Snippets of conversation I overheard on the way home from work the other day: A young woman dressed in black pants and black t-shirt was talking on her cell phone. She said “It’s just that I worry about the transmission… the transmission of certain viruses, you know?” Her tone of voice rose at the word… Continue reading Overheard
Author: BH
Spam sublime
I received a very interesting e-mail this morning from one Lon Landon regarding pills to increase my virility. I was not interested in the product offer, but I did enjoy the poem-like subject line of the message: “To worry the parenthetic bluebird” I’m certain any bluebird, parenthetic or not, would be worried about a decrease… Continue reading Spam sublime
Last post from Beijing (at least for now)
Well, it’s happened. Our time in China is nearly finished. Hilary left early this morning for Taiwan, where she’ll be doing some research for a couple weeks, and I leave this evening for the US. Almost everything in our apartment is packed up, and as I sit here alone typing, the sounds of the keystrokes… Continue reading Last post from Beijing (at least for now)
Abstract visualizations of del.icio.us networks
The illustration below is actually a chart of links shared between eight different del.icio.us users. I confess that I do not fully understand the methodology behind the chart, not being a del.icio.us user myself, but still, I think the concept is fascinating, and the results beautiful and geeky. You can see many more such charts,… Continue reading Abstract visualizations of del.icio.us networks
The States of the Union
From the New Economist blog, I learned about this interesting website, the State of the Union, at which you can read the text of every presidential State of the Union address, from G.W. in 1790 to G.W.B. in 2006. The centerpiece of the site is a cool java-script graph charting the length of the speeches… Continue reading The States of the Union