philosophistry


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Random fact

I have about 250 contributions to Wikipedia since October 2004. Mostly minor edits, like grammar changes.


posted by phil on Wednesday Jul 23, 2008 04:17 PM
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Free ($0.00) will

I don't believe in free will. I believe in a vast spectrum from cheap to expensive will. You just choose how much psychic energy you want to spend. And even the process of making that choice can be expensive or cheap.

I'm not sure whether our reservoir of psychic energy is unlimited or finite. People under severe torture, for example, consistently don't crack. So that's +1 for the human spirit.


posted by phil on Saturday Jul 19, 2008 05:19 PM
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Download link now available for Party Tarot

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, click here to download Party Tarot. $1.99. Please be sure to download it, rate it, and review it!


posted by phil on Thursday Jul 10, 2008 12:24 PM
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Speaking of hooks

Girl Talk


posted by phil on Wednesday Jul 9, 2008 10:49 PM
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Web video has matured, hasn't it?

The previous entry is a great example of how a medium's weaknesses become its strengths.

The fact that web videos have to be small and splotchy enable having three music videos arrayed together like that on one screen. TV doesn't do that. The best they have is Picture-in-Picture which nobody uses.

There is something really satisfying and empowering about going to YouTube, clicking on the HTML code, hitting Ctrl+C, then going to my blog and hitting Ctrl+V, repeated 3 times, and creating that.


posted by phil on Wednesday Jul 9, 2008 07:53 PM
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Three good intro hooks from Matt & Kim

I wish song hooks weren't called "hooks" because the word sounds like cheesy marketing-speak. Really I think hooks are a very huge part of the music-loving experience. Hooks are my index for songs I want to listen to. "I really want to hear a song that goes duh-duh-duh-duh-daaaaaa." Or something.

For lack of a better word, Matt & Kim have excellent "hooks." Better yet, they have three songs from one album with great hooks at the beginning of their songs.

Here they are:


posted by phil on Wednesday Jul 9, 2008 07:47 PM
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Personal Infoviz works: dieters lose more weight with food diaries


posted by phil on Tuesday Jul 8, 2008 02:28 PM
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Party Tarot iPhone Application opening Friday, July 11! - $1.99

UPDATE: If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, click here to download Party Tarot. Please be sure to download it, rate it, and review it!

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I started developing iPhone applications. Well, I have some stuff to show for my work!

I created a Tarot reader for the iPhone. Here is a video of the application:

This started out as a personal Tarot reader, but then I brought it to a party and saw its true potential. People lined up to have me do their readings. And I invented things like having my listeners close their eyes and touch the iPhone to pick their cards. Here is a marketing image I put together that shows the kind of use-cases I'm imagining:

So if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, click here to download Party Tarot. It's starting out at $1.99.

It's going to be marketed under the name Nuclear Elements, my current solo freelance company. I got the card images from a 1909 public domain Rider-Waite-Smith Deck on Wikipedia


posted by phil on Sunday Jul 6, 2008 09:07 PM
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Citizen journalism's role in the hive mind

When I see technology coming down the pipe, I like to think about how it makes the global brain better. That becomes my measure of progress. What can we, collectively, do that we weren't able to do. How are we maturing.

I think of the cognitive capacities of the whole. For example, This American Life had an episode called Two Steps Back which aired in 2004 about an outstanding high school teacher who is leaving teaching because policies have changed. What's great about the Internet is that now we can have follow-up. That episode aired four years ago, but I can make it relevant right now. I can Google and see that other people are wondering, "so what happened to that teacher?" This is an important step in maturity for the overall hive mind. Memory isn't just archiving information. We've had libraries since the Library of Alexandria. What we're doing now in our "information age" is we're developing an active memory, where relevant histories can be continuously coughed up and indexed faster than it used to ever be.

This is what citizen journalism really adds to the world. It'll never replace old journalism, which to me is paid, direct observation. Old journalists are the eyes. Citizen journalists are the follow-up on what the eyes saw. The newspapers will only report flash points, but to get the follow-up, the blogosphere is just so much better in perseverance or obsession over the topics that were reported last week. The blogosphere keeps stories alive much better than anything out there.


posted by phil on Sunday Jul 6, 2008 04:46 AM
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Futuretrack: social digital cameras

Just noticed that the folder where I keep all my photos has more photos saved from other people's myspaces, facebooks, and other social sites than from my own digital camera.

I think it's interesting that Facebook is/was planning on eliminating the distinction between photos you upload and photos where you are tagged in.

This reduces my need to get a digital camera, as I can rely on the hive mind to produce enough event photos.


posted by phil on Tuesday Jul 1, 2008 02:01 PM
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- We need Esperanto 2.0
- "The Experience-Adjusted Base Time" it takes to do something (or sort of a Prototypist's Manifesto)
- The "Convenience Argument" for and against handguns
- Design is universally hard (Wed. Jun. 25)
- The holistic nature of great design
- Music "property" in the 21st Century
- Apple and it's tight control over the iPhone
- "Do something cool with your computer" (Tue. Jun. 17)
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- "Motherwellian" - (Photoshop session 3/3) (Fri. May. 30)
- "Stripeology" - (Photoshop session 2/3)
- "Seizuresque" - (Photoshop session 1/3)
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- Micro-poetry question from Brian Eno (Sun. May. 25)
- Flashback: O.J. Simpson verdict is announced (Thu. May. 22)
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- PSA: I'm an iPhone developer now
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- Small World Invasion (Sat. May. 17)
- PSA: Early-phase Start-up Needs Search/Data-Mining Guru (Tue. May. 13)
- The Crazification Factor (Wed. Apr. 23)
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- Processing your field of vision while driving, as opposed to skimming (Sat. Apr. 19)
- Two of the best music videos I've seen in recent memory (Wed. Apr. 16)
- Timelapse video of a man stuck in an elevator for 41 hours (Tue. Apr. 15)
- Writing has a weird way of controlling me (Sat. Apr. 12)
- Is it possible to end suffering for any abstract, conscious, intelligent being? (Fri. Apr. 11)
- Beautiful Glitch
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- Gigapixel Zooming in on Boston (Wed. Apr. 02)
- What is meaningful to me?
- Teach Yourself to Stop Time

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