World RPS Society

Is this for real? Is there really a "World Rock-Paper-Scissors Society"? Is it just an elaborate joke? Would someone really put that much time into such a joke?

Water-fueled car?

Seems there's a company in Japan that says they've built a car that runs on water. Supposedly, they have a "membrane electrode assembly" that breaks water into hydrogen and oxygen; they then use the hydrogen to generate electricity, producing water as the result. Sounds too good to be true? Then it almost certainly is (actually, I would state it more strongly than that). By comparison, cold fusion is very believable. What's really impressive to me about this is the speed of creation of a quality Wikipedia page on the matter. The company had a press release on June 12, 2008, and the Wikipedia page was up on June 14.

Googleplot and recommendation systems

Daniel Lemire finds recommendation systems (I can't bring myself to call them "recommender systems", since they seem to me to be targeted more at recommendees) fascinating, though he is less than impressed by their implementation, such as Google's pagerank. Personally, I don't need sources of more information; I need lower volume and greater signal-to-noise ratio. A system that recommends that I not read something -- now that would be valuable (perhaps you're thinking the same thing right about now).

But he's right about one thing: Google's chart API is the rebirth of GNUplot. Except that it's not really open source. Anyone want to write a MATLAB function to export a graph as a Google chart?

Another book rental service

I'm still not convinced that this idea makes any sense. But there's at least two groups of people out there who've managed to raise enough money to have a go at it. That's more than I can say.

A Netflix for books

Background: once upon a time, when Amazon.com just went public, I said something like, "Why would anyone want to buy books on the internet? Half the fun of buying books is browsing a bookstore!" Another great moment in personal financial stupidity. Nevertheless, there's now a company that wants to emulate Netflix by renting books online, by subscription. Exactly what is the difference between this and a library? At least, for Amazon and Netflix, they are competing with for-profit businesses. Paperspine's competition is your local library, which likely also has an online catalog. Is it worth $10 a month or more to not have to pop by the library?

Roll your own syndication

I generally try to make my course web pages act as web portals for the course, with all the information students need (except, of course, for the pearls of wisdom contained in their textbooks and my lectures) there. I've also been increasing my use of blogs (and now, podcasts). Therein lies my desire to syndicate RSS feeds onto my web pages. Previously, I had been using RSS-to-JavaScript.com (there are other similar services), which provides the ability to includes JavaScript on your web page that will generate customizable HTML summarizes from RSS feeds. The problem I had with this was increased page load time: I was dependent on responses from their server. Now, I've found a new tool that works much better: RSS2HTML, which is a free PHP script that generates HTML according to a template that you write. There are three ways that I've been using it:

1. As a "complete web page generator". I use the PHP script, customized to hard-code the RSS feed and template file URLs, as my web page (for example, renamed as "index.php"). This is useful when the only feature available to you on your web site is PHP script execution.
2. As a server-side include. For example, the SSI code on one of my course pages will cause the PHP script to generate suitable HTML to be included for the course blog's RSS feed. The template file here is just an HTML snippet. This requires both PHP script and SSI support on the web server.
3. The third approach is what I'm using as of this date for the list of upcoming conference deadlines I place in this blog's sidebar. In this case, I can't make use of either local PHP scripts or SSI, as Blogger doesn't support them. So, I rolled my own RSS to JavaScript service by placing a modified rss2html.php script on another server, and use it to generate JavaScript output, rather than HTML (the script doesn't care what's in the template, other than the variables that it replaces with feed information). So, the template contains lines like:

   document.writeln('  ~~~ItemDescription~~~');
     

   There was one problem: the RSS fields can contain single quotes, which will of course screw up the generated JavaScript. To fix this, the PHP script must be modified. Specifically, lines like these:

   $this->ItemTitle[] = trim($this->title);
   $this->ItemDescription[] = trim($this->description)
     

   must be replaced with lines like these:

   $this->ItemTitle[] = str_replace("'", "’", trim($this->title));
   $this->ItemDescription[] = str_replace("'", "’", trim($this->description));
     

   This will replace single quotes with HTML entities that display as quotes but won't act to close the strings in the document.write() calls.

Topics: RSS, web software.

Two sites suffice

After a week of my musings on interdisciplinarity producing no Google hits for the term "exodisciplinarity", this post on my blog produced immediate results. "Exodisciplinarity" now produces a single hit on Google. (Of course, I understand that their algorithm is more sophisticated than that.)

I wonder what that implies for monetizing this blog?

A pointless experiment

I got curious about how little "significance" a web page can have and still get indexed by Google. In this case, I merely defining significance as being number of links to that page. So, I wrote a few thoughts about interdisciplinarity in my academic web a week ago, noting that the term "exodisciplinarity" returns no Google hits. The only link to that page is from my home page. A week later, still no hits for "exodisciplinarity". So let's see if the link (and mention of the term) in this blog post, being on another web site, will suffice.

And, in case you think the term is silly, do you really think that "pluridisciplinarity" merits 821 hits?

Acephalous: Measuring The Speed of Meme

Acephalous is doing an experiment to see how fast a "meme" can travel through the blogosphere. If you're reading this (and have a blog), link to the post I've linked from the title above and ping Technorati.