by DARPA?), the insects in the cohort could even be remote-controlled to help map whatever chemical they're being used to detect (for example, to find a perimeter around a gas release, and/or find the source if it's a chemical that doesn't affect insects).

Other than pissing off PETA, I can't come up with a down side of this research. I love this stuff.

US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive [Daily Telegraph, via Slashdot]

It's sad that it has to happen, but I loved the idea of shrinking Flint when I first heard about it. Basically, Flint is bigger than it needs to be anymore. The factors that led to Flint's growth (primarily the large number of GM plants that were once there) are gone, so the city is now larger than its industry can support. Many houses are empty, and that means garbage, buses, and police have to travel through a lot of empty areas to get to residents. The idea is to move the people in the outlying areas closer to the center of the city, and turn those empty areas into parks and such. It's a big change, but, since it will reduce crime and presumably increase property values, residents seem to support it.

Dan Kildee, the treasurer of Genesee County (which includes Flint), came up with the idea, and outlined it to Barack Obama while Obama was campaigning. Kildee has now been approached byt he Federal government to apply the idea to other cities that have lost the support to remain as large as they are.

Construction Begins on Spaceport America [Popular Science]

Virgin Galactic has broken ground in construction of the spaceport they'll use to launch commercial space flights. Construction has begun on the world's first spaceport. When this thing is done, it is officially The Future. Glee!

University of Colorado team finds definitive evidence for ancient lake on Mars [Eurekalert, via Slashdot]

A team at UC Boulder found the shoreline of a 3-billion-year-old lake on Mars, which was once 80 square miles and 1500 feet deep (the article says that's roughly equivalent to Lake Champlain, but Champlain is more than 5 times that area; Champlain isn't as deep, though, so I guess the total volume might be equivalent). More interestingly, they found deltas surrounding the basin, indicating that the lake was probably long-lived. And if there was water for a long time depositing material into deltas, we may have just found a very good place to look for evidence of life on Mars.

That's it for this week. As always, leave any comments on these or any of my other shared items below.

Obsessing Over My Music Library

Update: See below for edits regarding iWatchSyncer.

Most of my music listening occurs on my laptop at work, but most of my music library is on my desktop computer at home. A friend introduced me to Dropbox, which has allowed me to mostly easily transfer music between home and work, but I still had a problem. Often, I'd randomly think of a song that I hadn't heard in a while, and, inevitably, it wouldn't be one of the ones I had transferred to my laptop. Sometimes I'd remember to remedy that when I got home, but I knew I could do better. Finally, as of this past weekend, I can.

I'm still working out some kinks, but I can now:

• Access any song in my library from anywhere (as long as I have internet access, which I do as long as I have my phone and/or a laptop).
• Access my library through an easy-to-remember URL.
• Download any track in my library to whatever computer I'm on (this one doesn't seem to work on my phone yet, unfortunately).
• Play any track from my library, as long as I have the Flash player.
• Add newly acquired music to my library from any computer.

How did I accomplish this wonder of modern technology? Read on. Note: These are instructions for Windows. If you want to do this on Linux, you can probably do it much more easily. If you want to do this on Mac, there's probably a way to do it, but I don't know what that is.

1. Install iTunes.

I would have preferred to do this in a player-neutral manner (particularly because iTunes sucks for the "add to my library" step), but the share-the-library-online program uses your iTunes library, so c'est la vie. The more organized you can get your library in iTunes, the better. Mine is currently terrible, but Lifehacker has at least one post every week about a new tool that will make tagging and organizing your iTunes library easy. So far they haven't, but I keep hoping.

2. Install pulpTunes.

This is the meat of the process, the thing that will share your library. Two things: If you have a router, you'll have to open up port 15000 for it (specifically, you'll have to direct traffic on that port to the machine that's running it). Instructions for how to do that are included, and vary by router. You should also set up a password for it (both an admin and a normal user, if you want to give access to anyone else); that isn't enabled by default. On Vista, it may also be necessary to run this as admin (I'm not sure).

3. Set up Dynamic DNS.

This step isn't strictly necessary (especially if you have a static IP address or don't reboot your router very often), but I wanted to make this easy and stable, so I set it up. Be sure to use the auto-updater app from DynaDNS, so your alias will update if, for example, there's a power outage wherever you're hosting your library.

