Arcane Gazebo

Blogroll pruning

I recently cut down on the number of blogs I subscribe to in order since I wasn't able to keep up with all of them. This required me to remove a number of very good blogs that I simply didn't have time to read. In some cases I am relying on the fact that good posts from certain prolific bloggers will be linked by other blogs that I do read. Anyway, I've updated my blogroll to reflect what I'm actually reading now.

One addition to the blogroll is Zifnab's new blog Labyrinth.

I also removed the media links on the sidebar since I haven't been updating them.

Spring RSS Cleaning

My first act of spring cleaning was to declare RSS bankruptcy (mark everything in Google Reader as read and start fresh), and then remove the subscriptions to blogs I hadn't checked on in the last month or so (roughly since the March Meeting). As a result my RSS throughput has been substantially reduced and I probably have room to add some new blogs. Anything I should be reading?

Second act of spring cleaning will be the e-mail inbox. Actual physical cleaning of things may have to wait until after my qualifying exam (two weeks from tomorrow...)

Gunnerkrigg Court

During a bout of bored web-surfing, I followed a guest-artist link from Dr. McNinja to Gunnerkrigg Court, where my boredom rapidly evaporated. By somewhere in Chapter 2 I had already decided to blog a recommendation for this webcomic. By the time I finished reading the archives, in one enthralled sitting, it was pretty much my favorite thing on the internet.

The genre is British boarding-school fantasy, but Neil Gaiman is a better point of comparison than J.K. Rowling. (In fact, Gaiman himself has also recommended Gunnerkrigg on his blog.) It's a wonderful exploration of the interface between myths/magic and science/technology. Start at the beginning—it's not a joke-a-day webcomic but an online graphic novel with an ongoing story.

The brilliant unintentional comedy of Conservapedia

I don't normally go reading crackpot right-wing sites for my own amusement, but Conservapedia is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. In fact, I'd be certain it's a parody if not for Andrew Schlafly's presence as a major editor. As the name suggests, Conservapedia is supposed to be a "fair and balanced" (in the Fox News sense) alternative to Wikipedia, which apparently suffers from liberal bias. The editors of Conservapedia have helpfully (and hilariously) listed their grievances against Wikipedia, which include such major offenses as:

1. Wikipedia allows the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. and C.E. instead of A.D. The dates are based on the birth of Jesus, so why pretend otherwise? Conservapedia is Christian-friendly and exposes the CE deception.

and

5. Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English speaking users are American. Look up "Most Favored Nation" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts the spelling to the British spelling "Most Favoured Nation", even there there are far more American than British users. Look up "Division of labor" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts to the British spelling "Division of labour," then insists on the British spelling for "specialization" also.[3]. Enter "Hapsburg" (the European ruling family) and Wikipedia automatically changes the spelling to Habsburg, even though the American spelling has always been "Hapsburg". Within entries British spellings appear in the silliest of places, even when the topic is American. Conservapedia favors American spellings of words.

Now, this project is still fairly new so one doesn't expect to find extended entries on many topics. Nonetheless I was disappointed to find that many entries are... well, "half-assed" doesn't quite describe it. It's more like 1%-assed. A lot of entries consist of a single sentence lifted from an appropriately slanted textbook (sample title: Exploring Creation With Biology). (I want to mention that I hit the "random page" button once to find that example.) And a lot of the more likely fodder for entertainment (such as the entry for evolution) has already been edited by visiting liberals in an attempt to either correct or parody, either of which makes it less funny. Nevertheless, the best examples of teh crazy occur where you don't expect: these guys object not just to evolution but to relativity, and there are some other gems as well. (I'm linking to people who have quoted them, since the original entries have probably changed by now.) I recommend just clicking random pages until you find something good.

Although the temptation to troll the site is immense, I have to agree with those who say we liberals should leave it alone and see what develops. The intra-wingnut edit wars alone should be worth it.

