Experiments in Cyberspace

A common concern for all bloggers new and old is reaching a wider audience. They start with their family members and a few friends, and they write their feelings, thoughts, experiences etc, hoping to gain more subscribers in the wild wild web. Sooner or later, they direct their attention to the so-called social networks as getting traffic from search engines is difficult, at least initially. I will briefly touch upon my experiences with some of them and sincerely hope you will find this review useful. Before we go on, however, I want you to ask yourself a simple question: Do you enjoy using them? Your answer to this is the KEY CONCEPT here. If you think a particular network will bring you readers just because you manage to throw in a post or two, or any number of them, you will soon discover you are wrong. The buzz word is, and has always been the user experience , and you are one of those users. If the network(s) of your choice helps you find interesting blogs, good articles an...

On the outside it reads: He revealed eternal Truth, bringing Joy to millions. He astonished the world with His command over Nature. He changed history forever. Now that Christmas is close, you may wish to send one of these cards John Powers designed to your loved ones ;-)

Einstein was a great scientist and without exception all physics students new to his work are introduced to his use of Gedanken Experiment or thought experiments. Gren Ireson, a lecturer at Loughborough University, UK, where his research interests include quantum philosophy, physics of sport and learning and teaching physical sciences, contests that a thought experiment has three requirements [PDF]: It is carried out in the mind (however one cares to define 'mind'). It draws on experience. It allows the experimenter to see what is happening (perhaps a better term to use than 'see' is 'imagine' or 'form a mental image').  I see a lot of blogs announcing they do follow comments lately, so I will humbly use Einstein's technique to shed some light on do follow commenting today. Let us start with a definition first. Google's Matt Cutts speaks: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives web masters the ability to modify PageRank flow ...

I have seldom been to Second Life ; not that I do not like the idea but because of my unstable and slow Internet connection, which turns the experience to a misery. I am aware that some people are not easy with the idea of an on-line 3D world created by its virtual residents' wild imagination but to tell you the truth, it can be fascinating. Let's see if I can change your mind, too. According to Second Life Herald, the always-fairly-unbalanced e-zine founded by philosophy professor Peter Ludlow, two virtual world ballet companies premiered new productions on Sunday, November 23, 2008. La Performance with its high school gym-style performance of "You Are So Beautiful" of Shakespeare (music by Zucchero, and choreography by Jie Loon), and Ballet Pixelle (formerly known as Second Life Ballet) with "The Nut: A Slightly Abridged Telling of The Nutcracker" (music by the Bolshoi Ballet Theatre Orchestra, and choreography by Inarra Saarien) opened the season. ...

In their recently published article Collecting and Preserving Video games and Their Related Materials: A Review of Current Practice, Game-Related Archives and Research Projects , Megan A. Winget and Caitlin Murray[1] argue for the importance of collecting and coming to a better understanding of video game "artifacts of creation," which will help build a more detailed understanding of the essential qualities of these culturally significant artifacts. Surprised? Don't! Digital Age has its own quirks, and preservation of its products [data] may have a lot more impact than you think. Compare it to what had happened in the Middle Ages, when people were using pergament :[2] Some researchers have been formed, using special tools, methods and approaches, in order to study and teach a very specific and "weird" scientific field: "written history sources of the early middle ages" 600-987). This field is quite different from analogous "more ancient" ...

According to Los Angeles Times, Six Apart, the company behind major commercial blogging platforms TypePad and Movable Type, is offering free blogs to laid-off journalists via their Journalist Bailout Program : Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We're Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you. We're a company founded by bloggers, and we've supported on-line journalism from the beginning. During a time when so many great journalists are worried about losing their jobs, we want to do what we can to help. So we've put together a program to put you on your first steps towards independence. But I did not read the story from LAT first. While Times focused on how generous was Anil Dash's (from Six Apart) offer and the difficulties of making money on-line, it was Graham of Entrecard who truly got to the bottom of the real...

  With this photo, my intention, of course, is not to draw your attention to the " Life's Short. Get a Divorce. " campaign of Corri Fetman[1], the Playboy playmate and the hottest attorney (she is also called the lawyer of love because of her invaluable legal input as a regular columnist in the said magazine) in the galaxy, a fact, as it was affirmed by Marvin the Paranoid Android. Rather, I would like to talk about Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind [Barnes&Noble], by Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University. Marcus argues that evolution is a terrible designer (those who favor intelligent design can read: [insert your favorite deity here] did a clumsy job); not only our bodies are flawed, our mind is also completely messed up. There seems to be two systems operating in our minds: an ancestral system and a deliberative one. We have been unable to shake off the ancestral system dating millions of years despite our feeble a...

