Isaac Asimov: “Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.” [Quotes of the Day]

N.Y. Seeks Ban on Liquid-Filled Yo-Yo

The state Consumer Protection Board asked stores Thursday to pull “water yo-yos” from their shelves and for the federal government to ban the potentially hazardous novelty items.

Sold in dollar stores, corner stores and on the Internet, the toy features a rubbery, liquid-filled ball of various shapes and colors on an elastic cord.

Children often twirl the toy around their heads, and “the cord can easily wrap around a child’s neck,” said Teresa Santiago, chairwoman of the Consumer Protection Board. [GoUpstate.com] [via jennett.radio]

Next thing you know they’ll want to ban toy phones because the phone cord might strangle you.

Last year Piro from over at MegaTokyo and Merekat released the very cool Pirogoeth poster. I was lucky enough to get one from the original printing of it. It’s nicely framed hanging on the wall behind me.

Well, this time the two of them have gotten together again to create a new poster just as stunning as the last. According to Piro’s recent rant it comes out sometime around May. Yay!

Yesterday I mentioned Pyroto Mountain, a kind of trivial web game. I discovered today that the same people have another game called MultiMegaCorp. The basic concept is similar, but supposedly the trivia type questions are a little easier. With this one the whole concept is that you’re starting at the bottom of the ladder in a huge company and have to climb your way up to the top. I only just started, but it’s kind of fun so far. I can’t wait to write my first memo.

I was meaning to post about The Analog Lounge all day yesterday, but didn’t have a chance. Wednesday night was pretty damn fun. The turnout was really good. I’m sure a chunk of it was because of the guest DJ downstairs and the lack of a cover charge. But I’m not complaining about it at all. The more people who come out every week and have a good time is the more people who will be coming out as the weather gets better.

Big thanks go out to Frantic for blowing my mind again with how he uses the Pioneer mixer. I really need to remember where he said he shops online for when I can buy records again. One thing that was nice is there were some people who were there to mostly listen to the music upstairs, which I thought was really really cool. We even got some nice compliments. Now if we can just get all the residents to show up every week.

Bryant over at Population: One posts about and interesting web game called Pyroto Mountain. It’s mostly a trivia game, but there are some interesting little twists. One of which is you don’t have all the rules when you start out. You’re also required to interact with the other people playing the game through bulletin board posts.

As you gain more power you can climb higher up the mountain’s 512 levels. But there are some other catches you’ll find along the way. I’ve only been playing for a few hours, but so far it’s pretty fun. I think I’m hooked too.

Unknown: “In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would have taken many men many months to equal it.” [Quotes of the Day]

According to Ben Edelman, a fellow at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, it seems that Google’s SafeSearch feature is a little too agressive when filtering out possibly offensive material.

He continues: “SafeSearch is intended by Google to block ‘pornography and explicit sexual content,’ but my research indicates that it blocks far more. SafeSearch is easily confused by ambiguous words in web page titles — like ‘Hardcore Visual Basic Programming,’ a web page that describes intense programming for experts, without any sexually-explicit content whatsoever.

“SafeSearch also makes mistakes that are harder to understand — like filtering the National Middle School Association (nmsa.org) and even the front page of Northeastern University (neu.edu), not to mention numerous sites operated by national and local governments.” [Weblogs at Harvard Law]

Uh, oops? Maybe filters like this need to start using the same kind of technology as spam filtering, but in the other direction.

Tonight I went over to Harvard for Dave Winer’s weekly weblog meeting. While it is intended primarily for people in the Harvard community to learn about weblogs, he invites readers of his blog to show up also. I thought it was really interesting. I’m not sure how interactive he wanted it to be, so I mostly listened. One thing I wish I could have done is gotten online while I was there and blogged some things as I was there. Instead you’ll get some random thoughts of mine on the whole thing.

He gave a short intro to blogs, also covered making a post and simple things like uploading a picture. One thing I found most interesting was that it seemed like a lot of the people there were very much novices. There were a number of basic computer/web concepts that I felt there being a slight stumbling block on. This is something I run into with my parents a lot and when I was working I’d run into with co-workers. There are some basic ideas to do with computers that I think some people never really get taught well. My favorite example is folders. I think a lot of people get them somewhat, but don’t really fully get how they can can use them effectively.

Anyways, people asked a lot of interesting questions. One topic I thought was kind of cool was the question of community. Just what is the community of a weblog? Who’s going to be reading? Should you worry about Google indexing it? To an large extent these are things I don’t even think about. Mostly because internally I think I’ve already made a lot of those decisions. I made them back when I was working. I knew I had other people at HealthGate who read my blog and so definitely had a level of internal censorship going on. I can easily see this being an issue for people who don’t really get that part of the web.

One thing that kind of got my brain working was a question someone asked. They asked if it was possible to search groups of RSS feeds during the meeting. It got me thinking, wouldn’t it be handy if your aggregator was also indexing things as it grabbed posts. You could keep a month’s worth of simple keyword indexing to things. This is kind of also like how I wanted Net News Wire to have support for some kind of ‘scoring’ You could have keywords that you are always interested and ones that you aren’t and let it hilite posts that might interest you. If you have a large number of feeds it might be handy for a first pass skim through a few hundred posts.

I thought the meeting was pretty interesting. One thing I like about blogs is seeing people who are new to the web discovering them and discovering what they can do. Especially once they get past some of the initial stumbling blocks. It also made me think about different tools for people doing web/blogging stuff. But I’ll post about that tomorrow after I’ve slept on it.

John Robb mentioned a cool image resizing tool for OS X today called ImageWell. It’s just a small little tool that resizes images for you. I’ll have to try it out and see how good of a job it does. I love GraphicsConverter, but it sometimes seems silly to fire it up just to resize a single image.