Nov. 21 2008

What if your blog had a Christmas card?

Let’s get real for a minute.

Yes, we live in a digital world and hardly engage in interpersonal communication unless we absolutely have to. Instead, we push pixels at each other. With that said, how interesting would it be to visualize every single person behind making this digital transmission possible? It still takes people, right?

I’d need Marco and David in it, everyone else whom they work with, everyone from the server company that hosts Tumblr, the people from the factories who created the computer I’m using, everyone at the ISP I’m using right now, everyone from Google’s Chrome dev team (the browser I’m using), etc, etc, etc.

I’d imagine the photo, or at least the amount of people in it, would be quite large. Never forget that.

Mathematically speaking, “Napoleon Dynamite” is a very significant problem for the Netflix Prize. Amazingly, Bertoni has deduced that this single movie is causing 15 percent of his remaining error rate; or to put it another way, if Bertoni could anticipate whether you’d like “Napoleon Dynamite” as accurately as he can for other movies, this feat alone would bring him 15 percent of the way to winning the $1 million prize. And while “Napoleon Dynamite” is the worst culprit, it isn’t the only troublemaker. A small subset of other titles have caused almost as much bedevilment among the Netflix Prize competitors. When Bertoni showed me a list of his 25 most-difficult-to-predict movies, I noticed they were all similar in some way to “Napoleon Dynamite” — culturally or politically polarizing and hard to classify, including “I Heart Huckabees,” “Lost in Translation,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” “Kill Bill: Volume 1” and “Sideways.”

So this is the question that gently haunts the Netflix competition, as well as the recommendation engines used by other online stores like Amazon and iTunes. Just how predictable is human taste, anyway? And if we can’t understand our own preferences, can computers really be any better at it?

goldenfiddle | That’s My Pie

Pie charts of the colours contained within each film for The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation & Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola.
I don’t even have a TV.

Benjamin Palmer

mind you, mr. palmer is CEO of the Barbarian Group.

Nov. 20 2008

pile:

(via pmcarthur)

So meta!!!

this is right by my office. happens a lot apparently.

It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.
Bertrand Russell (via affremblequotes)

Nov. 18 2008

Nov. 16 2008

simplificationtheme:

Bloc Party - “This Modern Love”

If you like Take Away Shows as much as we do, then you won’t want to miss this one. (via Tuneage)

bill’s new theme is very nice and this is my favorite bloc party song.  what a combo.  other sunday afternoon activity included playing with hulu a bit more.  also, very nice.