For me, that is! Every once in a while I stumble upon a blog that mentions about these sexy, classy, fashionable, affordable, high quality, smart (yes-sir, smart), high profile designer frames (with variable dimensions) and eyeglasses using the latest modern materials, manufacturing and marketing systems. Apparently, buying a pair is a must if you want to acquire an aura of Zen.Ni-Cad batteries may not last but the effect of these eyeglasses with a wide range of patterns and prices will. In doubt? It is even in the news, you dumb foxes! After seeing these words a hundredth time, I have almost started to believe  Jason Calacanis, who announced his retirement from blogging . But what hurt me most is this analysis of the Economist:[1] The rest of the world may well have missed the unfolding of his tragedy. Behind it, however, is a bigger trend. Blogging has entered the mainstream, which -as with every new medium in history- looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death. To the ea...

I have (sort of) established that censorship in internet cannot succeed without violating basic human rights. Sadly, this is the de facto case, they are not observed in half of the world today. There are a number of experimental projects that aim to provide freedom of expression and of information retrieval. I would like to introduce one of them: The Free Network Project . Freenet, as is commonly known, is software designed to allow the free exchange of information over the Internet without fear of censorship, or reprisal. To achieve this Freenet makes it very difficult for adversaries to reveal the identity, either of the person publishing, or downloading content. The Freenet project started in 1999, released Freenet 0.1 in March 2000, and has been under active development ever since. What makes Freenet different from other similar projects is found in these few sentences: The journey towards Freenet 0.7 began in 2005 with the realization that some of Freenet's most vulnerab...

Excluding its simplicity, a big plus, Blogger has some disadvantages over other free blogging platforms. It heavily relies on JavaScript (this quite plain site ships 100,034 bytes of JS) rather than server side scripting, i.e. PHP or Perl, it claims to be XHTMl 1.0 strict, yet the very first script Google flushes breaks the validation, resulting in 461 errors, 164 warnings for this very site. These problems inevitably slow down loading of the pages and design concerns for running an efficient blog become even more critical. Now, I can live with extensive use of client side scripting (JavaScript) and 461 errors because there is nothing I can do about them and modern browsers are really fault tolerant (which makes them less secure, too). But I can not live without Comment Luv. It is the coolest, sweetest idea in the whole blogosphere. It is trivial to install it on a, say, wordpress blog. When I found out that there was a Comment Luv plug-in for Blogger , I had to try it. And I di...

How does code dream? What are dreams of code? Piksel08 examines the other side of code, an alternative side to a hard-coded reality of work and play. Open hardware and free software project a utopic vision, yet exist within economies of capital, the dream factory of mainstream technology. Within the chance meeting of sewing machine and umbrella on the dissecting table, hardware and software are flattened. Piksel08: code dreams explores the dreams of this soft machine; bachelors coding for pleasure, reverse engineering paranoiac constructs of the real, automatic coding practice, soft hardware, and everyday magic.  Also spracht Piksel's informative page about this year's event, Piksel08 , where artists and developers working with Free/Libre and Open Source audiovisual software and hardware will congregate in Bergen, Norway this year. If you are around, do not forget to take a look. There is also a live CD of last year's event ready for download at the site. Image: Exp...

Since this seems to be a popular topic, let me throw in a post in the early stages of this fresh blog of mine. It is popular because everyone and his dog have written something about it. Now, hear what this cat has to say. Why do you blog? No, I am serious, think about it. What is your aim, your target? What do you want to achieve? This is the single most important factor that will have an impact on designing an efficient blog (you noticed the emphasis on efficient, didn't you?). Here are some thoughts: You want to spread your ideas, i.e. you want to be read. You want to sell your products, crafts, etc. on-line. You want to make money from advertising or similar. If you consider the above, you will see that: First group needs readers or subscribers; Second, customers; Third, targeted visitors. You should evaluate your blog, from top to bottom, taking into account what type of visitors you expect. Without further ado, excluding the third group (there is a plethora of ar...

 B   A   R   A   C   K   O   B   A   M   A 66  65  82  65  67  75  79  66  65  77  65 - as ASCII values  3   2   1   2   4   3   7   3   2   5   2 - digits added \_____/ \_____/ \_____/ \_____/ \_________/    5       3       7       1       9       - digits added Thus, "barack obama" is 53719. Add 1954, the year Elvis recorded his debut single, putting the end to all morality and good taste - the result is 55673. Subtract 1912, the year Titanic went for its first and last voyage. The result will be 53761. Turn the number backwards, and add 3 - the symbol of ful...

