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.

Google Chrome. Google’s web browser to be released later today. In comic form. By Scott McCloud. And here are some more screenshots for good measure.

Godzilla tracking just got easier.

Google has now photographed Tokyo for Street View, which means you can now see both the Golden Turd and the next nuclear attack all in one panorama. The WHOLE city isn’t done, but you can see quite a bit.

Actually, Tokyo wasn’t the only recent unveiling Street View had. Joining the list is fellow cities Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Sidney, Perth, Melbourne, New Orleans, El Paso, Savannah, and a ton in between.

Tired of Google’s stagnant, antiquated approach to search, a group of ex-Googlers and other techies have opened up their own shop: Cuil.com.

Pronounced “cool”, the Cuil search engine has an index spanning 121 billion web pages, and operates by comparing your keyword to the rest of a page’s contents instead of relying on “superficial popularity metrics”. This mechanism calls to mind the semantic web, but Cuil’s About page is too ambiguous to tell for sure how Cuil works.

What is sure is that Cuil’s team sees their engine as the future of search. Anna Patterson, who moved to Google after building the search engine used by Internet Archive, has low hopes for Google. From CNN Money:

Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company’s approach to search. “Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now,” she said, “and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now.”

With these bold words and the talent behind them, as well as Cuil’s claim to fame of indexing a hypothesized three times as many web pages as Google, it is hard dismiss this Google contender along with all the others. But even a cursory glance at the engine’s functionality shows a less-than-polished product without much bite.

A lot of people have been finding massive differences in the number of search results between Cuil versus Google. An interesting example is found in “banana” and its French translation “banane”. “Banana” returns 47 million results in Cuil versus 97 million in Google, while “banane” closes the lead a little bit by returning 5 million results versus 11 million (though still roughly the same percentage-wise). A clear numbers win for Google, but dig a little deeper and you see Cuil vastly improving within only 24 hours since its launch. PontifexPrimus originally found only 15 million results for “banana”, and none at all for “banane” (unless you, curiously, turned Safe Search off).

Of course, the raw number of search results is much less important than the number of useful results. Unfortunately, Cuil falters here as well. Searching for “Spencer Sugarman” on Google returns maybe every individual website I am involved with, all on the front page. Cuil, on the other hand, returns 10 links to Undress Me Robot, and 1 link to an article about Burt Sugarman. The “banana” search mentioned above is much better, providing many relevant and unique results. But what Cuil fails to do on any search I have tried is surpass the quality of Google’s results. Instead, all they manage so far is to land somewhere along the spectrum of Much Worse to As Good.

This is likely to change. It is difficult to tell whether Cuil is incorporating changes as its engine is stress-tested, or if the learning is built-in, but either way the engine seems to be improving. If Cuil expands its hardware to ward against the downtime problems they were experiencing yesterday, and continues improving its search results, the search engine could soon stand strong against Google. But as CNN points out, Google’s immense power as a brand means winning will take a lot more than just marginally better search results or a slicker design.

Cuil.com - new search engine built by ex-Googlers and boasting an index three times as large as Google. More soon.

Google released Google App Engine, a “developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure” (which is a fancy way of saying your web app is hosted on their servers, using their processing power and storage). The service is a basically a competitor to Amazon Web Services, except that (in classic Google manner) it is still in beta and free. Who knows how it will go, but the first couple of days stirred up quite a bit of ire amongst developers. Long live the Googleplex!

Anyone visiting Chicago soon would do well to check with Google Street View for some of the city’s best street vendors. Similarly, Google lets you see the cosmos, camels, secret race tracks, the moon (now hiring), Mars, and other strange sights.

googleDrive - Drive around Google Maps!

Google has set that ambitious goal of scanning tens of millions of books. The vast majority of these books are copy written. Google’s answer is simply to ignore copyright, fight to change the precedence and hope things work out. I hope it does work out for them so that we can all scan the true entirety of human knowledge, but in another way, I feel sorry for authors. “Information wants to be free,” according to one of the web’s founding mantras notes this Weekly Standard article. As stands, the goal is to only give user “snippets” of pages around a search term. Google should just go the full distance, settle with the two organizations suing them, and publish, in their entirety, all books that are copy written but not currently in print. That would be the giant leap forward toward information wants to be free that we need.