4. Get Dropbox.

Again, this isn't strictly necessary, but Dropbox is sweet, and adding tracks to your library from anywhere is nice. Set this up on any machine that you use often, but you can also access it online (so anything you put in your Dropbox is already accessible from anywhere, but I'm assuming you want to have more than 2GB of music available).

5. Install iWatchSyncer (for now).

I am not in love with this solution yet, but it's the best I've found (Update: It does everything I need it to do; I think the LifeHacker review sold it short, or perhaps I just misunderstood what it did). I wish iTunes would just do this automatically like every other music player, but oh well. Set this up to monitor your Music folder in Dropbox. In theory, Whenever you dump something into that folder (from anywhere), it'll get added to your iTunes library.

I say "in theory" because, although this worked great when I first tested it, it doesn't seem to be updating as quickly as I'd like. I need to look into it more, and will post an update when I have one. It's possible I just have to reload my pulpTunes instance when I get home to push the update; I'm not sure yet. More info on that when I have it.

The drawback of iWatchSyncer (versus the other, similar program Lifehacker recommended) is that it can't recurse subdirectories; you have to dump anything you want synched "flat" into your Music folder (ie, as the file only, without any folders). The problem with the other one Lifehacker recommended is that they wanted me to give them money in order to actually use it, and I didn't want to actually pay for any of this.

6. Set up all of that stuff to load when Windows loads.

Some of it will do it automatically, some won't. Make sure it all does, mostly in case your power goes out.

That's it! Trust me, it's easy. Let me know if you have any tweaks to make it work even better.

Shared Google Reader Items, 4/14/2009

Darnit, it took me a week to get back to my shared items from Google Reader again. Here goes...

Science:

• Bacon cures hangovers. Thank you once again, science! Is there anything you can't do?
• Scientists in Australia have apparently found a way to stop the body from attacking (and rejecting) organ transplants. This might be even cooler than the bacon thing.
• I found it utterly unsurprising that chimps have to take their lady friends out to dinner to get laid.
• If you ever find yourself back in time, it would be useful to have this sheet. He promises to fix the H-2-zero typo in the next printing, too.

Technology:

• Slashdot points us to a tutorial on putting together a multitouch "Surface PC" for far less than the $10k Microsoft wants for theirs. I have to find some money to try this...
• My iFriend David comes up with cool ideas on his blog, and then people actually make them. That is cool.
• This almost makes me want a cat.
• It's getting close. Soon something will happen with 3d printers to revolutionize the world. This is a step in that direction.

Entertainment:

• My former coworker Amanda has a new collection of short stories out. Her previous books have been awesome, so I highly recommend this one. Whoot, I just noticed she has Kindle editions now. Very nice.
• Woody Harrelson defended himself after attacking a photographer by claiming that he thought the photographer was a zombie. I blame McCarron.
• Disney reuses dances. I'm not terribly surprised, but at least a little.

The Internets:

• Google has fully integrated search-by-color into image search. Neat!
• InfoChimps is a cool website. Go vote for them.
• Microsoft did something cool. Their live search can now solve algebra equations. So far it looks like it can only handle single-variable equalities, but it's still cool.
• Amazon has almost 800 free mp3s available from their library. It's a clever trick. I'm probably going to buy at least one album based on a very good sample I downloaded.

Politics:

• This has been all over the place in the almost-week since I originally shared it, but, in case you haven't seen it, the ad by the National Organization for Marriage about big bad scary gay marriage is unintentionally hilarious.
• Gov. Paterson of New York is going to introduce a same-sex marriage bill. It's about time, New York. Iowa beat you? Seriously??

Awesome:

• PG&E is going to get power beamed down from solar panels in space. I don't know how efficient or real it is, but the idea is awesome. And, if it works, it could even be useful.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 4/7/2009

Holy crap, I posted shared items from Google Reader just yesterday, and here I am posting again! Woohoo!

Atheism:

• Every year, more and more people call themselves non-religious. Don't worry, we don't bite.

Green:

• I can't decide what I think about the GM/Segway PUMA.

Politics and Government:

• Yesterday I noted that Sweden's parliament had legalized gay marriage, and I pined for that sort of thing happening in America. Today, that sort of thing happened in America. Kudos, Vermont.
• Dammit, Obama administration. Stop it. Just stop it.

The Internets:

• iTunes went live with their "tiered pricing" today, which turned out to be more of a price increase than a price restructuring. Big surprise there.

