July 2008
29 posts
Only six and a half hours left...
to drive while on a cell phone in California. I wonder who will be the first to get a ticket? What a great claim to fame. The ticket is only 20 bucks and it doesn’t hurt your driving record. That’s cheaper than most Bluetooth headsets.
June 2008
32 posts
Spain routs Russia 3-0 to reach Euro final vs.... →
For the first time in 24 years, the Spaniards have made it to the Euro Cup final. What a great time to be back in Spain. This Sunday is going to be CRAZY!
The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts... →
From the NY Times in February of this year. Width represents how long the movie was out, and color/area is how much the movie grossed. Be sure to drag the cursor over some of the movies. I noticed how in the 80’s and 90’s the movies didn’t peak as high but had longer tails than movies today. A good example is Ghost, which came out in July of 1990 and continued to pull in box...
The Happening
I saw this movie with my friend Krutal in Emeryville the other day and it is terrible. We both decided that M. Knight Shyamalan is a one-hit wonder (the Sixth Sense). Here is a great review of the movie. “It’s like the climax of Twister, without the twister.”
Powerset
Last semester I took a class at Berkeley titled “Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business”which is through the School of Information (links to the webcast of Info 141). The professor, Marti Hearst, is an advisor to Powerset, which is a natural-language search engine that is trying to take on Google. Powerset is different because instead of having to type in keywords (like you...
3 tags
“Once it gets rolling it’s like playing Plinko.”
– Tiger Woods, about the 10-foot birdie putt he just made to force a playoff in the US Open
Linerider →
I don’t know how I didn’t find this sooner.
The Human Hands Behind the Google Money Machine →
This is a good article I found in the NYT that goes into more detail about how Google’s text ad auctions work. Hal Varian, who spoke in the search engine class I took at Berkeley last semester, is quoted in the article (and pictured). The end is really interesting. There is a team at Google whose job is to watch trends in traffic to look for problems. This past February there was a sudden...
“Mrs. Clinton will get the nomination.”
– Harold Ickes, senior advisor to Hillary Clinton. I just heard him say that on Meet the Press. In order for that to happen, and assuming they split the rest of the electoral votes, Hillary would have to convince 195 out of the remaining 203 superdelegates to vote for her, and not Obama. Good luck.