The commercial promise–and downright coolness–of Google’s undertaking staggers the mind. Which is why many recent accounts of the project, from Toobin’s to Jason Epstein’s in the New York Review of Books to Michael Hirschorn’s in the Atlantic, vibrate with fidgety, egg-headed excitement.

Consider me among the egg-heads.

What fills the Web Design Hall of Fame? Google? Amazon? MySpace? Undress Me Robot? Each website would pass for inclusion on some basis, but inevitably fail on another. While print and other media have a solid canon of wholly successful designs, the web seems to be lacking. Armin Vit over at Speak Up asks us, “Landmark web sites, where art thou?” His short discussion does not offer any answers, instead simply spotlighting the dearth and turning to the masses for salvation.

Perhaps it’s the short lifespan of the web that hasn’t allowed any specific web site to become a de facto choice for design immortality; but Seven was released in 1995, becoming an instant classic, so age is not quite an issue. Or maybe it’s the perennially ephemeral nature of the web, where web sites can change every year, month or week if desired, rendering the sense of commitment less ominous than that of printed or branded matter. It could also be the giant amount of crap that one has to wade through on the internet, but not much more than the amount of bad logos, brochures or signs found day in and day out. Or maybe I’m just thinking about this the wrong way.

So Vit is hard-pressed to find a cause for the web’s lack of such great heights. Here he knocks down possible sources of this dearth, and later he knocks down certain sites’ inclusion in the Hall of Fame. (Google may be a great search engine, but default blue links and bevel and drop shadow logo? For shame!) For any hypothesis on the cause of the web’s impotency, we’ll have to turn to Khoi Vinh’s argument that the web lacks great designers who both think and do. My question to Vinh is this: why is this true only for web design? It is tempting to restrict your vision to only web design, but I find it extremely hard to believe that great print designers are not also graduating to managerial positions.

Then again, maybe Vit is thinking about this the wrong way. At the very least, his logic seems a bit inconsistent when dismissing the age of the web as a non-factor. Certainly, a genuinely classic design could be recognized as such within days or weeks of its creation (as in Seven), so it is not that the web has not been around long enough for people to recognize a web design’s success. However, Seven was released almost a century after the inception of motion pictures, and its opening does not utilize any techniques significantly different than what was available in the previous decades. The world wide web (not the Internet), on the other hand, is like a baby. At most just a bit over a decade old, web technologies are still in early development. Hell, even half of what you find on the web today was impossible five or ten years ago.

While age of the medium is hardly necessary for a design to be considered a masterpiece, it is very influential when considering what the medium can do. Are we yet at a point where web designers can create a site as beautiful as the best Flash website, but as usable and functional as Google? Cascading style sheets bring us very close, Javascript and PHP (and the like) even closer, but I would argue that we are not quite there yet. It will be a couple more years until designers have fully stretched the boundaries of today’s emerging tools.

But should we even try to apply conventional graphical design to web design? Joshua Porter prevails upon us to recognize the web as a different beast, and act accordingly. However, as Jeff Croft points out in the comments, Porter is concerned entirely with interaction design. Google, Amazon, Craigslist, and eBay are all very usable, but they lack any stunning aesthetics (though Amazon’s recent redesign has brought the site closer to Vit’s Pinnaclism). Assumedly, Porter would also see the conventional dictionary as a design success, with its extreme ease of use, but can we really lump it together with Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map?

Vit would reply with a resounding NO. How a user accesses and interacts with data are important aspects of design, but how that data is displayed is just as important:

When it comes to web design it’s rare that all elements — functionality, clarity of information, and subjective beauty — come together to create a result that is widely admired, recognized or lauded in the same vein as anything resembling the likes of Saul Bass’ AT&T logo, or Susan Kare’s icons for the original Mac OS.