Missed opportunities

Via Dave Bacon, venture capital firm OVP has an amusing list of deals missed. For instance:

A guy walks into your office in the late 1980’s and says he wants to open a chain of retail shops selling a commodity product you can get anywhere for 25 cents, but he will charge 2 dollars. Of course, you listen politely, and then fall off your chair laughing when he leaves. Howard Shultz didn’t see this as humorous. And we didn’t make 500 times our money.

"Not investing in Starbucks in 1986" should go into the regret index...

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

I assume that someone somewhere has done this before, but in lab today we were inspired to play this game by a recent xkcd comic. The rules:

1. Go to Wikipedia.
   
2. Click the random article link in the sidebar.
   
3. Open a second random article in another tab.
   
4. Try to find a chain of links (as short as possible) starting from the first article that leads to the second.

I drew Eastern Region of British Railways and Packed bed, which I connected through:

1. Eastern Region of British Railways
   
2. British Rail
   
3. History of rail transport in Great Britain
   
4. Steam locomotive
   
5. Fire-tube boiler
   
6. Smokestack
   
7. Flue gas desulfurization (this article mentions packed beds but doesn't link to the page)
   
8. Wet scrubbing
   
9. Packed bed absorber

If you try it, post any interesting results in the comments!

RSS bankruptcy

With uncounted hundreds of unread posts stacked up in Google Reader after my vacation, I am declaring RSS bankruptcy. After catching up on a few essential blogs, I just clicked "Mark all as read" and started fresh. If there's something brilliant I might have missed, let me know.

Will it blend?

In what Majikthise aptly terms the "greatest online advertising campaign in the history of the internet," BlendTec advertises their blenders by posting videos of blending inappropriate objects, such as hockey pucks, or a rake handle, or an iPod.

On seeing the 100% perfect t-shirt

I was reading wigu when something improbable happened: I actually noticed a banner ad. (My brain's banner ad filter has been extremely good since about 1997.) It was an ad for t-shirt shop Seibei, and the reason I noticed it is that it had a list of topics which included "Murakami". Of course this was Haruki Murakami, one of my favorite writers (as opposed to pulp novelist Ryu Murakami). Sadly, the shirt in question doesn't appeal to me—I guess I'm not that fond of sandwiches.

The shirt is a reference to the (very) short story, "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning", which can be found online and which you should all read. It can also be found in the collection The Elephant Vanishes. He's got a new collection of short stories out, which I haven't picked up yet (because it's still in hardcover), but I'm looking forward to it.

There was an interview with Murakami recently in the Wall Street Journal (via JSpur), but I'm pretty sure it's behind their subscription wall so I can't link to it.

In conclusion, better Murakami t-shirts are needed.

UPDATE: Here's the WSJ piece, thanks again to JSpur.

Penny Stock Spam: Who falls for this?

The New York Times had an article yesterday about the recent surge in spam volume (which I'd definitely noticed, although Gmail and Thunderbird catch almost all of it). The article reports that the most profitable form of spam is penny stock advertisements:

Many of the messages in the latest spam wave promote penny stocks — part of a scheme that antispam researchers call the “pump and dump.” Spammers buy the inexpensive stock of an obscure company and send out messages hyping it. They sell their shares when the gullible masses respond and snap up the stock. No links to Web sites are needed in the messages.

Though the scam sounds obvious, a joint study by researchers at Purdue University and Oxford University this summer found that spam stock cons work. Enough recipients buy the stock that spammers can make a 5 percent to 6 percent return in two days, the study concluded.

I get lots of these messages myself, so this must be correct. But still: I know there's a lot of stupidity in the world, but who are these people dumb enough to actually buy stocks based on e-mail recommendations from strangers? And how are they able to tie their own shoes? Could anything be more obviously a scam?

Library Anticorrelations

Like the opposite of Amazon book recommendations, LibraryThing's UnSuggester lists books that are unlikely to be found in the same library as a given title. I entered one of my favorite books, Haruki Murakami's masterpiece of surrealist fiction The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and was amused to get a list of mostly Christian devotional books. It's not that Wind-Up Bird is anti-religious in any way, so I imagine it's a result of demographics more than anything else. (Via Unfogged.)

