My blogging inspiration is low tonight, and I should be in bed anyway. Here are the last few things I’ve bookmarked:
- I was away on business this weekend and was thankful that American had WiFi on the plane I was flying on, so I could actually get some work done that day instead of losing it entirely to travel. Talking about this with a co-worker after I got back, she pointed me at a blog post about the routing challenges involved in offering WiFi on planes. I haven’t read it all yet, but it looks like fun stuff.
- My default search process for any physical good these days, especially books, starts at Amazon.com. Unfortunately I have a Sony PRS-505 ebook reader, which takes epub-format books, and Amazon obviously only sells Kindle format books. Luckily I found a Greasemonkey script which was trivially editable to allow me to add a link to Borders’ ebook store to an Amazon product page.
- Coming from having worked on software for high-frequency financial trading, this article on building a working poker bot looks interesting. (Another link I haven’t read yet.)
- A friend mentioned playing with Pikwik, an open-source answer to Google Analytics which looks interesting. I’ve been frustrated by some of Google Analytics’s longstanding UI issues, and generally not being able to use it to answer questions I think are pretty reasonable, so I want to play around with it some.
- Reading this Wired article on how to calibrate your bullshit filter lead me to the extremely exhaustive Wikipedia list of cognitive biases, which is just fascinating, and I discovered a few things there that I hadn’t known about before. (In my bookmarks the link’s description is, in its entirety, “Remember.”) The heuristics used by plains apes living in tribes of 50-150 individuals a few million years ago just Do Not Scale to a globally-networked world of 7 billion people. (A point also driven home by Accelerando, which felt like the right first book to read on my new(-to-me) ereader, the aforementioned Sony.)
- You get a bonus sixth link, which I just discovered via Wikipedia as I was writing this — the Accelerando Technical Companion, because boy was I wishing for a footnoted version the first time Stross pulled out Matrioshka brain
So I haven’t entirely been marinating in futureshock this past week, but it’s been close. What have you been doing?