CogBlogged from ‘January, 2009’

A little experiment- not looking to see who can name the pattern (that is easy).

4 Days of Spam by cogdogblog posted 2 Jan ’09, 9.14pm MST PST on flickr Made by www.wordle.net from 4 days worth of spam caught in my GMail filters. This might be more pleasing than the cruft that I scraped from my spam nets.

more funny animals Oh, it’s that time of the year. Left and right people are blogging, tweeting, facebooking, friendfeeding, their lofty goals for 2009 and all their resolutions to Get in Shape, Lose Weight, Get Organized, Do Something Charitable, Clean My Inbox etc.. Will sees value on blogging less. Beth offers great detail to address 3 broad goals. George reflects on going for more depth. Barbara eloquently looks for her way and meaning. All these folks getting serious, aiming to be a true Slow Blogger. Well, not here at CogDogBlog- we are dedicated to lots of shallowness, silliness, and fast as possible blogging. I don’t begrudge people making goals, plans, etc as things to aim for. But we should do it all the time. This post holiday loftiness, fueled by extra helpings of turkey and fruitcake, appears to this dog as sucker bet, a set up to end up depressed [...]

Change in Orientation- Change in Function by cogdogblog posted 2 Jan ’09, 9.51am MST PST on flickr By sheer accident, I found when using the Calcuator app on my iPhone, it becomes a scientific calculator (more functions, more precision) when you rotate the phone. This is elegantly beautiful. Some days I feel arithmetic and other days I just want to cosh π x!

cc licensed flickr photo by Marcus Ramberg I’ve been seeing a number of my search results this year landing on sites like WikiAnswers and Yahoo Answers — these are useful setups using a wiki based model where anyone can post a question, and then any site visitor can answer. It’s a great approach. I mean, how man time have you been to s site, and looked for a help in the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) only to find the Q you have is obviously not FA-ed? The problem in FAQs is that people who know the answers get to write all the questions, so they write only the ones they can think of. But in poking around these sites, I was finding a whole bunch of bizarro questions and oddball answers. There is a whole layer of microcultures in these spaces that just make be sit back in internet curiosity. [...]

Among others, Lee Blackall is asking if WikiPedia should cost six million dollars in light of the budget details released by Jimmy Wales. After, all six million clams is a lot of moolah, more than most wikipedia authors/users likely have sitting in their piggy banks. I could not help a flashback to what that amount could buy in 1974 to rebuild an injured astronaut: Imagine the new opening.. World knowledge, encyclopedias. A 1.0 concept barely alive. Gentlemen, we can a rebuild it. We have the wiki technology. We have the web capability to build the world’s first user generated encyclopedia. Wikipedia will be that encyclopedia. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, vaster, in more languages…. And according to CNN, a bionic man built for $6 million on 1974 would be inflation adjusted to $28 million in 2008, and actual R&D costs today estimated over $100 million. Perhaps maybe $6 [...]