Last.fm should do a version of this for music.

Cassette generator

Via Boing Boing, a website to generate images of custom-labeled audiocassettes. I am totally going to use this for the cover art on a mix CD.

Yo La Tengo and Hold Steady collecting videos

Two of my favorite bands are requesting videos from fans: Yo La Tengo simply want a reading of their upcoming album's title, I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass. The Hold Steady have more open-ended instructions: "We want to you know about what you think about the opposite sex, relationships, love, the whole shebang." They're both posting submitted videos on their respective sites.

Video's not really my preferred medium, so I won't contribute to either unless I get really inspired, but I like the concept. The YLT album comes out on September 12, and Hold Steady's on October 3.

Easier than actual socializing

I am apparently a sucker for social networking sites—I'm now on Facebook. Previously I've joined MySpace and Orkut, although I don't use the latter much anymore.

MetaFilter Half-Life

My post about the liquid nitrogen incident drew a few links from other blogs, with a majority of hits coming from MetaFilter. This was great fodder for my obsession with site statistics, and the MeFi-driven traffic spike was especially interesting: it looks just like an excitation process in physics, with a saturation region that lasted about half an hour and then an exponential decay with about a 90 minute half-life.

There was a long tail that remained after many time constants; I suspect there are a couple different populations of MeFi readers, one that visits the site about once an hour and another that visits much less often, maybe once a day.

Life is random

When I started using Google Reader I complained about the way it mixes all the feed items from different blogs into one column. But as I used it for a while I realized that this has certain advantages, and the perfect metaphor occurred to me: it's like listening to music on shuffle!

Not all of my feeds are blogs, and it's a little weird to have the Physical Review Letters feed mixed in with a bunch of political commentary. But in fact I never used to read the PRL feed at all (even though I was checking it in my aggregator) because it would update in batches of 30 abstracts, 29 of which would be uninteresting to me. But when it's mixed in with everything else I can scan each item as it comes up and star it if it looks worthwhile (like the singing sand paper I posted about). Likewise, Overheard In New York is actually much better when it's shuffled in with the other blog items, rather than reading 20 quotes at once. So I've come around to this style of reading blogs.

Google Reader test drive

I'm trying out Google Reader after having used Sage for a while now. I like reading blogs by RSS but I have a strict list of requirements for an RSS reader:

1. It must run in Firefox.

That's it. I've tried some standalone programs but I hate switching windows every time I want to read a full post. So for a while it was Sage, which is a Firefox extension that sits in the sidebar, but Sage has some weird idiosyncracies and annoyances, like occasionally forgetting to check feeds until the cache is cleared (especially BoingBoing's for some reason) or misinterpreting links so that they go to the local hard drive instead of the appropriate web server. At least the Export OPML feature worked, making the switch to Google Reader nearly instantaneous.

I tend to read blogs from different computers depending on whether I am at home or in the lab, so it's actually extremely useful to have a single aggregator I can access from both places. I didn't realize how valuable this was until I tried it. (Bloglines would be the other obvious choice for this, and I'd be curious to know how it compares with Google Reader.) The major downside to this approach is having to wait on the aggregator site to query feeds, as opposed to being able to query them directly and get immediate updates.

A minor complaint about Google Reader: The interface, while clean and simple, is difficult to scan for interesting items. All posts are mixed into one column regardless of their source, while most readers I've used in the past separate them by blog. When I have a lot of updates to read (usually in the morning, since the east coast bloggers have been going for three hours), I'm used to clicking on the blogs I'm most interested in first as a way of sorting through the large quantity of updates. Presumably I could do something with labels to separate out the top tier of blogs I read, but it still feels weird. On the other hand, Google Reader does show the post author prominently—Sage would not display this at all, which was immensely confusing for certain group blogs. (Sometimes I would make a game of guessing which blogger had posted each post.)

