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JohnGabree.com Impractical Proposals

2006-01-14

Music: Programming Indiespace

Soundflavor matches your preferences to its database of 182,000 songs and directs you to music it thinks you'll like, with 30-sec samples so you can decide if you agree. Even better, Last.fm creates a profile of your tastes based on your 200,000 favorite songs and uses it to program -- employing "probalistic latent semantic analysis" -- a free radio station just for you. It's not on the money 100% of the time -- it thinks there is a kinship between Fred Neil and Van Dyke Parks, fr'instance, but all in all it delivers on its promises.
<http://Soundflavor.com/Pages/> <http://www.Last.fm/>

2006-01-13

Science & Technology: VisualComplexity.com

"VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

"Not all projects shown here are genuine complex networks, in the sense that they aren’t necessarily at the edge of chaos, or show an irregular and systematic degree of connectivity. However, the projects that apparently skip this class were chosen for two important reasons. They either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject. Nevertheless, all projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts." -- from the website. <http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/>

2006-01-08

Good Eatin': Weird Food From Around the World

"Nearly every culture invents a food that is weird or disgusting to outsiders. These seaslug strange foods from around the world are cultural markers to show who's a member (insiders like it) and who's not a member (outsiders hate it)....For example, many cultures pride themselves on their foul-tasting local drinks, such as white lightning, pulque, chong, retsina, and so on. You're accepted if you drink it....Foods don't make it onto this list just because they are unpopular. Some people hate broccoli. So what? Weird foods get on this list because they are cultural markers. There's stuff you like (such as hakarl) (and you think is normal) that other people refuse to even allow in their house." -- from the website. <http://www.weird-food.com/>