sardonick

A friend of mine went to Korea this last summertime, and took an amazing bunch of pictures. It struck me as I was browsing them: these are not just vacation photos to be filed away, they are of high enough quality to appear in most any mainstream publication.

I look forward to the day when photostreams like this get passed around
and we can get national-geographic caliber stories written grassroots by
the masses instead of by magazines. Do you think it’ll happen? I give
it 10-15 years max before this becomes mainstream =)…

(note: if you look carefully, bbc solicits reader information and photos at the bottom of most breaking articles, so I suppose we’re already getting there).

p.s. the author of these photos says:

… Yeah, I think grassroots story telling will will go mainstream but I think it might happen in 5-7 years. We’re in the 1.0 phase now with bubblings of what is to come — there a quite a few publically generated news sites and larger operations aggregating strories/photos from regular folks … It’s just matter of time before the next big idea hits that brings the various streams/ideas come together.

I received an impressive spam a while ago. It was a comment to my SQLObject post a while back, telling me “Have you tried Ruby language? It has quite good database object system.” Not a bad comment, taken by itself. But the poster’s submitted website was clearly some search engine optimization type spam site. I’m still not sure if the spam message was generated automatically or by human. But it does give me nightmarish vision of separating ham from spam in a post-turing-test world.

To paraphrase/quote David Klein:

publications would be so much better if we were forward-thinking instead of rigorous in our testing. It seems like people judge a paper’s value by “in 10 years, will someone find a hole in the rigor of my testing procedure”. I would rather judge a paper by “does this make me have an interesting idea about the field that I’ve never thought of before”

All dissertations require four months of uninterrupted work.

• The last month of work takes 0.5 calendar months.
• The second to last month takes 1.5 calendar months.
• The first two months can take years, and they usually do.

Prof. Daneil Bewrry, U. Waterloo

Sigh… if only this were less true.