I think web designers are still grappling with how to handle both data and aesthetics. Dynamic websites and visually appealing websites are both relatively new phenomena, each still coming into their own. This all goes back to Mark Boulton’s point that separating content and presentation has led to cookie-cutter websites [1]. When dealing with small website of just a few pages stunning, unique examples definitely already exist, and I think Vit will be satisfied once designers are able to take that beauty and create something that is both expansive (handling large amounts of variable content) and exquisite.

[1] Don’t you hate when you incriminate yourself?

After years of trying to push their ways into the social networking business, Google and Yahoo are changing tactics. Forget Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360: think personal social homepages. The New York Times reports iGoogle and My Yahoo will soon be expanding to incorporate a more social twist:

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

(Of course, Yahoo unveils a new social network every month.)

Google is as tight-lipped as ever, but Yahoo is a bit more generous with information. The company is working on so-called Inbox 2.0, a project to add several features to the Yahoo Mail service. For example, the inbox will function socially, users will have profile pages, and other Yahoo services will be integrated to present a unified social experience.

Google, on the other hand, has only commented that they “believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social,” and “it is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand.”

The most obvious question is, “Why ignore Orkut and Yahoo Mash (and so on)?” How will the expansion of iGoogle and My Yahoo differ from those ventures? Right now, admittedly from the very little information available, the whole thing seems like Google and Yahoo are trying to (essentially) create Facebook, except with “email” instead of “messages”. Sure, Google and Yahoo could provide a more useful front page (though, more social?) and gather more users, but those are not fundamental differences.

Then again, assuming these projects are successful, a well-designed network with millions of users would certainly have enough gravity to pull people from Facebook and MySpace. Facebook is doubly vulnerable, since it lost its main attraction once its doors were opened to the non-collegiate public. MySpace, on the other hand, continues to be a piece of shit, which I guess makes it doubly vulnerable as well.

Because nothing else is more important: Ze Frank is back. No telling if the video is a one-off thing, or the opening volley of a continuous attack on our senses, but we shall all bow down regardless.

I mean, how can we not love a man who shows us, yet again, how absolutely ridiculous Japanese television is?

Silverstripe has lengthy coverage of An Event Apart, a web design conference put on by A List Apart. The article (covering both days) is an immense grab bag of design inspiration, so definitely check it out. The An Event Apart page has the slides for the San Francisco events, as well as the other 2007 events (Boston, Chicago, and Seattle respectively).

The History of Visual Communication is a comprehensive walk through, well, the history of visual communication. The trail begins 40,000 years ago, and ends roughly a decade ago.

Anyone who has played Super Mario Bros. 2 knows it is a very different beast than the rest of the Super Mario Bros. family. In actuality, the game was hardly a Super Mario Bros. game at all, but an appropriation of Doki Doki Panic. The real Super Mario Bros. 2 was deemed too hard, and never released in America. Nintendo finally caved in and the game is now available through the Wii’s Virtual Console. After watching the YouTube video of a player racing through the whole game in 10 minutes, Slate has a piece detailing just how difficult, and fun, the real Super Mario Bros. 2 game is:

In most games, you trust that the designer is guiding you, through the usual signposts and landmarks, in the direction that you ought to go. In the Real Super Mario Bros. 2, you have no such faith. Here, Miyamoto is not God but the devil. Maybe he really was depressed while making it—I kept wanting to ask him, Why have you forsaken me? The online reviewer who sizes up the game as “a giant puzzle and practical joke” isn’t far off.

Finally, much to the dismay of everyone hoping for an actual gPhone, Google has announced Android, an open-source mobile OS it is developing in cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance. An introduction to Android is available on YouTube (after being pulled initially), but it is almost unbearingly vague, prompting some to ask, “Is Google now in the vaporware business?” And of course, the inevitable iPhone reference.

A lot of cell phones come with games, but most of those games are pretty terrible. Thankfully, vampent has created a mobile Nintendo emulator. Of course, you’ll need good games to go with it, so start off with Mario Adventure. Hell, just go play Mario Adventure on your computer.

