Sunday, March 9, 2008
Another silly diagramme unearthed by the people at BoingBoing and themed on Dungeons and Dragons whose creator Gary Gygax died recently.
When you look at the full version of the diagramme, you’ll see a rectangle about “people blogging about diagrams”. I am such a nerd!
Flowchart: How D&D is a gateway drug to every flavor of nerdiness: “Wired’s Adam Rogers wrote a lovely, sweeping obit for Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax in this weekend’s New York Times that included this flowchart showing how D&D was a gateway drug into every kind of nerd-dom:
We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group…
Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.
Link
(Thanks, Ethan!)
“
(Via Boing Boing.)
Saturday, January 26, 2008
On the 12th of January, I attended a photo walking in central London.
I discover the event on Upcoming but most people were Flickr users.
The organizer Phill Price has written a wrap-up post on photowalking.org.
If you’ve got Google Earth and want to navigate the photos on the route we’ve walked, here’s the Flickr link to the KML file for that event.
Below are some of the photos I took on that day (it was an exceptionally sunny day for this time in the year in London):
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Interesting article on Boing Boing about Google image labeler and how to entice the mass into a dull job by the means of a game challenge…
It’s a clever way to do retrospective tagging. Organizations with large archives of data are likely to do more of this in order to open access to their “long tail”.
In a non-digital world, an analogy could be the way the BBC organized national “treasure hunts” to retrieve long missing archive material, except they were one-offs.
Google has found a way to harness the power of the mass (and no, this has nothing to do with what happens to humans in the Matrix trilogy, although …)
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
A compilation of alternative accommodation, trendy because labelled as “green”.
I actually like the Loft Cube (too easy to mispronounce as ‘Love Cube’) , and if installed on the rooftop of a London building, the views from all side must be amazing and I quite see myself in such dwelling. It’s not expensive, especially compared to London prices.
It also happens that the first Loft Cube has been installed in London, on the 8th storey of a building near Tate Britain …
Now, if only the cube could come with an instruction manual on how to approach local authorities and building management companies …
read more | digg story
Sunday, January 14, 2007
It’s fascinating to read the Google Zeitgeist (the list of the most frequent queries to Google search).
the list for November 2006 in UK is very illustrative of the period (pre-Christmas shopping season).
It was interesting to see “cricket” appearing in top 15 in India but not in UK.
It also show that greek people are searching for a hedonistic life, may be to try to have a similar life to all of these celebrities that are searching on Google 
And of course there are the eternally popular queries in almost every countries: Jessica Alba, Paris Hilton, Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears.
Finally, I admire the concision of danish queries
In the same vein, Digg.com links to an article about what chinese are searching for the most in Baidu (the most popular search engine in China)
Thursday, December 7, 2006
Few months ago, I posted an article about the misunderstandings and confusion that often occur when communicating by e-mail.
Because a picture is worth thousands words, here is a pie chart resulting from research done in the sixties:
The percentages describe the importance of the effect an attribute has on a the receiver of the communication (in a work environment). Because body language (non-verbal) and tone of voice are definitely not conveyed in an e-mail, it easy to see why e-mails are easily misunderstood (SMS is worst, but that’s another story). As a byproduct it also justify the existence of smileys.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Ars Technica has published this interesting article:
London pilots “future crime” database
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Looks like you’d better stay away from the game system of from the owners for that matter:
Saturday, September 2, 2006
Few weeks ago I was reading that MySpace was claiming more than 109 millions users.
My thoughts at that time was:
That’s a lot of users. How many of them are
- spammers, scammers and viral marketers
- virtual accounts created by mySpace to sexify their market value
- one off account created by individuals that wanted to see what is it about
- created out of boredom and where holders main activity is silent browsing of strangers profile
- duplicate accounts of forgetful legit users
And this morning I found that on Digg:
MySpace Not So Social Anymore: “MySpace is no longer a social site, corporate spam-peddlers have taken over. Fake celebrity profiles, corporations posing as 13 yr-old girls to sell products, and a growing flood of ads is too much even for undemanding, noobish MySpace users. If something isn’t done, it’s only a matter of time before MySpace goes the way of AOL.”
(Via digg.)
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