two kinds of sad

at the zoo

he was eating popcorn with a little friend

what we did for xmas

stuffed horse

horse in an awkward position

Yahoo Answers

Have you seen Yahoo answers at answers.yahoo.com? Users ask questions and then other users answer them. At the same time there is a moderation system where you can vote for the best answer. Presumably, the people whose questions get consistantly moderated well get more points and their moderations get more weight and their answers are given more weight. This idea is really obvious, but has the potential to be as transformative as the Wikipedia. The problem of course is that to get people to use it, other people have to be using it already. Google has a system where people pay money for an answer and only handpicked group of contractors are allowed to answer any question. I think that this is a much less exciting option.

In Korea, the website Naver (www.naver.com) used this idea in 2004 to not only become one of the top websites in Korea, but to drive their search engine to dominant marketshare over Yahoo and Google.

So Yahoo launched answers in the US around a week ago and they have a substantial amount of traffic. But here are some random questions and answers:

Question: A woman has 7 children, half of them are boys.How can this be possible?
Answer: maybe one of them is bi! or one could be gay.

Question: Why will a ducks quack not echo?
Answer: wE HAVE MANY DUCKS ON OUR FARM AND WHEN THEY GET STARTED THEY RAISE HELL AND ECHO AS WELL

Question: Biologically, is there a reason as to why the age of the girl must be les than the age of the guy in a couple?
...

Question: If evolution is correct and there is no god why cant I shoot you?
...

You have to see these to believe them.

So what is the problem with Yahoo Answers? The implementation seems to be working very hard to reduce questions like this. Surely the Korean site wouldn't be the top Korean destination on the net for information if it was filled with garbage like this. Are there cultural differences causing this type of system not to work in the United States? I mean if more people believe that aliens are likely to exist than that evolution is likely to be true, maybe using the collective intelligence will never work in this country. That seems pretty sad.

Second Podcast

If you liked the last podcast, here's the REMIX:

http://www.lukebiewald.com/jesusremix.mp3

First Minja Lurtle's Podcast

Here at 832 Capp st. we explore all forms of technologies, memetics, emergent informatics, socio-techno revolutions and web 2.0. It's like I keep telling Tess, "The medium is the message".

So here is the first podcast.

See if you can guess the identity of the signing hippie.

untitledd

man or woman or disgusting

watch out Luke

you don't want to make the germans mad

Ich will sofort hören wer del.icio.us kaputt gemacht hat! SOFORT! Ich kann so nicht bloggen.

Arnold likes ass

and rightly so. in case you haven't seen the Arnold in Rio video:

http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2683788?htv=12

Represemt

I already regret this post.

Mam, or womam

Sorry about mothimg but mike postimg. I spilled uice om my laptop amd it wouldm't turm om for a week. But suddemly it works agaim except for a few of the keys. Here's part three im our semiweekly feature...

you gotta believe in yourself

L. E. J. Brouwer (Luitzen Egbertus Jan, 1881-1966) was a Dutch mathematician and the founder of intuitionism, a philosophy which admits only things that can be constructed by finitary means. In particular, intuitionism does not accept the validity of the Law of the Excluded Middle, nor the Axiom of Choice. Ironically, Brouwer is best known (outside the philosophy of mathematics) for his fixed-point theorem, which he proved by means of conventional (non-constructive) analysis, i.e., techniques that he philosophically considered to be questionable if not downright invalid.

color log

Teletext Babez

check out this listing of german teletext porn that ran on cable tv

http://www.a-blast.org/~drx/lo-tech/teletext/index.en.html

"Ich hab kein Hoschen an"

blog fizzling out? no!

have we not content left to flaunt on our blog?

as more and more of our bulbs burn out, we should say goodbye to big incandescents and hello to xmas strings and color duraflame logs. what says holiday cheer more than dim lighting that makes us look more attractive. and along the same line of thought, who's down for some exotic nog recipes: emu egg nog christ i love christmas. i'm ready and willing to program some holiday songs onto the sequencer and my itunes shared playlists will soon feature the seasonal favorites by kurtis blow and snoop.

also, steve will be graduating law school mid december. we should do something relatively nice for him so we can count on free counsel until we can count on tess for free counsel.

Police Causing Trouble

So they won't arrest a bunch of kids blasting Aerosmith and rattling my windows at 3 AM on a Wednesday when I call them, but they do arrest cheerleaders for having sex in a club??? Who is against this? Jesus christ.

I like the way this article made the Yahoo front page. I've got to figure out what they use to decide what goes there. Must be related to click through rates.

I know everyone's seen enough turtles by now but...

...but how can you get sick of turtles?



When we went out on Halloween (and pre-Halloween), nobody had anything bad or mean to say about the turtles. Everybody was excited, everybody wanted to relive a happy moment of their life by singing the song or giving shout-outs to their favorite turtle. It was pretty goddamned heart-warming.

Luke and Tess are also Drunks

A couple that drinks together stays together.

Mike is a drunk

Man or woman part 2

Maybe I'll make this a weekly feature

unsolicited touching dolphin

400 skeeball tix, no thanks to luke. he wasted all his tokens on the drumming game.

mike wins

but he was on the golf team, so that seriously does not count. people.

we are damp

look at tess drying under the pizza heat lamp.

Queen of Science

Nerds always want to put some stupid quotation at the begining of their powerpoint. Usually they pick some crap from Shakespeare or Goethe. But yesterday this prospective employee took it to the next level: "Life is only good for two things: discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics." (from Poisson of both Poisson's equation and the Poisson distribution... does anyone else have an equation and a distribution named after them? Is there a Gauss equation? Kenny/Patrick are you reading this? Ok, enough...)

Mike recently observerd "Math textbooks are only good for one thing: propping up the projector."

Man I hope we hire that guy.

Without Arvel We are Nothing

Guess what night it is?

Tuesday night. And if you run in our circle, that means it's movie night. But not tonight. Because despite my spending a full half hour today in the video store (Lost Weekend is my store of choice these days, mostly because of proximity) deliberating over what to show, when 9 o'clock came around (9:15 really, I know everyone is slow), nobody buzzed our door. Sadness.

This sad state of affairs begs the question, what went wrong? Firstly, Arvel is out of town. That means that he isn't around to encourage his housemates and hangers-on to come, or to bring beer and such. Secondly, I fear that as Brett put it "there is something wrong about movie night." He argued that at movie night he is surrounded by friends, but can't interact with them because there's a movie playing. Thirdly, maybe nobody likes SLC Punk?

So, I open this to the audience (thought it is likely just my roommies that are reading this, who come every week out of inertia), what needs to change about movie night? Is there a movie you think will bring the droves? Should we just show cartoon shorts and then have time to talk to each other? Should I chain Arvel to our couch so that you all are forced to come over here once a week and visit him? Let me know.

chrissy lu

fat albert

terminal velocity

more candy and i will vomit

movies movies movies

did someone suggest the Muppet Movie?? i think i saw Sweetums at the shell station last night. what a great costume!!



we should keep a running tally of movie ideas. this means you, anonymous readers!

open thread

from my vast experience sailing the blogosphere, i know that the best thing for a blog is the open thread. so i pose the question, if one were to launch a box of candy with a slingshot high into the air and then down into a crowd of drunken revelers, does it slow to a safe speed before striking someone's skull? and if not, should a good human care?