Adobe Photoshop CS4 will include a new feature: content aware scaling. I am geeking out.

Ah, design is becoming so democratic! Free market! Even your grandma can do it!

via Joey:

Google’s solution to a “certain problem” is to have the user answer some math questions within a time limit at certain hours of the night, on Friday and Saturday.

But me, I get drunk and send inappropriate emails at all hours of the day.

Google proposes that “surely if you can do basic math problems then you have a solid command of what is and is not socially appropriate when it comes to late night email.” However, some question the initiative’s effectiveness:

Not really. Drinking seems to lower inhibitions more than it lowers other abilities such as math skills, and at least for me it never lowers my math skills enough that I would fail this.

Yeah, I had a friend in college who, when drunk, would only ever talk about two things: Thomas Aquinas’s epistemology… and his fiancee’s hymen.

Proud American is a new docudrama (of sorts) chronicling “five powerful singular stories” magnifying “the pillars that make America a truly grand society.” Directed by award-winning corporate media producer Fred Ashman, this “loving look at the American Dream” is beautifully shot in 75mm thanks to some charitable funding by Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, MasterCard, and American Airlines. Of course, with two of the five stories follow the founding of Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola, having their money in the project might go without saying.

This movie is a farce. Somehow it has managed 14% on Rotten Tomatoes. And somehow it has 2.3/10 stars on IMDB, where one user rightly called the movie the “World’s Most Expensive After-School Special”. But it is a farce. Right? It has to be. Otherwise it is the world’s longest commercial; another disgusting, disturbing attempt by corporate America to leverage patriotism into consumerism.

Why do I eerily foresee this film making its ways into classrooms, shown right beside those lame school videos during social studies?

Fun fact: “Opening in 750 theaters, Proud American managed to earn only $96,076, or $128 per venue — the worst for any wide release in the United States since at least 1982.”

Yes, I think any Star Wars jokes instantly qualify for the “nerd alert!” tag.

Revolving around the ephemeral “web 2.0″ and the future of the internet, Web 2.0 Expo New York wrapped up over the weekend, and already the talks are up at the blip.tv Web2Expo page. (The San Francisco talks from April are also up for viewing.) The expo runs the gamut from technology to business, but most interesting were the talks on web 2.0 structure by Jay Adelson of Digg.com and author Clay Shirky. Shirky’s talk, It’s not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure., especially titillated my nerd bones, so here it is in all its bald-headed, fast-talking glory:

Basically, Shirky proposes that consequences we normally attribute to an explosion of available information thanks to the internet is actually attributable to a failure of the filters in place to deal with an already abundant amount of information. Since the invention of the printing press, he says, we have lived amidst “information overload”, such that we can no longer look at the phenomenon as a problem, but as a fact. An appropriate response, then, is to build better filters.

Notice that the solution is to build, not to fix. An overload of information has been our oxygen for centuries, but the type and amount of data we deal with now is vastly different than whatever has come before. Shirky ends by separating the types of filters needed into two categories: programming and social. The latter category is pretty nebulous, but “programming” is much more concrete, and already in use today. Digg, Netflix, Google, and every other website run on extrapolating from its users’ actions is utilizing so-called collaborative filters, and these are a pivotal part of the internet’s future.

Collaborative filtering works by ranking content according to prior users’ actions (e.g., Google looks at links, the paragraphs surrounding search terms, other mysterious data), then analyzing your own actions to serve up relevant content. With sites like Digg and Reddit, this involves users upvoting or downvoting submitted sites, and then you seeing the best sites in descending order (with maybe some specializing depending on if you’re at a subpage). With sites like Netflix and Amazon, your own consumption is compared to other consumers in order to serve up recommendations.

As we approach the singularity and the web becomes more ubiquitous, collaborative filtering will become increasingly sophisticated (and accurate). As Jay Adelson mentions, Google’s search rankings have become more powerful simply because of the diversity of its users has increased. Collaborative filtering thrives on multifarious data, and this will come quickly with a larger number of netizens, and more slowly through the growing number of connections between web services. Adelson points to the economic advantages of shared data (read: better advertising targeting), but this is of course of huge value to users and developers as well.

