Work is moving along at a reasonable pace. I just spent an hour cleaning up the database that I scraped from metacritic. One thing that I noticed is that metacritic's data is pretty bad...there are lots of duplicate names, misspelled names, incorrect publications attributed to writers, and so on. Yikes. They must not be pulling the information from a database (otherwise why would the data be so inconsistent). It must be a lot of work to manually update their website all the time.

Link to the applet.

The other project I worked on was part-crawler, part data-miner. It crawled through all of the archived movie reviews on Metacritic's Archives and extracted movie data and reviewer data. The idea was to put the data together so that you could rate a few movies, and then the program would find reviewers who rated those movies similarly to the way you did, and then recommend a movie to you based on those reviewers' reviews.

I didn't have any trouble getting the crawler to work, but I kept getting memory errors in Processing (all told, there are about 5000 movies there with many more reviewers and almost 200,000 individual reviews). The current plan is to re-imagine this with Perl and a MySQL database. It may be a little while before that is up and running.

I've long had a pet theory that even the most mundane subject, if you really focus your mind on it, can, under that intense scrutiny, yield unexpected wonders. The corollary to this is that I do not get bored easily, because just by paying attention to whatever is around me, I can find some hook to latch my imagination onto.

Many of the readings for my ITP classes this year have, in some way or another, been good examples of the validity of this theory. I've read about interaction discussed at such an in-depth level that thoughts I'd never considered came flooding to the fore.

This reading is no different. Many would consider the evolution of writing (and the attendant struggle between orality and literacy) to be not much more than a history subject. As this reading shows, however, there's a lot more to it than that.

To begin with, though, you really need to think in a historical context to appreciate the monumental change writing afforded. In a world where words are evanescent, barely existing in the real world during the time taken to speak them, the ability to fix those words down and let them outlive their speaker, was very powerful.

Interestingly, many of the same arguments now leveled against advanced technological tools (i.e., cell phones, calculators, PDAs) were used to attack writing. Plato, for instance, thought that the use of written language would dilute people's ability to remember things because they could write them down.

The article continues on rather deeply into the way the alphabet created an existence for words that was at once linked closely to but also very dissimilar from the spoken word. The article mentions—and I recall being amazed at this when I was a young child—that when you reverse the letters of the word it can spell another word (e.g., "part" and "trap"), but when you reverse the sound of a word, it bears very little resemblance to either the forward- or backwards-written word. I think my own amazement at this fact might give a little insight into the way words were viewed by historic cultures that were just beginning to feel the effects of spreading literacy. I came to the realization slowly that the written word is a completely different object than its spoken equivalent.

The Middle English word "grammar" was originally used in a mystical sense, to convey the magical properties the written word could evoke. Our word glamour (which originally referred to the ability of something to cast a spell) comes from a Scottish variation of the word grammar. So Glamour Girls are really grammar girls. Keep that in mind when you're browsing the supermarket check-out aisle.

There is no definition of a hipster. To suppose there is a definitive criteria for hipsterdom would likely offend one of these postmodern aesthetes. Instead, hipsterdom is an exclusive club for the self-initiated, entrance made all the more impenetrable for its nebulous boundaries. The central idea seems to be that you either are or are not a hipster, and while transcendent ascension into the fold is possible, no amount of conscious effort will get you there.

Click here to read the rest.

This is pretty heavy stuff. Dawkins implies that memes (see the wikipedia article on memes), as replicators, have a destiny to supersede DNA as the primary replicator on the planet. The idea is that ideas have a life of their own, not just metaphorically but technically, in the same way that genes do. They exist as neuronal structures within human brains and are transmitted from human to human much like a virus.

Instantaneous global communcation really gives memes some teeth with which to chomp away at the dominance of genes as the primary replicators on the planet. The paper I read was written in 1989 (originally in 1976), before the advent of the internet, at least in popular culture, so Dawkins doesn't mention much of the possibility of global media to spread memes, but it is clear that if memes are indeed destined to

Dawkins seems a little awestruck at the speed that memes are able to mutate and evolve as opposed to genes. He cites the fact that the memes of language have changed so much in only 20 generations that Chaucer would not be able to understand a contemporary person speaking English. The reason for this is quite clear: How many times have you passed on your genes in this lifetime? And how many ideas have you helped to spread?

Memes have big speed advantage over genes. I have a hard time setting the two up as opposed or competing entities, however. If anything, it seems like memes are dependent on genes. Memes can be spread by non-human means, of course (e.g., books), but, to adapt the famous zen koan, does a meme exist if it has no genes to perceive it?

As an interesting aside, Dawkins, when explaining in detail the memtic evolution of the song Auld Lang Syne, which in its original version starts with the line "For auld lang syne" but now is often sung as "For the sake of auld lang syne." Dawkins argues that this is evidence of a memetic mutation taking hold: In a situation where the song is being sung, if one person accidentally sings "for the sake of", the sibilant 's' and the penetrating 'k' are striking enough to break through the other voices and a child listening and wanting to sing along but not knowing the words clearly hears some words (a word, "sake") that he can identify and latch onto, so when the refrain comes around again, he sings it differently.

This struck me because I always remembered in Church amusing myself by listening to the hisses that blanketed the room on every sussuration.

I have been an open source fan for a long time. Probably since I was a "Mac Evangelist" (Guy Kawasaki's email list in the late 90s), I, without paying too much attention to the fact that Apple's technology was highly proprietary, came to be repulsed by Microsoft's proprietary software and disregard for (web) standards.

Of course, I really just came for the free software. But also, ever since I started getting online in the mid-90s I was interested in coding and kept coming into glancing contact with open source communities and being interested (and confused) by what they were doing. When I lived in Boston in 2003 I even worked for a non-profit technology/activist group that was promoting open-source software solutions for non-profits. We put out a CD full of open source software. The office that I worked in was a floor above the offices for the Free Software Foundation (GNU).

So for me, Raymond was really preaching to the choir. His words reminded me a lot of another interestig hacker type, Paul Graham, who wrote Hackers and Painters, a collectin of essays on code-writing, creativity, marketing, open-source, and so on. Graham also said that, when he was working on his web startup, it was very important that he be able to release new features nearly every day, both to stay ahead of the competition, and to keep his users coming back for more.

And this idea of speed as becoming paramount, especially in the digital domain, reminds me of what Ze Frank spoke to my Applications class about on Tuesday. Frank was also saying how important it is to kind of always be innovating and coming up with something new.

It had never occurred to me until yesterday afternoon how, in this respect, stylesheets are able to do exactly the same thing. I can change the background color of every single page of my site by changing just one line of the CSS file.

I don't know if CSS was developed specifically for this one-to-many power, or if it was developed to be able to semantically divide the web form from content, but it struck me as an astonishing parallel between two things that really aren't very similar.

Maybe it's part of human nature that we inherently seek to optimize. Maybe our brains do this thing all the time where they store "masters" for different kinds of information and the brain is able to change its definition of the master once and every other memory we have that is related to that master is changed.

Yes, that actually sounds like it is a good description of the way we think. If I told you the sun is actually a disc, not a sphere, and that it was about 4 inches across and alwyas about 2 feet out of reach, you could change your definition of sun (if you believed me), and every memory you had of tanning on a beach would be affected, without having to go through all of those beach memories.

At least, I think that's what's going on.