Rambles at starchamber.com

Planets don’t look like stars. Their light is strong and steady, unlike the pale twinkling of their starry neighbors. Once you know what to look for, it’s easy enough to spot them. But since they wander around relative to the stars (”planet” literally means wanderer), it’s not always easy to tell one from another.

I often [...]

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Here’s an example of the fun that can be had with an open API:
Relate-a-zon is a game you play with the Amazon catalogue in which you hop from a starting product to a target product through as few as possible intervening stepwise related products. I found it difficult and frustrating (I kept ending up in [...]

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John Singer Sargent once said, “A portrait is a picture with something wrong with the mouth.” You try to make a picture exactly like someone, but something smells “off.” A few days ago I read a nice piece by Clive Thompson about the related concept of Uncanny Valley and computer games.

The Uncanny Valley theory goes [...]

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The best visualizations tell a perfectly compelling story without the need for much setup. All you really need to know is that you’re looking at Federal Express flights arriving at Memphis on a stormy day.

Watch the video, and then add your own biological analogy here.

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I often muse about the difference between the biology world and the software world. They’re ramming into each other more and more these days, and sometimes the result is more like a car accident than a gentle merger. Bioinformatics and systems biology are two rapidly growing fields where you are as likely to find a [...]

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Witness the hive mind in action at popurls.com. It’s the next logical step after popularity aggregation websites like digg.com, furl.net, and del.icio.us: take all of the popularity aggregation websites and aggregate them into a one giant meta-popularity conglomeration. Obviously we’re not out of meta’s yet… one can imagine this process continuing for a few more [...]

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How much are you paying for gas? The people at GasBuddy.com will tell you, and they’ll also tell you where to find the cheapest gas in your area. They’ve got a good social network/web application thing going where people around the US regularly report what gas costs near them. So, for instance, here are the [...]

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When a horse is running, is there ever at point at which all four feet are off the ground? That was the question that vexed Leland Stanford, the California governor, robber baron, and eponymous university benefactor. Today high quality photography and video makes it difficult to believe that this could actually be a controversial question. [...]

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Ben Hammersley has shut down the Lazyweb, but the key insight that it embodied still endures:

…if you wait long enough, someone will implement that wacky idea you had… (or already has!) Alternatively, that if your blog has enough readers, a reader will know and provide the answer to a question you are too lazy to [...]

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