Science (and Food):

• Want a better boiled egg? Try science.

Wow, that's it. These are really short when I do them daily. I should try this more often.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 4/6/2009

Last time I posted my shared items from Google Reader, I said that maybe I'd get on a daily schedule. Oops.

Science:

• There may be a link between autism and vinyl floors. This is only an initial finding, but at least people switching from PVC floors won't doom their kids (and other kids) to die of measles.
• However, the correlation might not mean anything. Take, for example, this strong correlation between US highway fatalities and lemon imports from Mexico.
• What can happen when poorly characterized correlations are misidentified as causes: As of last week, Jenny McCarthy and other anti-vaxxers have killed 150 people.
• Looking to cut unhealthy foods out of your diet? It may be a bad idea to go to restaurants with healthy options, then. A new study found that having salad as an option for a side made people more likely to order a side of fries. Or for the more evil spin on that: If any of you own or plan to some day open a restaurant, take note. Put something cheap-but-healthy in the "extras" areas of your menus, and people are more likely to order one of those extras. I wonder if it'd also apply to other extras. Maybe we'll start seeing things that are actually useful in supermarket checkouts, to trick us into buying more candy bars.
• Want to boost your willpower? Lifehacker (and a Case Western study) says to brush your teeth with the wrong hand. Apparently this is also supposed to help you avoid Alzheimer's.
• Bad Astronomy included an announcement of a cool contest today: create a stick-figure cartoon that can be used to educate people about a false argument. Cool.
• I love this video of the Sun's surface. I mean, think about it for a minute. That's the surface of the Sun. When you watch that video, you're seeing the structure of that surface. People 100 years ago didn't even know if the surface of the Sun had structure, and now we can watch videos of it. Neat.

The Internets:

• PageZipper is a neat bookmarklet for stitching together long pages. It's particularly useful for The Big Picture. Now to learn user script coding, so I can make it auto-run for The Big Picture.
• I find it funny but unsurprising how many versions of the story about internet surfing increasing productivity showed up in various Google Reader shared lists.
• Worried that you might have the Conficker virus? Check this page to find out. I love how simple and clever that site is.
• If you use Gmail, I highly recommend turning on Search Autocomplete in Gmail Labs. I can't think of a downside to it, and the upside is that it can teach you some neat search tricks. For example, type "has" after you turn it on.
• I shared a story about Google being in late-stage talks to acquire Twitter, but it now has an update saying it's not true. Darn, I thought that could be interesting.
• The Associated Press is going to try to stop web aggregators from using their stories. In other words, the AP doesn't want anybody to read their stories. I'm going to try to avoid doing so going forward. Pssst, AP: try to find a model that works, rather than trying to sue the model that people want out of existence.
• Lifehacker pointed me to a cool pair of bookmarklets to tag things to read later and then pull one off your list. A friend pointed me to one that does the same sorta thing, but allows you to read the stuff you put on your list from other devices (or, I just noticed, by pulling them into an aggregator as an RSS feed). I need to search around each to find which I actually recommend, but for the moment Instapaper wins just because Lifehacker's recommendation got smashed into oblivion by click-throughs, and this is the sorta thing that might continue to tax a server.

Geek Culture:

• Thinkgeek made an awesome Tauntaun sleeping bag as an April Fools' prank. Now demand is so high that they might actually make it. Please please please please please. Also, please sell it in adult sizes.
• Two geeks in New Jersey made fools out of a lot of people with a simple UFO hoax. Strong work.

Politics and Government:

• Sweden's Parliament voted last Wednesday to allow same-sex marriage (226 to 22). That's like Congress voting to allow it. That's awesome, I wish we could get to that point.
• But hey, at least Iowa's Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in Iowa. It's a start. According to 538, it might even survive.
• The US government will launch Data.gov in late May to provide a clearing house of government data. Very, very cool.
• I love Obama. "I've said before that one of the great strengths of the United States is, although as I mentioned we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."

Green:

• Lifehacker had a video about a great trick to light things like workshops in sunny places: 2-liter bottles with water and a bit of bleach. Brilliant.
• Off-shore windpower might exceed US electricity demand. Holy crap. Let's get that figured out.

Technology:

• T-Mobile is going to launch an Android-powered tablet. I hope it's going to be actual touchscreen, like a G1 or iPhone, not stylus-based... but it'll be interesting to see how they solve screen-scratching potential in something as large as a laptop if that's the case.

