“…science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.”

Or chiefly produces cake.

My iPhone just autocorrected “xo” to “xoxo.” Anthropomorphization indeed.

The political zeitgeist of Main Street, USA:

Indeed, the latest figures released by Secretary of State Ross Miller indicate Democrats since September 2007 have out-registered Republicans by an obscene margin — 79,798 to 3,249. Not all of these folks are new to Nevada or new to this concept we call voting. They are former Republicans.

(via The New York Times)

Python 2.6 was released this week, with some tasty ingredients:

• Unicode is king
• Async worker processes
• Iterable abstract base classes
• Optimizations similar to Squirrelfish

• Woke up early.
• Finally finished a technical V3 that had been kicking me off for a week.
• Delicious breakfast at Cafe Gratitude with Cameron.
• Awesome offee & conversation with Cameron and Ryan.
• Really productive research/working session with Cameron.
• Noticed moving average for Flickr stats is moving northward.

This was originally in response to an email from Eric about the noise and relative value of Flickr photos in his friends’ photo streams.

I like the concept of notableness. Certain criteria of the datum fall outside the bell curve, warranting more attention.

We dealt with this issue on Vox—a linear stream of equally weighted items. In reality, items are not equal. Not only that, but different items are more notable to different viewers.

This morning I unfollowed someone on Twitter because she spammed the front page with several tweets per hour. This is akin to the nuclear option, something software should solve, really. Typically, her tweets are low value to me, but in aggregate they are interesting. Or if she has one that’s well-replied to or starred, it is isomorphically more significant.

Lastly, an algorithmically condensed event stream isn’t something that nicely fits into an RSS feed. Or maybe. This is where the rubber meets the road. Capturing—and therefore limiting—a set of events into an aggregate event, then freezing it in time as a discrete RSS entry might be a reasonable compromise between theory and reality of implementation.