Found this band the other day, a really cool emo/mathrock band called The Brave Little Abacus. Check out their album on youtube if you've got 49 minutes and 28 seconds to spare.

Thanks. We've been collecting tag pairs quite some time now, but not really using the data.

I think it might be nice if a right-click could open the tag page in a new tab. I will probably play around with that. There might be other places on the site where it might be useful too.

is your pairs ranking continually updated? it might be good to have either a rolling window or some kind of hotness score so that new tags can gain traction

Yes, they are. That's a good point. A rolling window is probably the easiest approach with our current implementation.

Currently, 'co-tags' are just gathered in a stream. i.e. the #space co-tag stream might be:

  #mars #astronomy #mars #robots #gravity #astrobiology #iss #mars #carlsagan...

It's not about being afraid, or hateful; it's about not being blind to the reality of the pathetic status of men in Western society...

I know. I'm glad someone has the courage to speak the truth, to point out that we now only have 80% of each house of Congress, 86% of G7 heads of government, 95% of chief executive positions at S&P 500 companies, 66% of the Supreme Court, 73% of cabinet secretaries, and all of the presidents in history. Pathetic. At his rate we'll only have half the power positions in the world by the end of two centuries from now.

Have you ever heard the album McLaughlin did with Carlos Santana, Love, Devotion, Surrender? To me, it's the best work either ever did (Santana used to be awesome long, long ago, before he did collaborations with Rob Thomas and women's shoe designers).

Yeah, there's no cure for stupid.

Here was my take-away from the whole process:

When we first started, she told us we'd probably be ten to fifteen hours into a logo. And we were like, naaah, no way. We aren't anywhere near that choosy. And then she gave us a couple first-runs and we were like I mean, dayum. Print that sucka. but there were one or two tweaks, and we talked about it. And we did "one or two tweaks" like four times, and then I asked "how many hours we at?" and she said

"Twelve."

And that's where you go "You know, we're working with a professional who has done this before, is intimately familiar with the process and has a firm grasp of what we need and how to give it to us. Let's pay her."

...or, you go "HOLY SHIT HOW DID YOU SPEND TWELVE HOURS MOVING PIXELS AROUND, WOMAN?" Because after all, you just get emails. It's easy to forget that there's work that happens between them, and you need to pay for it.

My partner is so excited about this coming out; he's a huge fan of VII. I never played the original, but he assures me it has a great story, and with fresh graphics, I'm a little excited too.

Ratched still shakes me in a way I can't quite quantify. In the book and the movie, there's just something way too recognizable in her lack of humanity and penchant for causing suffering without reason. An evil character, no doubt, but more importantly one that if you're reading a book you'd consider inhuman, but she's so well crafted you realize you know of plenty of real humans like her.

And it was awesome 'cuz the not-too-pretty girls all worked at Subway and if you flirted with them you could trick them into giving you about 90 stamps. Then the owner would audit the stamps, notice they were flying out the door and fire the not-too-pretty girls. But they'd already signed their friends up so you'd go flirt with their friends.

I ate free at Subway for like two solid years. I'm willing to bet I still have a dozen fully-loaded cards in the glovebox of the car I abandoned at my folks' house.

I think my high school graduation is going to be my saddest and proudest moment of my life.

I grew up kinda smart (always did well on standardized tests and in reading programs), so school wasn't that much of a challenge for me for the longest time. I thought that would carry on throughout my life, but around middle school, I started to stumble. I started getting Cs and Ds around that time, which was pretty uncommon for me, and it marked a time of downward spiral.

There were many times in my high school life where I thought I wasn't going to graduate. I was at a point where I was trying to scrape by in advanced classes, which began to hurt more than help. I had many teachers sit me down and just basically ask, "What are you doing, man?" I really didn't know. I started falling deeper into my depression, where I thought about killing myself literally every single day. I didn't care about school at all, because I thought that it didn't matter since I was going to die anyway. I went from doing things to just kinda lounging around and sleeping all day. I had the time to do my work, but I just never did.