Awesome:

• Sure, I could have put this in the Science block, but it really needed its own tag: a robot made a scientific discovery all by itself. To be clear, this wasn't a group of scientists deciding what the robot should investigate and using the device to test their hypothesis. The robot was given a pool of data, and software to analyze that data in order to make its own hypothesis. It then designed experiments to test that hypothesis, carried them out, and analyzed the results. That is unbelievably awesome. I, for one, welcome our new robot scientist overlords.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 3/31/2009

It's only been a weekend and a day since my last update of shared items from Google Reader. Maybe I can get back to a daily schedule!

Education:

• Lifehacker ran through the Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education. Many of them are very specific, but there's definitely some cool stuff out there.
• Campus computer labs are dying, morphing instead into wifi hotspots. As a former nearly-full-time resident of the CCLI at MTU, that's a little sad. I'm not sure we would have all ended up there for a wifi hotspot.
• Toddlers can't plan for the future much, even when told to do so; they need negative reinforcement showing them why such planning is necessary. In other words, they aren't ignoring your warnings because they're obstinate, it's because their brains don't work that way. Well, not just because they're obstinate.

Atheism:

• This sign at Beryl Baptist Church pretty much says it all. I did the link that way hoping to push Pharyngula up in searches for "Baptist church," because that would be both funny and useful.
• The UN is calling religion a pussy again, claiming it can't survive people making fun of it. Poor religion. So useless, so ridiculous, so unnecessary. I'm sorry, though; I'll continue to call a spade a spade, and a religion a harmful, steaming pile of bullshit.

Politics:

• Gates says no quick end to "don't ask, don't tell." Liberals see no quick end to thinking maybe keeping a Bush appointee was a bad idea.

Science:

• Playing certain types of videogames (specifically first-person shooters) improves vision. Damn. I generally hate those things.

Technology:

• My mecha is one step closer. Honda has developed my control system for it.

The Internets:

• Ah, browser user scripts. Is there anything you can't do? Lifehacker gave me two new things you can do: auto-hide message labels in gmail (for screens where they don't fit as well), and fix the mess that is the new Facebook. Don't believe it when Lifehacker says those things are "Firefox only." I think IE is the only browser left that doesn't support them, as long as you're using the beta Chrome 2... and even IE 8.1 is rumored to support them.

Random:

• Thanks to a camera phone, the end of the rainbow has been found and photographed. I'm pretty sure that SUV ran over the leprechaun and scattered his gold.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 3/27/2009

It's been a busy couple weeks since my last shared items from Google Reader update. Sorry I took so long!

Science:

• Obama ended the ban on stem-cell research funding. Things that are stupid about the idiots who are against stem-cell funding:
  
  1. The things being used for research are blobs of cells. They're less human than a patch of dry skin that flakes off.
  2. The blobs of cells are incinerated when they aren't used in research. How is incinerating these blobs of cells less bad than using them to learn?
  3. The assholes love to point out that embryonic stem cells haven't shown as much promise as other types of stem cells... ya know, the types of stem cells that have received government funding for research. If embryonic stem cells are so great, why can't researchers learn things from them when the research isn't being done, huh??? Answer that!
• A chimp at a Swedish zoo hoarded rocks to later throw at people. In other words, the chimp planned for future events. That is very cool.
• These photos of undersea eruptions near Tonga are awesome, moreso after the confirmation that this event wasn't associated with a tsunami or anything.

Politics:

• Obama ordered his administration to consult with AG Holder before using the content of Bush signing statements (ie, to ignore them unless Holder says otherwise). Mostly awesome news, although he signaled that he might use them himself.
• Diebold admitted that its voting software had a flaw: it failed to record deletion of ballots. Um, that's a pretty big flaw.

Education:

• Students who listen to podcasts of lectures outperform students who attend lectures.
• Woohoo! The Texas board of education didn't ammend the science standards to include "strengths and weaknesses" garbage about evolution (an attempt to set natural selection apart as a weak theory, rather than one of the strongest). Hurray, science education survives in Texas!
• Er, survived in Texas. Six hours later, an ammendment to require teachers to tell their students that there are different estimates for the age of the Universe passed 11-3. Ok, technically there are different estimates, but they result in an age of 13.7 +/- 0.12 billion years. The young-Earth creationists on the board think that +/- 0.12 billion is close enough to the +/- 13.7 billion (to three sig figs) that they believe, and want to make sure students have room to think that their nonsense is backed by science.
• In better news, YouTube and a site called Academic Earth have each put together directories of the various educational videos available online. YouTube's offering contains over 200 full courses. Very interesting.

