100 Things I Learned from the Movies

Below is a sample, but here’s the full list.

  • If you push the fat guy enough, he will snap – Full Metal Jacket
  • And everybody is racist, everybody – Crash
  • A rug really can tie a room together – The Big Lebowski
  • If a bear is hungry enough he will eat you – Grizzly Man
  • You can’t roll back an odometer by running the car in reverse – Ferris Bueller

Posted in Pop Culture | 2 Comments

Personas – How Does The Internet See You?

WHAT IS PERSONAS?

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

PHILOSOPHY

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

My results are below, but try your own name here.

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Bag of Randomness

  • My cubemate walked into the office yesterday like it was just another day, then at noon he got a phone call from his family in India telling him his father died unexpectedly.  He hasn’t been back to India for quite some time, but was on a four o’clock flight later that same afternoon.
  • If your parents are alive, call them today.
  • If you don’t have any living parents, tell your kids you love them.
  • If you don’t have either, tell someone you care about what they mean to you.
  • My allergies have been killing me.
  • Chase has those “Pick Up The Tab” commercials where they tell you that one of your purchases could spontaneously be paid for by them.  I always thought that either I wouldn’t win or if I did, they would pick up the tab on a small fast food purchase or something.  But I was wrong, I was luck enough to have them pick up a $122 purchase.  Lucky me.
  • Melanie Oudin has a Reese Witherspoon appeal to her.
  • 1000 melting soldiers in Berlin
  • I hear the new Cowboys Stadium is in the world record books for having the most HD televisions in one place, 3000 of them.  I wonder if they got a discount for a bulk order.
  • My laptop came back in the mail yesterday.  So far, so good.  The only thing I still can’t figure out is hooking it via HDMI to a big screen.  When I do that, I can’t get the sound to transfer, so it’s probably just a setting issue.
  • President George W. Bush will be speaking to school children at the Cowboys Stadium.
  • Both Letterman and Conan pretty much made the same joke about Obama’s speech to students yesterday, something to the effect of sitting next to an Asian kid to get better grades.  I’m not offended, it’s just an observation.
  • Tony Blair was on Letterman.  It was quite interesting.
  • Schools Should Teach Christianity’s Role in U.S. History, Say Evangelicals
  • A Parable of Political Compassion
  • Grace
Posted in Personal | 7 Comments