Mozilla is hosting a contest, a really awesome contest, if I may say so myself. With the Firefox Flicks ad contest, you can win some cool prizes for creating a 30-second Firefox advertisement. This seems like a great win/win situation.

Albumart.org is a great site to find any CD or DVD covers. And it’s AJAX powered, so it’s fast and classy too.

A lot of importance is placed on getting the right amount of sleep. However, a Vietnamese man has spent the last 33 years of his life entirely sleepless. Admittedly, that is an extremely rare case, but new pills are being developed to cure the need for sleep. Until then, get a good nights rest, and maybe read up a little on how your sleeping life affects your waking life.

More RIAA goodness: space and format-shifting (such as ripping CDs to your iPod) are now deemed infringing by the RIAA. Okay guys, seriously, the RIAA is a bunch of assholes.

On a lighter note, Genesis in Rap Songs. Best mixtape ever.

And back again to those heavier notes. The Los Angeles Times recently published an article on evangelist Ken Ham, who seeks to “arm you with Christian Patriot missiles.” Forget evolution, because “the Bible is the history book of the universe.”

Bernard-Henri Levy, who appeared on The Daily Show last month, has published an impassioned Letter to the American Left. “Nothing made a more lasting impression during my journey through America than the semi-comatose state in which I found the American left.”

Google Talk, another of Google’s steps towards complete web domination, recently added the ability to connect to Jabber servers. This might not sound very exciting to many people, but with a little tweaking you can now connect and talk to people on AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. Pretty snazzy, I would say. And while on the subject of Google upgrades, Gmail is now available for your domain. Although most website hosts provide some email addresses, Google is offering their usual unlimited amount of address and unlimited amount of storage. Pretty snazzy, I would say.

Japanese television is absolutely insane. For example, Nasubi.

Nippon Television’s (NTV) producers have obviously never heard of the Geneva Convention. If they had, they wouldn’t have treated poor Nasubi the way they did. They wouldn’t have stripped him naked and shut him in an apartment, alone with no food, furniture, household goods, or entertainment. They wouldn’t have kept him there for over a year until he had won $100,000 in prizes by sending in postcards to contests. They wouldn’t have cut him off from the world and they would have told him that he was on nation-wide TV.

Complete List of Web 2.0 Products and Services

Library Thing - Catalog your books online!

A day late, but never a dollar short, today’s Undressing the Internet is twice as bombastic. Brothels and gigapixels and artificial suns, oh my.

A brief history of the oldest public institution (in the UK, at least).

If anyone is thinking about moving, City-Data.com has put together a bunch of Top 100 lists of biggest cities, cities with the highest median income value, highest located cities, cities with the largest percentage of females, cities with the largest percentage males, best educated cities, and etc. etc. etc.

For a few years, the Gigapxl Project has been taking breathtaking photographs of various places around the United States (mostly in California).

Something just as inspiring: beautiful art made with knitting. I don’t know how the monkey riding a banana really fits, but I’m cool with it.

Something just as cool: China is building the world’s first fusion device in March or April, and beginning testing in July or August. If the experiment is successful, this is big news. It will be like having the sun as a renewable energy source.

Something not cool at all: The MPAA and RIAA are trying to get legislation passed that basically gets rid of fair use. Future innovations in television in radio will be banned unless they are of “customary historic use”. As the site says, “Had it been the law in 1990, no TiVo. In 2000, no iPod.” Ars Technica also has a post about it.

A universal guide to getting laid in Japan. For males and females!

You might have heard (you being the illustrious internet user that I know you are) that the government is trying to get Google search data. For an overview, Outer-court.com has just the thing. Searchenginewatch.com has an up-to-the-minute article on the topic, with updates being added on all the time.

Of course, you could be wondering “What’s the big deal?” and you would not be alone. Stephen Colbert thinks we need to stop worrying about privacy and start worrying about public-see.

In the market for a fun gift for a kid? Budding scientist? Try out the world’s only nuclear powered toy. Just don’t go for the good blimp deal.

It’s important that everyone realizes how much fun they could be having with their iPod. In light of this, 50 Fun Things To Do With Your iPod.