Technology:

• Sometimes I think Scott Adams is watching me.
• Research for my mecha is almost complete: UT-Dallas scientists have created nanotube-based artificial muscles, and European researchers are making microchips that physically mimic brains (I assume this will be useful for the complex control systems that my mecha will require).

Astronomy:

• I want to believe Space Bat survived his trip, and will return one day to save us from Mothra or something.
• The entire Cosmos series is now on Hulu. This needs to get hugely popular, inspiring someone to make a series somewhere near as awesome.

The Interwebs:

• You can filter google image searches by color by adding "&imgcolor=COLORNAME" (such as "&imgcolor=green") to the end of an image search. Neat!
• User scripts work in the beta (or dev) version of Chrome. I now have subfolder-labels in my gmail inbox. Woot!

Business:

• Peter Bregman at the Harvard Business blog says small businesses will win in this economy. I hope he's right.
• On a related note, a BusinessWeek column from 2000 wondering how Google will possibly ever make money (particularly since it's focused purely on search, not on the lucrative portal market like competitors [never heard of them] and [oh yeah, remember altavista?].

Psychology:

• Zenhabits had some good tips for beating procrastination. #7 is best: "Put something you dread more at the top of your to-do list — you’ll put off doing that by doing the other things on your list." I've been using it (combined with Gmail Tasks), and it works like a charm. Well, better than a charm, since charms don't work.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below (or on Reader if you use it, with the cool new comment feature).

Shared Google Reader Items, 3/8/2009

Here are my shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Entertainment:

• Who watched the Watchmen? I did, and loved it. PZ Myers at Pharyngula also did, and wrote a better review than I could. Warning: some things in there might be spoilers if you don't know the story, I'm not sure.
• Judd Apatow is directing Ghostbusters 3. Will it be hilariously awesome, like Ghostbusters, or hilariously terrible, like Ghostbusters 2?
• Time Warner is offering subscriptions to its channels (such as CNN and TNT) on the interwebs. Very interesting.
• The entire Seinfeld cast will reunite on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Excellent.
• A company plans to sell an electric guitar that also works for Guitar Hero (and, I would hope, Rock Band). Sweet.

Geek Culture:

• My friend Jon sent me an interesting site, listing "What's Special About This Number" for most numbers from 0 to 9999 (well, at least many of them, I didn't check whether it's more than 50%).

Technology:

• A team at Arizona State University, working with E-Ink (the company that makes the digital ink for the Kindle and Sony Reader), have developed bendable, touch-screen e-paper. This is very, very, very interesting to me. Imagine having a reader you can roll up and put in a backpack or briefcase, but then fold out to read that day's newspaper or a new book. Neat.
• A bionic eye has given a blind man weak sight. It's a big step in an awesome direction.
• The Kepler space telescope, which will search for Earth-like extra-solar planets, launched successfully Friday night. I thought that was awesome enough, but then I found out (by crossposting my Google Reader links on Facebook) that a childhood friend-of-the-family worked on the launch as a NASA engineer. I'm so jealous.

Programming:

• I found a neat online favicon generator. If you don't know what that is, you probably don't need to know.

Science:

• Gravitational waves may have been detected in 1987. This would be very cool. I don't entirely understand gravitational waves, but they may travel faster than the speed of light, and that's very interesting. Perhaps we're listening in the wrong spectrum for ET communications, for one thing.
• Obama is reversing Bush's stem-cell research (effective) ban. Very cool, but what took him so long? That was rumored as a day 1 fix.

The Interwebs:

• PDFVue lets you edit PDF documents online. Convenient.
• Dropbox is a cool way to synchronize files between computers (for example, I use it to transfer docs from my office computer to home, and vice versa). If you sign up through that link, I get extra storage. It's win-win!
• Stephen Wolfram claims that he has a site that can answer questions (ie, when you search for "How many bones are in the human body?", it will return an answer, rather than a list of pages that might have the answer). That will be very interesting if it actually works (come May, when the site says it will be available).

Politics:

• Goddammit, John Conyers (D-MI). You have it absolutely backwards. He wants to force researchers to only publish in journals, not to any of the free sources. Stop it!