I hate being one of those "smart but lazy" people, but I feel like my current trajectory doesn't match the one I had laid out for me years ago. I thought I was going to actually amount to something. I thought I was going to accomplish a goal. Now, I'm just sitting here with my 3.444 GPA (3.0 unweighted), my acceptance to a halfway decent university close by, and complete lack of any interesting skills.

I feel like if things transpired differently, I would be in a better place. I don't point blame at some specific person or thing - only myself. If I could have only just dealt with my issues, instead of becoming enslaved by them, maybe I could have done something more with my life. Maybe if I wasn't so stupid, and valued sitting around on the internet or sleeping all day less than I did homework and studying, maybe I wouldn't basically be the benchmark of my classes. I just want to go back in time, find my freshmen or 8th grade self, smack him in the face and just say, "Do something. Just fucking do something. Don't be so fucking lazy."

My high school graduation is going to be the closing of a chapter. I can't sit there and say "Maybe tomorrow," or "Maybe next quarter," or "Maybe next year," because it's over. I don't have another chance to really fix all of my fuck ups, or at least try to rectify them with positive things; I just have to deal with it. I'm not going to be the kid in my class that's really smart and did something with his life; I'm going to be the kid that never turned in his work, barely passed the class, and barely graduated. Every time I hear someone say how few days we have left, I get reminded that I'm at the end.

Basically, I'm going to be proud of what I accomplished, but ashamed of how I barely got there.

Man, this is exciting. I believe its almost a guarantee that we will find life within our lifetime in the Solar System. Though not as cocky, I'd bet my car on the findings of life on Europa.

If you are doing physics research, learning a programing language would be more beneficial to your career then learning how to setup a network. IMHO

You could build your own physics app.

Yes, it's not on your end. That is going to require some house-cleaning.

I'll get to it!! AHHH

he's too pretty for jail. Just ask Martha Stewart.

I think it's a very interesting experiment. I have much more invested in The DAO than Digix, and I have a lot of faith and trust in the Slock.it team, again much more than Digix. Not saying that Digix isn't the following, but I have seen nothing but smart, quick-moving, ambitious, a bit dreamy, from Slock.it. This is their baby, and they love it and want nothing for the best to it. They want to change the world, and they are smart enough that they may be able to make a dent in it.

I do think that at this point there is a bit more $$ than I would liked in The DAO. I think for an interesting experiment, $200M is probably a bit much. But, I have no doubt that the key players (Slock.it, other proposers, key community members who have stepped up, etc) are going to do everything in their power to try to make it better and the code better and address issues.

I think the real value of The DAO is one more step towards a more decentralized world, one more thing that gets referenced when people are trying big things, one more thing that either proves or disproves the impossible debate regarding wisdom of the crowd.

Being a programmer generally sucks as a career. You are always fighting for your position against people who are younger than you, have more free time than you to keep up to date on the latest skills, and are willing to do your work for less money than you are. Programming is basically a commodity skill, and not a career unless you are one of the visionary 1%. And you aren't.

However, as a skill you use in another career, programming is VERY useful. But those context-specific skills can be learned on the job a lot faster than sitting through a general class for a general audience, and trying to extrapolate the meaningful bits to what you want to do. Screw that. Take an online course focusing on the methods and structures you are interested in, hack something together, and, if it works out, refine it later. Or pass it off to a junior level programmer to fix your code.

On the other hand, there are not many people who are genuinely skilled at network routing, and this market is EXPLODING. Like Mike Rowe of "Dirty Jobs" fame likes to say, there is a huge demand for good plumbers out there, because all the programmers in the world have toilets.

Well, all the programmers in the world need their network to work. And they don't know shit about a network closet, configuring routers, and managing network traffic. And there is only going to be MORE network traffic. The job ain't glamorous, but it pays well, and not many people are actually good at it.

Go for the CCNA. And then go learn how everyone other than Cisco does it. (F5, Avi, A10, etc.)

I dunno, man. I think the way the US pretends insider trading is illegal only serves to crush the mid-level guys. The entire bailout in 2008 is basically one big bundle of insider trading.