Wednesday Zeitgeist

We (The Brunswick Massive) came second at Trivia last night. Drank slightly too many beers and feel particularly average this morning. Drunk and rambling discussion (actually crossed into full-blown argument, I think) about organ donation and God. I am against the first and for the second. Controversial. Everyone else is the opposite.

About to head up the road to the protest. Ironically signed my new Australian Workplace Agreement this morning ... contemplating joining a union but there is no real option for software engineers. Officially the ASU, but it's obvious they don't actually have a clue about information workers. Which means starting my own union. I wish I could shut up and just join in, but no ... my answer is to always reconfigure the entire system, start my own thing.

• Matt Parker memo RE: The South Park Movie:
  

  "Winona is not shooting ping-pong balls from her vagina. She is, in fact, hitting the balls with a ping-poing paddle."

• Nuclear Weapon Effect Calculator. Not that I am obsessed with the apocalypse or anything.
• The Long Tail:
  

  The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.
  

  As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers.
  

  In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

• This is an actual book:
  
• The 'Thirst for Knowledge' may be opium craving:
  

  "The brain's reward for getting a concept is a shot of natural opiates"

• I have known this for years ... I am addicted to learning stuff and, by extension, Wikipedia.
• The company I work for actually does pretty much everything in a wiki. All of our development work, but also all our internal systems and brainstorms are in the wiki and everyone has access. I mean everyone: from the CEO to the programmers ... incredibly democratising. The wiki we use is called Confluence. Made by an Australian company and several times I have contemplated trying to get a job with them and moving to Sydney ... it's awesome stuff.
• I am total fanboy.
• For wiki software.
• Oh dear.
• The Millenium Falcon as a transformer:
  

• Awesome images of the 'Black Sun' - a flock of 1 million starlings.
• Grails are my new favourite band. Mogwai meets Do Make Say Think at Godspeed You Black Emperor's house.
• My friend Tommy and I do this thing where we find a new band and nag the other person to listen to them for ages, until finally they snap and listen to it and then love the new band even more than the person who originally found it.
  
• Nerdy map of the Software Wars.
  
• Harriet the Tortoise dies.
• Strange Japanese simulation of a metoerite colliding with the earth.
• Honestly not obsessed with the apocalypse.
• Speaking of which, Dystopian is Latin for "the robots win."
• Mapping cyberspace:
  

  By sampling more than 1,000 political blogs, she and other researchers developed a map of the ties among them, noting, in particular, when conservatives or liberals reached across the aisle to point to a blogger from an opposing viewpoint. Naturally, the left-leaning blogs are shown as blue dots, and the right-leaning blogs are colored red. Orange lines between blogs indicate links from liberal to conservative blogs, and the purple lines are from conservative to liberal. When two liberal blogs link to each other, the line is shown in blue, just as mutually connected conservative blogs are connected with red lines.