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 2/26/2009

It's been almost a week since I last did this! Doh! Here they finally are, my shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Art:

• I love Photoshop, but I'm not as good at it as I should be after using it for... holy jeebus, about 15 years now! I want to get better, so I need to start using VunkySearch's tutorial finder thingy.

Technology:

• Researchers found a way to make solar power cheaper. Any time now solar should make sense (sadly, it usually doesn't right now; it hurts the environment enough to make solar cells that their benefit probably doesn't offset it). How long after that do you think it'll take for it to actually be used?
• I'm so in love with this key finder idea that I want to elope with it and bear its children.

Psychology:

• A couple weeks ago, I mentioned an interesting-sounding survey over at Cognitive Daily. Soon after that (but not soon enough to make it into my last update), they posted results. Turns out we're more random than at least one of their readers thought.

The Internets:

• The stimulus bill requires that each government agency report money it gives out via RSS. Neat.
• I'm using Gmail's new multiple inboxes feature, and I think I like it.
• Speaking of Gmail, attaching multiple files in Gmail is now easier. Can gDrive be far away?
• This xkcd comic notes something I noticed with my Kindle the first time I laid eyes on it; that's why I re-read the Hitchhiker's series on it, and set up this store. Took him long enough!
  

Politics:

• Legalization of marijuana is more popular than key conservative leaders.
• 538.com examines the same question I had: Was volcano monitoring really the worst thing Kenneth Jindal could find in the stimulus bill? Really? The Governor of Louisiana can't see the economic benefit in paying people to make sure people aren't killed by volcanos? Really??
• News organizations can now show photos of returning war dead, after an 18-year ban. The reason reversing this was important was so Americans could get a clear picture of what these wars are costing. I think we're already starting to get that, but better late than never on the reversal.
• The economy tanking may have a good result: states are scrapping barbarism because it's too expense. Woot.
• Obama has picked former Washington Governor Gary Locke for Commerce. Let's hope third time's a charm...
• Because I like to be fair, here's FactCheck.org's run-down on Obama's speech. I think most of those "exaggerations and factual misstatements" are what I'd call "rhetorically true," meaning that the truth fits at least one interpretation of what he said, whether that's the interpretation most people would jump to first or not... but anyway, it's good to check this sorta thing.
• The Senate has passed the DC Voting Rights Bill 61-37. The idea sounds great, but, dammit, it's illegal. You can't just change the Constitution because it sounds like a good idea. You need to ammend it. It's not that complicated: "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed." That's quoted from the 14th Amendment, because we already realized once that the original was broken. Fixing it again wouldn't be a big thing, but you can't change the Constitution through a bill, no matter how good of an idea you think the bill is.

Science:

• Researchers are getting close to a universal flu vaccine. Neat. Someone was talking about something similar at a party recently (because that's the sort of party I attend), but they had the process all wrong.
• Learn all about nanotechnology and why it's cool through the Nano Song. Strong work.

Entertainment:

• The Oscars didn't show Don LaFontaine in their dead people montage. That's terribly lame.
• Jim Kakalios, author of the awesome The Physics of Superheroes (great read, I highly recommend it), was a consultant on The Watchmen movie, and made a video about it. Neat.
• U2's Bono and the Edge are writing music and lyrics for a Spider-Man musical, set to premier in 2010. Awesome.

Atheism:

• Teehee. (BTW, for those who think I filed the comic under the wrong heading, "atheist" and "agnostic" pretty much mean the same thing, I just prefer the taken-as-more-shocking term. If you aren't sure that you believe in something, particularly something that damns you to eternal torment for not swearing fealty to it, you don't believe in it.)
• The UN has passed a resolution trying to ban making fun of religion. The response to that is obvious: Fuck you, religion! In case that's not specific enough, I'm talking about you, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. Are you such a bunch of pussies that you need special protection? Aw, what's wrong, religion? Is free speech telling you you're unnecessary? Suck it up and take it like a man.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 2/18/2009

It's time again to discuss some shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

The Internets:

• This is the best place I could think to put this interactive map of front pages across the US. Neat!
• Facebook gave up, the TOS change is no more.
• This finance tracking thingy Lifehacker told us about today looks useful. I'm gonna give it a try.
• A free application called Queued promises to make Netflix queue management better.
• In that I now use two different applications to keep track of all my tweets, this comic tickled me.

