This article made me much more interested in playing with Google Trends.
The collective history of Web searches, [John Battelle] wrote on his blog in late 2003, was “a place holder for the intentions of humankind — a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends.”
It dawned on me this weekend that I don’t actually know what ESPN stands for. I could guess Sports and Network, but didn’t know the other letters. According to Wikipedia, it originally stood for the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Oddly, Wikipedia didn’t refer to this as an acronym, they referred to it as an initialism. That led me to reading about a number of distinctions I was never aware of in the English language:
Kind of an interesting article by Malcom Gladwell, if you have the time.
I just saw two neat applications of computer-like intelligence integrated with parts of our regular lives. (both via engadget)
Faucets that illuminate the water in a red shade if the water is hot, or a blue shade if the water is cold:
And this umbrella, who’s handle glows to let you know whether or not you should take it to work, based on weather reports in your area:
This kind of thing is very cool… I hope to see it become cheaper and more popular in the future.
Mentioned over at Signals vs. Noise was this interesting ad campaign from Amnesty International. The tagline is “It’s not happening here but it’s happening now” and it features various images, outdoors, designed to appear overlayed with the real background. Pretty cool.
What was rumored last month has now been confirmed as true. David Lee Roth did his last show on Friday, and Opie and Anthony start up on CBS radio this Wednesday. They’ll be in seven markets including Boston (on good ‘ole WBCN) and New York.
Update: They’re back on DirectTV too.
“The uproar from fans, pleading with us to put Opie & Anthony back on the air, was deafening to say the least,” said Dan Fawcett, EVP/Programming Acquisition for DirecTV. “And though our original intent was to focus our XM service on more music, we now understand the passionate following that Opie & Anthony have and we’re happy to bring them back on board in an expanded format.”
Remind me not to visit Oklahoma.
“This appears to have been part of a plan to kidnap a person, rape them, torture them, kill them, cut off their head, drain the body of blood, rape the corpse, eat the corpse, then dispose of the organs and bones,” Tompkins said.
Oh, and did I mention the victim was a little girl? This has to be among the most disturbing stories I’ve ever heard.
I don’t remember having seen this (probably because I don’t watch the Olympics), but it’s amazing.
Slate has an interesting article about Social Security… not really interesting in that it says anything new, but I like it because it appears to have a bounty of facts, and summarizes a lot of the issues succinctly.
In 1950, more than 45 percent of men 65 or older were still in the labor force. By 2003, that percentage had plunged below 20. Five years ago, a study showed that men and women were retiring five and six years earlier, respectively, than their predecessors did 45 years before. Why? Because they could.
There are rumors that O&A are moving back to regular radio to take over for David Lee Roth, who replaced Stern.
The way such a deal would work would be for O&A to do a delayed simulcast with Free FM, to allow Free FM to edit portions of the show prior to broadcast. In addition, the O&A show would be expanded by 1 hour on XM, in order, to provide extra material for Free FM for those times when O&A’s XM content is unsuitable for general FM broadcast.
O&A have been hinting on the air that this rumor is true. If true, this would be awesome. O&A already, just by virtue of being on XM, have a larger audience than Stern. If they had a version of the show on FM, there would be no comparison. The fact that they’d be taking over Stern’s timeslot and former station would be especially sweet.