Puzzlepieces – March, 2008

I attended Abandoned by Canada: Torture Surviver Speaks Out tonight, run by WPIRG and AWOL. The depressing part of of it all is that not only did Canada, a supposedly decent country, violate its own basic laws, not just in turning a blind eye, but in initiating torture (by proxy in Syria, etc.), but that it continued to do it when it realized those involved were innocent, that they continue to to defend this action, suppress information about it, and that is likely continuing today.

Blogdigger Dev Blog: Blogdigger Acquired by Odeo - very interesting news. Back in March 2003 Dave Winer blogged that perhaps there should be a search engine based off data in RSS feeds. Three people started coding that weekend, Greg Gershman, Scott Johnson, and François Schiettecatte, forming BlogDigger, Roogle, and RSS-Search.

Scott’s “Roogle” launched by Mondayish, was Slashdotted to death, and and became Feedster. Scott and François both decided to make a company out of their ventures, and realizing that they lived in Boston, merged into Feedster. Greg later incorporated BlogDigger, but didn’t take quite the same route. I became online friends with them all to varying degrees, got to intern at Feedster in 2005, and also met Greg during that time. Although it never really attained the prestige that Feedster did, BlogDigger was always cool to me. Greg added searching by category (now generally called tags these days) thanks to my suggestion. His geo-based search is pretty nice, despite the fairly small number of geocoded blogs.

Feedster is 404ing these days, later PubSub died. Technorati eventually added searching to their backlink features, but they are struggling to some extent these days. The likes of Google Blogsearch hardly help. At any rate, Greg hung in there, and it is great to see it living on even further, and I hope him the best at his new job.

…My heart’s in Accra » The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech - insanely long post that I barely read, but I agree with the points on cats, porn, and activism.

Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry - wow. Watching things grow sloooowly for a long time, and then it finally seems like things are picking up… very exciting.

Update: link is The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem

Okay, so I am cheating a bit here. Rather than writing a new post, I’m linking to a page on my wiki where I have been collecting links for several years already: mfagan wiki / waterloo geo stuff.

Back when I started UWhub (now largely defunct) it was first going to be a mapping site for the area around campus. Then I decided it would be easier to make just regular web search first, then add a search with a geographic component (e.g. housing search), at which point I would add the map. Apparently a search engine can be a lot of work so I never got past that. But since the beginning there I have been collecting links for tools and resources for mapping the University of Waterloo, the city itself, etc. At some point it moved from a text file to a spot on my wiki, and I cleaned up and edited a lot of it recently. I have also dumped some other things on the page that don’t have much to do with mapping.

So that was a long prelude to me pointing out that that page is an extremely useful and comprehensive resource. While it is very unlikely I will actually put all the data into a single map site, the collection of links by itself is great. It includes lots of maps, at various scales (one classroom within the school, the entire world…), and tons of other data sources that can be mapped in some way, such as businesses, transit, housing, news, jobs, etc. It includes a lot of resources most people didn’t know existed, from health inspection records for all food outlets in the region, maps of crimes in the area by week and crime type, interactive maps with high resolution aerial imagery from multiple different years, geological data, historical and future maps, detailed maps of the all the floors of all the UW libraries, etc. And I keep finding new things to add, let me know if you see things I’m missing. I will definitely reference some of these links on a later post about the city.

Telling smokers lung ‘age’ helps them quit - Addictions- msnbc.com - makes sense

Right to Quiet Society - Home Page - listening to Sounds Like Canada this morning and they were talking about sound pollution, something that bugs me infinitely. The link goes to a website they mentioned, for what may be the most prominent organization advocating for non-insanity on the matter. Non-insanity, of course, being defined as agreeing with me.

There are a huge number of noise problems, so I will mention some that are bugging me at the moment.

Problem unawareness - the fact that many don’t even realize that this is a problem is a problem in itself. People tend to think of tangible pollutants, and discount sound and others. Reminds me of the song Garbage.

Public music obligatoriness - restaurants, malls, stores, elevators, gyms, etc. all feel the need to be playing music 100% of the time. I suspect people buy more than they otherwise would, what with being unable to actually think things through on account of the noise. I would say that it is okay for some of these places to play music sometimes, but none of them should be playing music all the time.

The number of places where one can not have to listen to music is quite sad. I managed to forget my goggles when swimming on Saturday, meaning I kept my head above water for most of the hour-long swim. It wasn’t until then that I realized how insanely they blast music in there. A pool is a noisy place already, what with the echoing. Even good music sounds terrible at the volume they have to keep it at to hear it.

I really do not understand the concept of a restaurant or other venue in which one cannot actually hear anyone. Do people not go out to, you know, talk to each other?

Excessive volume - almost all the movies I have been to in theatres lately have been deafening. Literally painful to the ears to start with. I suppose we are on a very bad cycle these days: people listen to music/tv/etc. so loudly that they ruin their hearing, and thus much listen to things even louder, thus worsening the hearing of those and those around them, thus necessitating louder volumes…

On the subway, I can’t listen to my mp3 player, as I am not willing to turn it as loud as need to be heard over the subway itself, which is very loud. And yet I can still hear the music from the headphones of people sitting across from me. I have the maximum volume on my iPod set to a mere third of its potental maximum volume. It is hard to believe that these people will not need hearing aids quite early in life. To be fair, I do have an American iPod; it is different elsewhere thanks to the less-unenlighted France having maximum volume laws.

Noise from unnecessary tools - another thing mentioned on the radio show was leaf blowers. To me this fits into the category of tools that have no advantage over manual means (ever see anyone spend five minutes trying to move a single leaf with a leafblower?), yet produce a ton of noise.

Jarring sounds - if there has to be noise, it should stop, start, and change gradually. Abrupt changes in sound are just a bad idea, screwing up your scenses, just like lots of sharp scene changes in video.

I will have to check out quite.org now.