Science:

• Geographers at UCLA think they've narrowed the search for Bin Laden to one of three houses in a certain city in Pakistan. Very cool, especially if accurate.

Politics:

• 538.com has a good explanation of what's going on with the banking crisis.

That's it today. As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 2/17/2009

It's time again to discuss some shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Digital Rights:

• Facebook swears we own our stuff we put on Facebook. I agree, but it's nice for them to say so before the lawsuits.
• Inspired by all this Facebook insanity, Lifehacker points us to privacy settings every Facebook user should know.

The Internets:

• NBC now has HD episodes available for download. Neat.

Technology:

• Universal chargers are (slowly) coming to cell phones. When I mentioned this plan a week and a half ago, the article I referenced said cell phone companies were against the idea. So I'm going to assume me blogging about it made it happen.

Science:

• It turns out men really do objectify women when the women are dressed subjectively. We knew that, but we were trying to keep that information to ourselves.

Politics:

• Burris didn't talk to any of Blago's people only talked to his brother, but not about money when they talked about money Burris wasn't able to raise any. Jeez, isn't that close enough to what he originally said? Why's everyone down on Burris?

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 2/15/2009

Here are today's shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

The Internets:

• With a simple edit to a text file, you can make Firefox ignore security settings and remember passwords. Be careful using this one. The bookmarklet version is also neato.
• We can now edit Google Spreadsheets on our phones. I can barely imagine all of the possibilities! (Note: Like many geeks, I have an unnatural love for spreadsheets.)
• "Web 2.0" has passed from a buzzword into being an actual thing. It's becoming uncool to invest in Web 2.0, and I'm hoping investors will realize the reason the hype has gone down is that now it's the right way to make a website.

Technology:

• IBM has patented a bullet-dodging bionic suit. Seriously. We definitely have the technology now.
• Samsung has released a solar-powered mobile phone. This means we can edit our spreadsheets all day without fear of power loss!
• Abraham Lincoln was a technology nut, and even had a patent. Cool.
• Liquid wood is coming back as a possible plastic replacement. It's good to see there's something in the works as a plastic replacement. If we switched to 100% alternative energy today, we'd still need a crapton of oil to make plastic. We need to find a plastic replacement, or our reliance on fossil fuels can't go away.

Politics:

• Andrew Sullivan is still not happy with the party to which he supposedly belongs. I think he hoped they'd become his ideal of the party after Bush left office, and is now even angrier.
• Roland Burris now says Blago's brother asked him to donate to buy the Senate seat, but Burris also claims he didn't do so. BTW, NYTimes.com seems to be requiring a login more often than it used to. Sorry about that. I'll probably switch to a different general news feed.

Psychology:

• I don't know what Cognitive Daily is planning with this survey, but it looks interesting.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Firefox Keywords and Chrome Search Engines

In my last blog, I mentioned Chrome search engines, and how you can use them to make your address bar smarter. I had never noticed these in Firefox, but they're also there. Chrome makes them a bit more obvious (with the "Press TAB to search..." thingies), and adds them automatically for pages that you search on that are formatted in a way that Chrome can recognize, but they're there for all of us (well, except weirdos using IE or Safari; they might be there, too, but who would know?). These things are very useful if you have to poke around within a site a lot with just slightly changed URLs (I need to do this several times a day, loading different itemIDs in an author view or student preview), but they're also useful if all you want to do is search. Here's how they work.

Firefox:

1. Create a new bookmark. It can be any page; we're going to edit it to make it what we want. Starting from Google for a Google-based keyword wouldn't be a bad idea, though, to get the favicon right.
2. Click Bookmarks, then right click the new bookmark and choose Properties (or whatever the equivalent is on Mac).
3. Change the Name to something to remember it by in case you need to edit it in the future, such as "Google Map Search" (or whichever one you might be setting up).
4. Change the Location to the url you're going to search, with %s for the word or phrase you want to search on. To put that in concrete language and hopefully make it more comprehensible, let's do one of my favorites, "map" (for looking something up in Google Maps). We'll do a cooler version of this in a sec, but this is an easier place to start. For this one, your Location is http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=%s
5. Most importantly, change the Keyword to something short to type, "map" in this case.
6. Save changes.