A side effect of the switch is that my self-imposed limit on RSS subscriptions has been removed. I used to control my blog reading by not adding so many items that I needed to scroll in the Sage pane to see them all, so the number of blogs I kept up with was limited by the size of my Firefox window. Now my subscription list isn't visible, so I can just keep adding feeds without encountering any psychological barrier (until I wake up Monday morning to 500 unread posts).

Anyway, I think I'll continue using Google Reader for a while, and see how it goes.

Quantum wiki

Via Mason, some guys at Caltech have set up a quantum information wiki intended for the research community. I added a page for myself, a stub page for the Clarke group, and updated their list of blogs to include this page and Mixed States. At the moment there's not much there from the solid state angle, so I may be back to contribute a bit more.

BSL, a blogge most scholarlye and literarye!

I can't believe I haven't linked Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog yet. This is definitely the funniest Middle English blog out there. In a recent post, he rewrites the opening of The Da Vinci Code in the style of the Canterbury Tales. An excerpt:

So Sauyniere lyk Sinon storye tolde
False as the devil, and seyde yt forth ful bolde
For he hadde yt rehersd many a yeer
(Ye notice, o myn gentil rederes deere,
Ich telle yow nat of what thys ‘thyng’ might be-
Yt ys a tricke poetic vsid by me
To kepe yow yn confusioun most plesynge
Thurgh alle thys vague and nonspecific tesyng).

It's quite an improvement over Dan Brown's writing. For further reading, the best post ever on that blog is the one where he writes a rough outline for the Canterbury Tales. (Those of you who read Making Light have already seen all this.)

Spammers Destroy Trackback

I turned off trackbacks a while ago due to spam, and I see that two blogs much larger than mine (Marginal Revolution and Brad DeLong, both on my list of daily reads) have done the same. Indeed, looking in my server logs I see that there has been a massive, distributed trackback spam attack underway since last Monday—presumably this is also what's hitting the other blogs. There's no way I could have policed this last week, in Baltimore with my computer broken, so I feel vindicated in closing off trackbacks several months ago.

Making Light has a way to prevent individual links from contributing to the Google pagerank of the linked site; this will indeed make this kind of spam pointless, but I don't think it will act as a deterrent. It's basically free to post trackback spam and I doubt any spammer will bother to check which sites are tagging links with the "nofollow" attribute. Certainly they haven't noticed that I don't even have trackbacks anymore.

Ultimately the result will be the complete abandonment of the trackback protocol, as we are seeing already. I hope this won't also happen with blog comments, but since the value added to the blog is much higher for comments it's more worthwhile to police them for spam rather than close them entirely.

Against my better judgement

I'm trying the social networking thing again, this time on MySpace. My profile is here. I hear this is a good way to find new music, although I also hear that they have sold out to The Man (aka Rupert Murdoch). Regardless, as far as I know only one of my friends is on this thing, so let me know if you have a profile so I can add you.

Sing along, you know the words [Open Thread]

This is brilliant: Now That's What I Call Blogging! Some of these have been heard on occasion around here...

My body may be rebelling against my intent to make it run 26 miles this weekend. I can only assume this is why I seem to be contracting a cold at this precise moment. Anyway, I'll be traveling this weekend since the race is in Dallas. Then I go back to Berkeley for about ten days and then back to Dallas again, followed by Connecticut. Maybe I should throw in a visit to Pasadena?

Spoon: Gimme Fiction: I kept hearing "The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine" on internet radio, and liked it better each time, so I finally bought the album. Pretty straightforward and well-executed indie rock; "They Never Got You" is another excellent track. I hear their older stuff is good too, so I should look into that. (The clerk at Amoeba recommended Kill the Moonlight.)

Useful Physics Aggregators

Those of you who come here for the physics blogging (which has been somewhat absent of late) may be interested in a couple of links I found recently, via referrals and Technorati:

Mixed States aggregates the RSS feeds of a number of physics blogs (including this one). Since the included bloggers are listed by their real name, it's a nice way to see who else in the community is blogging (although I didn't recognize any names that I knew from physics rather than from reading blogs).