Complexity (the number of ways-hows-and-whys a system can act) may become an anachronism as novel research demystifies consciousness reducing human complexity to a deterministic system. Biomachines that bypass time consuming conscious activity ultimately may be fielded by the DOD. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is already working towards this end. Through its Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts program, it has probed brain signals triggered when an analyst sees something interesting in a satellite image. The analyst's brain registers the discovery long before the analyst becomes cognitively aware of it. "The brain can signal the discovery three times faster than the analyst can respond... My goal is to use these technologies to harness the speed of thought... I know it's possible, especially if we confront these challenges not just as problems of biology and neuroscience but problems of physics, math, materials science and microtechnology....

Anyway, Pamela is in the market for a new computer and she might let me build it! I think in her mind though I could potentially be not b/p AT ALL at a higher dose and so she might raise me until that point? I am not good with criticism, even though I try to be. Sometimes you feel as though you can not forgive, or you won't let yourself because it hurt so much. I just read in Health that cilantro can kill salmonella, so you might want to wash that down with some fresh salsa. Your a strong person and with time, I believe you can get over him, all right? And you believe you will pretty much know as soon as you might that person. I guess that's because everyone loves the light-and-natural look these days, so the industry had to make a scent to go with it. So on Thursday, I was all nervous and everyone go to try out -but me and like two other people. Do you smugly sneak your Way into conversations that don't really have anything to do with religion? So I found some mp3 software...

A recent article about Argentina's attempt to block Internet users from searching for information about some of the country's most notable individuals that showed up in Slashdot has made me ponder. How do you run a successful censorship campaign in the Internet? As explained in the post, it is trivial to make such attempts a complete failure [1]. What most people forget or do not want to acknowledge is in order for it to succeed a coercive element has to be present, and that is the lack of basic human rights. Let us for instance take my home country, Turkey. Access to YouTube is blocked (I am using a proxy, kind of slow but it works), whole wordpress.com is unreachable (I am not using ISP's DNS and can run my own if necessary, I have bind installed, so the miserable attempt fails). Now, think again. Why does it fail? It fails because no one is knocking down my door in the middle of the night and take me and my computer with a lame excuse that I am using a proxy or VPN,...

I come home and tell my cat about it. And a few fun questions: What is your favorite soap? What is your favorite thing to use when you masturbate? What is your favorite time of day to have sex? It was really very nice to spend time with just my family. He is a prick at times, and doesn't mesh well with the rest of the family, personality wise. How can President Bush give speeches promoting democracy and expect to be taken seriously when people at home and abroad with the current election scandals in Florida, a puppet government in Iraq, and receiving an endorsement from Iran because they feel he would be more indifferent to human rights violations than John Kerry. I had the post-op visit with the surgeon yesterday. I took off yesterday, and we headed up to Baltimore. Afterwards, we were going to go to the American History museum, but it was already 3:30, and it closes at 5, so we decided to walk around and see the monuments and such. Austin was good and fresh and lovely, ...

It was cute fellow crisis volunteer!!! I'm sure the parents around me thought I was nuts, but how can you resist Josh Groban? I thought of her as Class Mom, when we went to the pumpkin farm for a Halloween field trip. A little later, after seeing my parents get divorced due to disputes over money, the American dream of amassing astounding wealth grew more distasteful for me. You'd think marriage was a cake and if they gave some to the gay people, there'd be none left that wasn't eaten or slobbered on for everyone else to eat. Name ten movies that when you see them at a rental place or think about them you want or have to rent them? We would wrap them in tin foil and put them in the bag. The funniest thing in the WORLD is a kid ripping open a fistfull of pixie sticks, dumping them in her mouth and then doing flips and cartwheels while screaming like a wild animal for the remainder of the festivities. I'd say more, but then what would the stuff below be for? W...

I made some postcards. I think I'm in serious denial... at least to some extent... I must have been crazy to think that he would want to spend some time with his new wife! And that would be to the point where I don't want to try. Have been spending the last several days drifting through things, touching down occasionally to talk to friends, do chores. After all the shit he had been through and was still facing he was more concerned about my stupid knee than about himself.

Yesterday I came across Michal Zalewski's site . While reading it (could be a bit technical for most), I noticed an interesting tool, an automatic blogging engine. What it does roughly is it takes a number of arguments you provide and outputs a blog post after checking some pre-defined sources in its database. My intention is to use this engine or similar tools, tweaking its sources where and when necessary, and post my findings here. For what it's worth, unlike Zalewski, my emphasis will be on social, psychological and cultural aspects, not on programming or artificial intelligence.

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