Judging programming language contentment using Twitter and Mechanical Turk
— using humans to gauge sentiment, something it's hard for computers to do correctly #
Twitter meme could reveal answers to security questions
— new meme: #robotname is your mother's maiden name and last 4 digits of your SSN #
Current interviews Mark "Afro Ninja" Hicks
— hard to believe it's been five years since I first identified him (via) #
MonaTweeta II, encoding the Mona Lisa in 140 characters
— using Chinese characters to send 210 bytes in 140 UTF-8 characters (via) #
Bad Astronomy reviews the science of the new Star Trek film
— overall, it did better than most sci-fi; the comments reminded me of The Onion's take on the film (via) #
Jer Thorp's animated 3D visualization of take-offs and landings from Twitter
— he grabbed every "just landed in..." query, extracted locations, and mapped the results with Processing #
Nintendo's documentary-style ad for Punch-Out
— featuring The Wire's Sen. Clay "Sheeeiiiit" Davis as Little Mac's trainer, Doc #
Globe and Mail's interview with Canadian cartoonist Seth
— the wonderful video offers a revealing glimpse into his home and collections (via) #
Mud Tub, using a pile of mud as a user interface
— skip to 2:20 of the video to see them play Tetris by squishing mud around (via) #
The Sound of Young America's unaired pilot for Current TV
— interviews with Patton Oswalt and Daily Show/Colbert Report writer/producer Ben Karlin #
Ze Frank as Jonah Peretti on Ashton Kutcher on BuzzFeed on Ashton
— falling down a rabbit hole of celebrity and sincerity (via) #
The Stranger's 2009 Sex Survey
— entertaining and mildly-NSFW charts and graphs, including this purity test #
Mike Frumin's sparkline map of NYC subway activity from 1905 to 2006
— don't miss his interactive version using OpenStreetMap #
10 Zen Monkey's exclusive with the "John Doe" and lawyer who sued Jason Fortuny
— I hate to say it, but I agree with Fortuny that it was stretching copyright law #
Tabulating original vs. repurposed content on major gaming blogs
— surprisingly, 21% of all posts were original reporting; see also: churnalism in British papers #
Gawker's Ryan Tate on citizen journalism and civic reporting
— some local bloggers are digging far deeper than newspaper journalists (via) #
The Lonely Island's "For Your Consideration" promos for the MTV Movie Awards
— my money's on Slaughter Shack, starring Will Arnett as "Eagleheart" #
Daniel Benmergui's Today I Die
— manipulate the words and characters to progress the story; from the creator of I Wish I Were the Moon #
Sean Tevis raising money for open government and his 2010 campaign
— I just gave $40; he narrowly lost last year because of dirty tricks and a huge influx of GOP money #
Duke Nukem developer 3D Realms closes down
— hopefully, marking the end of one of the longest vaporware projects of all-time #
The Dragnet Fugue aka "Fugue for Friday"
— 1975 composition from the creator of the Music Animation Machine #
In Bb 2.0, a collaborative music and spoken word project
— each person submitted a video performing in B flat major, which can be mixed at whim #
New Amazon Kindle supports native PDF reading
— uses Adobe Reader Mobile, so no more conversion by email or $0.15/MB delivery fees #
Tracing the real-world history of Jughead's crown-like hat
— the dot and dash were just a shorthand for suggesting badges and pins (via) #
Metafilter's global 10th Anniversary Party
— it's a testament to the team that the community's still so active and vibrant #
Chris Ware's animated Quimby the Mouse for This American Life
— new animation with music by Andrew Bird (via) #
Refresh Cannon, multiplayer game played with a single avatar image
— insanely clever, refresh to change angle and distance; also check out Refresh Hero, Refresh War, and just Refresh #
Time interviews Louis CK about consumer cynicism
— his anecdotes on Conan about complaining passengers were all about himself #
The Biology of B-Movie Monsters
— exploring the physiology of shrinking men, giant bugs, and E.T.; from 2003, but new to me (via) #
Jim Munroe's GDC: The Game
— the Game Developers Conference organizers commissioned a playable text adventure about the show #
Nieman Journalism Lab on @NPRBackstory
— automated Twitter bot searches NPR's news archives for context for current news stories #
"You're," a printed portrait mashing up identity on various social sites
— each portrait pulls in data from Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, and Last.fm (via) #
Jack Schulze discusses his influences for the Here & There maps
— he has some interesting ideas about shifting perspective in first-person and God games #
419 Scammer Gets Honest
I just received a very unusual, and refreshingly candid, message from a known scammer in Senegal. It started with a standard introduction to a 419 scam early this morning.
From: jenifergoodluck (Your Big Fool) <[email protected]>
Reply-to: [email protected]
Date: Mon, May 4, 2009 at 6:11 AM
Subject: Hello My Dear one
Hello My Dear one
How are you and how is your work? i hope that all is well with you, My name is miss Jenifer , i know that you may be suprise how i get your email, i got your email today when i was browsing looking for honest partner,then i feel to drop this few line to you , and i will like you to contact me through my email so that we can know each other and exchange our pictures, and we maybecome partner.
Remember the distance does not matter what matters is the love we share with each other. i am waiting to hear from you soon.
kiss regards Miss Jenifer
About an hour later, I received a very unusual followup.
From: jenifergoodluck (Your Big Fool) <[email protected]>
Reply-to: [email protected]
Date: Mon, May 4, 2009 at 6:11 AM
Subject: You Owe Me
Since you haven’t fallen for my stupid scam letter let me go ahead and be up front with you.
Because I am a Nigerian, you owe me something. The fact that my decadent forefathers sold their neighbors and relatives into slavery means that you owe me a lot of money, especially if you are white. I will accept $1000 USD from you per month for the next 12 months. That will settle your debt towards me that was created by our forefathers.
Moreover, it is imperative that you begin to acknowledge my inherited right to steal and be corrupt without oppression from anybody’s legal system. I am entitled to instant riches at the expense of everyone outside West Africa.
This starts with you, my friend, so start paying up now by Western Union.
As much as I’d like to think Jenifer had a nervous breakdown within the hour, it’s clear that it’s a different author. The writing style is completely different and the scammer’s from Senegal, not Nigeria.
I’m guessing an angry recipient hacked her Yahoo! Mail account and sent out the second message to discredit her. Any other theories? I replied to the email to get more details, but I don’t expect a response.
Where Are You in the Movie?
— if The Wizard of Oz spanned my lifetime, then Dorothy just met the Tin Man (via) #
Danny Sullivan's preview of the Wolfram Alpha search engine
— best explanation of what it does, and doesn't do, along with a good roundup of links #
Adblock Plus on their war with NoScript
— you can read NoScript's deceptive rebuttal; cheating ad blockers only makes users angry (via) #
Paper Moon, monochrome Unity-based platformer inspired by pop-up books
— the developers were featured in this week's great WSJ article on new business models for gaming #