Low-level web curation, from Metafilter to Undress Me Robot, will always have its place online, but the future is definitely in these automated processes which leverage what each user is already doing to provide a highly personalized and more effective experience. However, obviously, collaborative filtering is simply an update of the sort of filter that has been around since the 1500s, moving from the editorial eye of a single person to the gaze of millions. The next big jump in information overload might break down even these strong filters, taking a paradigm shift to get back on top. And who knows where that will take us?

© mighty god king

© Astronomy Picture of the Day

Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has had some recent controversy involving her use of personal email (read: Yahoo email address) to do government work. Using personal email prevented Palin from having to disclose anything discussed in those emails, but internet activist group “anonymous” hacked her email last night, gaining access to stuffed inbox within. Government sunshine site Wikileaks.org reports they were handed the contents of the mailbox around midnight, and have so graciously been hosting the files (also on Rapidshare if Wikileaks goes down).

I have no idea if this is real, but Gawker makes some convincing arguments. This is pretty amazing.

Bon Iver recently spent some time at the MySpace studios, recording a beautiful four-song session and an interview. Have a listen over at MySpace Transmissions or download the four-song EP for free. I’ve said it before, but even more here is a soft and delicate sound that fills the room with comfortable darkness. That’s just Bon Iver; laying in the grass as the sky fills with dark oranges and reds until everything goes black and it’s just you and the crickets.

Lockpick Pornography is now being offered in its entirety for free in PDF. Written by Joey Comeau of A Softer World fame, Lockpick Pornography is a ridiculous, fun, interesting, sensational, wild, heartbreaking of staggering genius. And it’s only 121 pages, in big type, so just read the damn thing.

Or if you want a taste, the first seven (of ten) chapters are online in plain text, and you can read some short stories from It’s Too Late to Say I’m Sorry, Comeau’s collection released last summer.

Anyone wondering what today’s Google logo was all about: first beams at the Large Hadron Collider. Cosmic Variance was live-blogging the startup, making for some tense internetting lasting almost 5 hours. There were no collisions today, but a full beam of protons was successfully sent around the monstrous machine, officially marking the beginning of operations for the LHC. This is exciting!

1:12 am (PDT), JoAnne: The beam is at Point 8, which is 3/4 of the way around! Thanks to SkyNews for the feed!

1:18 am (PDT), JoAnne: Now the beam is at ATLAS, 7/8 of the way through. They are giving ATLAS some events (not collisions, but beam halo and beam gas). Lyn Evans, LHC project manager, was heard to say that he’s going to win his bet, whatever that is.

1:23 am (PDT), JoAnne: BEAM! We have BEAM! All the way round! Now they’re doing it again.

I love the internet!

This mix is a seven-hour road trip, conveniently depicted by seven songs traveling from afternoon sunshine to nighttime calm. Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers begin the trip with a small bit of upbeat oldies; a two-minutes-and-forty-four-seconds injection of smiles and light. Hour two rolls in, and with it comes Ben Sollee, loose and airy and easygoing. Home is still close behind, and every now and then a voice from the passenger seat still sings along. Yes, the second hour strolls by with optimism and brightness, and it isn’t until the third hour that the conversation slowly peters out, replaced by a growing landscape. John Vanderslice understands this. He understands there comes a point where you realize the situation you’ve entered. But maybe We/Or/Me understands better, because that realization doesn’t mean doom. It just means four hours have passed by, and the landscape’s had time to bloom into open fields and rows of trees that overpower the asphalt and traffic lines. And staring out the window in silence isn’t bad. And it isn’t bad. And it fills that whole hour, and pushes into the fifth. But as the sixth hour looms over the horizon, the bright lights and big cities come back into your mind, and with Chad VanGaalen alongside you can almost hear the train rumbling past on the opposite track. That is, until the sun goes down, and with it the windows, letting the cool breeze blow in to wake you up. Optimism wrapped in a sweet, uplifting chill. Optimism wrapped in I laugh more often now, I cry more often now, I more free and the other day, this new friend of mine said something to me (“just because something starts differently doesn’t mean it’s worth less”), and just as to prove how right he was, then you came. Six hours of driving, hard trekking it across hard roads, and you are more alive now than you ever were then.

The last hour? All Beulah, all giddiness.

Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers – Little Bitty Pretty One
Ben Sollee – A Change is Gonna Come
John Vanderslice – White Dove
We/Or/Me – Tell Sarah
Chad VanGaalen – Rabid Bits of Time
Peter Bjorn and John – Objects of My Affection
Beulah – S.O.S.

Stream from imeem: