le grand content

we all love indexed (right?)

bit of visual representation to get things in perspective.

maths geeks

Thought This American Life #88 - Numbers merited a mention for touching on the possible psychology behind a desire for formalised representation, though just treating it as something 'unemotional' is kinda one-dimensional.

for all your satirical needs

this handy chart (from wired.com)

blinkered and happy, but still hopeful

article in The Economist the other day looking at the interrelating effects of competition and bias in the media.

I'm sometimes left pondering the fact that I love The Guardian so much even though in the main it only reinforces my views and opinions - this comfort pleasant, but is this the reason we read the news?
well... if you replace 'follow the news' with 'consume the news media' then it's a lot easier agree that pretty much so, yeah.

anyways, so the study this was looking at is particularly notable for its relatively simple but kinda innovative use of natural language processing to extract information (first processing transcripts of Congress to identify partisan phrases, then measuring their occurrence in newspaper dialog - the innovation being that even relatively subtle differences can be objectively, effectively, used in this way to identify rhetoric)

the conclusion drawn - that it is exactly the slant that each media has that leads to its profitability - is not astounding, but it is interesting that apparently even small deviations from this optimal slant have observable effects on circulation. also new to me is the finding that there doesn't seem to be much of a correlation between the slant and the newspaper's ownership - being totally market-targeted does make sense, but it's still at least a little surprising.
ok, so this kind of capitalist democracy of information is naturally blinkered in each individual instance, but as they say better than I do in pointing out the advantages:

None of this is particularly helpful to seekers of the unvarnished truth. These conscientious sorts still have to find the time to read lots of newspapers to get an unbiased picture of the world. But by serving demand from a variety of political niches, competition does allow for different points of view to be represented.

(we knew most of this already, right? but it's nice that someone's done some stats on it)

genre-mapping venn

almost forgot, I went along for one night of the trans musicales de rennes festival and it was pretty good times.

almost as excitingly, though, at 3 in the morning burger-time, is finding this (pdf) being used as table place-mats.

I wouldn't do her either, but.

( ^ Repulsive, but still) Bit of an article on media sexism ..can't say I paid much attention til recently, with the whole presidential race and the amount of sex/attractiveness/womanliness-judgement comments thrown at the candidates going past the point of irony. ok, this is not going to go anywhere near a discussion of inherent gender differences, arguably innate perception and still quite relevant character judgements... but still. there were just so. many. better. reasons. to criticise Palin or Clinton than ones relative to our ideas of femininity. why do more male writers not get called out as being vapid when they come out with those kinda things? not that female journalists get it thrown at them too much either... umm.... update: women/media/perception of relationships ..but I'm hoping that the slights at Will Young (handbag / 'vanilla sex' - c'mon, everyone says vanilla these days, and I didn't know it came from that...) are some kinda irony. or is she just trying to even the balance? not sure this is the way to go about it. ok, I'm not gonna talk about sexism again. for a while.

any song, any time

http://www.justhearit.com/ appears to be some kind of searching conglomeration of youtube, and.... I'm guessing mp3 blogs. except apparently they've paid up all the licence fees. weirdly enough, it doesn't have random stuff that's very unlikely to be on the internet, and other stupid questions i think of asking it... but it does have Flotation Toy Warning... and it seems to be crawling myspace too.. ...which makes it different from Deezer in that they're not actually hosting the content - probably not a bad idea. unfortunately, it does fall into the Deezer preference of a flash-only interface - which I maybe don't hate as strongly as this guy, but kinda, all the same.

ASCII spy..... half a post

Y'know, happens sometimes, you've got some contraband data you want to sneak out and spread worldwide, but under the radar, as it were. More importantly, wouldn't it be nice if this could just... be presented nicely, too? Is that too much to ask? These things make such a difference... We all already know and love ASCII art (right?) but most generator-type programs just populate the field with a bunch of random characters. This, new from Vincent Chu on googleapps will encode the data file of your choice (albeit at present with size restrictions) into an image, for example: ....this would be a lot better in every way if I hadn't been foiled by blogspot's stylesheets of course overiding any I tried to put in (to make text really really small, to render the image) ....I haven't been able to think of a straightforward way to do this ....something to come back to, maybe. (there was a hidden encoded file and everything!)

Une Attrape-Salinger

Unrelated to anything, except maybe as a late Christmas present (though kinda wrecking my ideas about this maybe being an employment recruitment-friendly blog by pointing to what I'm guessing is copyright-dubious material), stumbled upon what looks to be the complete published short-story works of JD Salinger. Covering 1940 - 1965, Catcher in the Rye's there, too, if you reckon you can handle reading the whole book from the screen.

25 years is a short while, out in the world as well as in somebody's life, and it's pretty cool to be able to see not just his development as a writer -- technically, as well as in his perspective -- but also the wider social themes and fashions in social interaction; and in-between a few different first-person characters, one voice coming through now and again with the kind of over-thinking under a cover of casualness instantly recognisable in its similarity to Holden Caulfield. Which is one of the most pleasant, most comforting voices I know. If you've read Catcher, one in particular - This Sandwich Has No Mayonaise - is bittersweet.

Some other favourites so far:

The Long Debut of Lois Taggett

The Heart of a Broken Story

(later edit - forget the others, this one especially: ) For Esme, with Love and Squalor