Coherence * is a blog reviewing work in superconducting quantum computing, something that should be useful to me professionally (perhaps more so than the cond-mat RSS feed, which is high volume and a bit tough to sort by topic). Above their blogroll they list professors working in the field, including former Clarke group member and current collaborator Britton Plourde, but strangely not John Clarke himself. (However, there are at least four of John's former students/postdocs there, among other familiar names.)

Fish, Barrel, etc.

This link is of course mean, cruel, and shallow, not to mention that it takes aim at some extremely easy targets. But when I was feeling frustrated by my experiment today, it's amazing how much my spirits were lifted by The First Annual MySpace Stupid Haircut Awards. (Via memepool.)

The (imagined?) perils of academic blogging

There's been a bunch of commentary among academic bloggers about whether blogging hurts one's chances of getting tenure. (For example: Sean Carroll, Chad Orzel, PZ Myers.)

Tenure considerations are still many years off for me, but I will admit to having similar worries with regard to the process of landing a tenure-track job in the first place. The job market in physics is very tight, and I hear from people going through the process that candidates are scrutinized very closely. Physics postdocs are expected to devote pretty much all their time to research, and in that regard my having a blog might be interpreted as insufficient dedication (or something). Maybe that's irrational but this is how the worry goes.

Of course, this too is a long way off for me—probably four to six years. Four to six years ago, hardly anyone knew what a blog was, so the culture may be very different by that time. If I wanted to play it safe, I could close the public blog when I graduate (which itself is probably two years off) and if I wanted to continue blogging, do so at some other site under a pseudonym. (The blog will have to relocate in any case, assuming I leave Berkeley.) The disadvantage of this is that I wouldn't be able to talk about my research in any detail without the risk that someone would recognize me.

Most likely I'll just keep on blogging as normal; it's too much fun and a job that frowns on it is probably a job I don't want anyway.

The blogs, they are multiplying

Regular readers will not be surprised to know that Mason has posted more comments here than anyone else (well, besides me), and his habit of saying exactly what he's thinking has inspired some excellent discussions as well as potshots from anonymous visitors. So I'm pleased to add Mason's new blog, Quantum Chaotic Thoughts, to my blogroll. I for one am looking forward not only to his posts but to the anonymous responses he garners.

However, I do think he should have used a well-known anagram of his name in the blog URL. He'd probably get more hits that way, too.

Arcane Gazebo goes mobile, thanks to Google

If you have a mobile phone with a browser, you may know that Google will translate your search results into mobile-readable WML. I discovered yesterday that they've improved this service, adding text formatting and form capability. This relieves me of the need to put together a WML version of this blog.

How to read Arcane Gazebo on a WML-capable mobile phone: Go to google.com and search for arcane gazebo. Follow the link on the first result. It actually looks pretty good (on my Motorola V551), blockquotes and italics are preserved, and posting comments should work (I haven't tried it yet myself).

Blogging by proxy

I had this collection of things I was going to post today, and then I realized that Making Light already had them all. So just go there and read down the page. In particular, the map of disaster-prone areas in the US, and George W. Bush's impossibly tasteless jokes about Trent Lott's house. (Will people finally realize that he's neither a "good Christian" or a "guy you'd like to have a beer with", but a fucking aristocrat in the grand Louis XVI style?)

Hurricane relief info

For a more rational and compassionate response to the hurricane than the one in the previous post, see this list of relief organizations.

I just discovered that my three months living in Britain no longer disqualify me from giving blood, so I'm going to see about making a donation soon.

Notes on Spam

1. What kind of comment spammer only posts links to Google? Someone was seriously posting these all over some recent threads this morning. Testing out new spamming software maybe? I'm mystified.

