—Lazy Sunday 2
Andy Samberg goes out on a high note, bringing it full circle with Lazy Sunday 2 on his last SNL. “That’s how it began. And that’s how I’m gon’ finish it.”
In retrospect, we regret the things we didn’t do more than the things we did.
(Source: icanread)
Using last.fm Data to Map Geographic Flow of Music
By tapping into the last.fm API, these Irish researchers modeled the geographic flow of musical influence. They were able to identify where certain tastes frequently originated, and draw a hierarchy of influential cities (like the chart shown above for North America).
Surprisingly, the size of a city doesn’t associate very strongly with how influential it is. That means that despite its enormous size, NYC isn’t that much more influential than Portland or Austin. There are prevailing theories that large cities are the drivers of cultural invention, but this seems to show (for music, at least) that a connected online world is leveling that playing field.
Also, they have a graph displaying “Normalized Radiohead vs. Normalized Coldplay”, which has to go down as one of the best figures in a research paper, ever.
(via arXiv)
This past weekend I was inspired by a quote from PG’s latest essay, /todo.html. So my friend Dan suggested that I make a desktop wallpaper of it with the quote custom illustrated in some way. The passage itself goes:
I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you…
Being a geek is all about your own personal level of enthusiasm, not how your level of enthusiasm measures up to others. If you like something so much that a casual mention of it makes your whole being light up like a halogen lamp, if hearing a stranger fondly mention your favorite book or game is instant grounds for friendship, if you have ever found yourself bouncing out of your chair because something you learned blew your mind so hard that you physically could not contain yourself — you are a geek.
I’m incredibly biased, of course, but based on that last paragraph, I think we geeks sound like pretty awesome people to be around. So why, then, the lingering social stigma?
(Source: icanread)
I'm with whatever comes my way, hip hop hooray.