Chrome:

1. Right click the address bar, and choose "Edit search engines."
2. Click "Add"
3. The name, keyword, and url are the same as Firefox. The only difference is that Chrome will give you the "Press TAB" clue to let you know that you have a keyword setup with that name.

To use these things, type your keyword in the address bar, followed by your search (for example, "map 123 Fake Street, 78754". The page will load, with your search.

Note that these don't have to use search engines; any time you can fill in a phrase in a url to go to a page you're looking for, it works. It's hard to give you examples of that, since I can't show you the ones I use at work... but, well, for example, this one will load an xkcd comic by ID number:

• keyword: xkcd
• location: http://xkcd.com/%s

Typing "xkcd 526" in your address bar would then load one of my favorite xkcds, which you should keep around for reference.

Here are some others (note: in Chrome, I highly recommend just going to most of these pages and searching to get them into your list, and then editing the keywords; the url they grab has some extra trickiness that's neat, but I'm not going to sort out all of how those extra bits work):

• YouTube: you, http://youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_query=%s&search_sort=relevance
  
• Amazon: am, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search/?field-keywords=%s&mode=blended
• IMDB: imdb, http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%s
• Merriam-Webster: mw, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%s
• Allrecipes.com: cook, http://allrecipes.com/search/recipes.aspx?withterm=%s
• Images.google.com: i, http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&q=%s&btnG=Search+Images
• Maps.google.com: map, http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=%s

And this brings me to my favorite: mapto. This one is slightly trickier. The easiest thing to do is probably to search for your starting address (I have this set as my work address for my work lappy, and my home address for my home desktop) using "map YourAddress," and then copy that string into this.

Here's an example, with 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, District of Columbia 20006 (the White House) as our starting address:

• Keyword: mapto
• Location: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&saddr=1600+Pennsylvania+Ave+NW,+Washington,+District+of+Columbia+20006&daddr=%s&hl=en

Notice the +'s; if you're careful, you could just change that to your address. You can actually shorten that a bit; for example, this would also work:

• Location: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&saddr=1600+Pennsylvania+Ave,+20006&daddr=%s&hl=en

Once you have that set up, you can type "mapto DestinationAddress" (for example, "mapto 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, 20006"), and a map from your starting address to that destination address will load.

Let me know in the comments if you have any other creative uses of keywords.

ETA: Be sure to check out the follow-up to this post, where I discover way cooler tricks.

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 2/10/2009

Here are today's shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Science:

• Trees are marching north at a rate of about 1 km/year. Kudos to NatGeo for the Ents reference, but boo on the sig fig error (100 km/century = 60 miles/century, not 62, no matter what Google might tell you). Bad NatGeo!
• Oh great. We were told the other day that many renewable energy technologies rely on non-renewable materials. Now Scientific American points out that biofuels are bad for feeding people and combating climate change. Dammit.
• Carl Safina informs us in the NYTimes that "Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live," calling on biologists to stop worshipping Darwin. He refrains from asking biologists whether they've stopped beating their wives. Pharyngula points out some of the many things wrong with Safina's diatribe.

The Internets:

• Firefox 3.2 (or possibly 4.0) will have natural language abilities. Natural language (and the semantic web, its close cousin) is the next big thing that'll happen to the web. It's cool to see it's coming. I mean, I already have a lot of that through fancy Chrome search engines (I should probably blog about how to do that one of these days...), but it's cool that it'll be built in.
• Chris Wilson at Slate is performing memetic research. If you took part in the "25 random things" meme, get thee over there to help them out!
• Microsoft is offering domaing name registration and hosting free for a year, $15/year after that. That's an incredibly good deal, so good that I really don't trust it. If you've thought about setting up a website, check it out and let us know if it feels legit.
• Google plans to offer real-time power-consumption monitoring. I love this idea, particularly the services to warn you of spikes and auto-map those to causes that will grow out of it. Neat.
• Um, Lifehacker? It's built into Reader, we just need to drag that "Note in Reader" link up from "Your Stuff" to our bookmark bar. Why would we download something? Well, ok, I really wanted to find something to make a hotkey out of it, but I'm not sure it's worth the script (especially since I've gotten in the habit of using bookmarklets).

Technology:

• A new artificial arm listens to brain signals. Neat! We have the technology!

Politics:

• Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley want to give us our money back. Before you fall down in shock, don't worry, it isn't altruistic; it's because they're afraid they'll get more regulation.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.