So much to catch up on…

79 Years of Best Picture Winners in Posters Some excellent posters, I have seen too few of them, and a few I hadn’t even heard of.

Also see list with nominations.

Also, because it can never be said enough times: 1976 WTF??

Five-year stupidity window

From Dinosaur comics:

The way I figure it, after about five years we gain the ability to look back on anything and laugh, and I can reasonably say “Oh, but I was young and stupid back then!”.

I look back, and I think: “Oh, I was much wiser back then; the last five years I have been young and stupid.” Sigh.

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Cold reading

For those who haven’t seen a demonstration of cold reading before, here is an excellent one:

Thanks to “A Candle in the Dark”, a blog that turned up in my Google recommended feeds.

Web phrase occurrences

Quick post while I get back to work. Someone please help me here…

There are two things I mainly use Google for:

1. Searching for pages related to a particular something. This is the most common, and intended, use of Google.
2. Searching for all occurrences of a particular phrase, or more generally a pattern. This might be to compare numbers and compile statistics, or to find what context the phrase is most often used in, or find what are the most common phrases using that pattern.

For example, I just thought of the “My dad can beat up your dad” phrase, and searched Google for “my * can beat up your *”. (Click on link, and see results for yourselves.)

Someone should already have developed a tool/library for using Google (or any other search tool) for doing this, right? Why haven’t I found it yet? Maybe I should contact the “X is the new Y” people… Tell me if you’ve found such a tool.

——————————————

X is the new Y:
Original(?) diagram,
Updates, Updates on updates,
Wikipedia.

{Haskell,Python,Ruby} quine

Here.

“The broken link has been fixed. Thanks for being our first users!”

I was going through my old logs, and found gmail.com/2005-08-24.084603.html with the above at (08:46:03).

Here’s a timeline of Google Talk, from Wikipedia:

2005-08-23: The server was discovered, word got around on blogs, people logged in, the above happened, etc.
2005-08-24: Google Talk was officially announced.
2005-08-28: I set up Gaim etc. at home for my mother.
2005-08-30: First conversation, and she’s already asking questions like “Did you eat chapathis? Why are you still awake?” etc.
2006-02-07: Talk in Gmail!
2007-03-14: Google Talk Gadget
2007-11-26: Group chat, although it’s not perfect
2007-12-06: Gmail lets users log into AIM. Great, a multiprotocol IM client inside email, just what we needed. For this I blame Sean Egan, Google Talk employee and lead developer of an IM client that formerly had “AIM” in its name ;-)