2. Even my UC Berkeley spam is now advertising Texas Hold 'em. Next they'll be trying to sell me herbal viagra.

3. I worry about the search engine traffic I'm going to get once Google indexes this post.

Outsourced Astroturf Blogging

Via Marginal Revolution, this is either a well-done hoax, or an earnest attempt to start a business selling blog posts which are outsourced to China. In their own words,

Our general business model is a two tiered effort to hire Chinese citizens to write blogs en masse for us at a valued wage. The first tier is to create original blogs. These blogs will pop up in various areas of the net and appear to the unknowing reader to be written by your standard American. Our short term goal for these original blogs is to generate a steady stream of revenue through traditional blog advertising like google adwords. We estimate that our current blogforce of 25 can support around 500 unrelated blogs. Hopefully a few of those will be hits. The long term goal is to generate a large untraceable astroturfing mechanism for launching of various products. When a vendor needs to promote a new product to the internet demographic we will be able to create a believable buzz across hundreds of ‘reputable’ blogs and countless message boards. We can offer a legitimacy to advertisers that doesen’t exist anywhere else.

This is hilarious enough, but there's lots more comedy gold to be mined from that site. This post, for example (all emphasis mine):

On the blog creation front I have been working hard trying to help Jeff make our product more believable. Our initial results have been a little bit below what we expected. To increase our authenticity we are trying to isolate and remedy problem groups. Our design process centers around 3 general groups. They are:

1. Teenage girls
2. Normal Bloggers (yuppies, moms, average college students)
3. Super Bloggers (bipolars, cynics, liberals, outcasts, super-hip)

...

The biggest problem spot right now is Group 3. Group 3 is the most difficult to reach through traditional media so it has the potential to be our biggest astroturfing area. To create convincing Group 3 product we need to have extensive faux-archives (to give the illusion of a faithfully updated blog) and we need to drop a lot of obscure pop-culture references. The key to good Group 3 is to spend 80% being negative about certain areas of culture and 15% excessively positive. The last 5% should be used for self-loathing because the blogger likes certain ‘un-hip’ culture. Currently I am trying to isolate some popular music to provide to our bloggers for source material. Right now I have:

Group 3 Music Source Material:

Insult: Coldplay, John Mayer, Neptunes, American Idol-related bands, Good Charlotte

Praise: Neutral Milk Hotel, Handsome Boy Modeling School, The Kleptones, Gwen Stefani

Anyway, regular blog readers for the most part already have the ability to filter out crap and find the quality sites among the millions of existing blogs, so (if this isn't a joke) I'm not too worried that this will reduce the signal/noise ratio. Besides, they've got a long way to go if they're putting Gwen Stefani in the wrong column. (Or maybe they've found a client already...)

The senator I don't like to talk about

I meant to post this yesterday, but somehow it slipped my mind. Anyway, I've often posted kind words for California's excellent junior senator. However, I rarely mention our other senator, Dianne Feinstein. Generally she just doesn't get my attention as often as Boxer, but when she does I get the impression that... she kind of sucks. It was a post on Eschaton that brought this to mind:

Andrew Raisiej, who's running for New York City Public Advocate, writes about a response he recieved when he gave a technology presentation to the Senate Democratic Caucus:

First Senator Dianne Feinstein raised her hand and said, "Senator Daschle, the Internet is full of pornography and pedophilia, and until that's clean up, I don't think the Senate should be on the Internet." (And she represents Silicon Valley!)

After banging my head on the desk, I wondered what the chances are we could get a primary challenger. Probably not so good. Sigh...

Shrillblog returns, shambling and oozing.

Brad DeLong, using dark and forbidden magicks, has singlehandedly resurrected the Shrillblog, which hosts the best Lovecraftian political commentary on the internets. I promptly failed a sanity roll, took a point in Cthulhu Mythos, and bookmarked its RSS feed.

Newly Bookmarked

My friend Lemming, who once guest blogged here, has started his own blog: /dev/shm. Lemming's perspective is always unique and entertaining, so I encourage everyone to check it out. And I'm not saying that just because he can blackmail me with embarrassing stories from my college years.

Now, do I put it on the blogroll under "d" or under "/"?