I was going through my Google Reader subscriptions when I came across this post on the American legal system, and through it the site Overlawyered. The site makes for quite a lot of interesting reading. It also had a reference to Secondlife, rather a reference to the Secondlife parodying site “Get A First Life“, which seems to have got into trouble with an interesting response from Linden labs.
Author: Aditya
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Overlawyered and Secondlife parodies
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World Wide 3dWeb
I was checking out the Crystal Space 3D site (the engine behind Planeshift, an MMORPG) and projects using the Crystal Space engine. I came across a project named Festonia which aims at creating a world wide 3d web. The project has released the first 0.01 alpha version of the 3d browser, and as per the site is supposed to be in testing (didn’t find it for download though). The project seems to be aimed towards providing ways to setup 3D web servers for 3D websites. This probably makes it somewhat different from Secondlife, though a 3D web could very well take the form of Secondlife which has facility for content creation, ownership and its own economy.
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Information overload and Adhocracy
I was checking out the page on “information overload” on wikipedia, which is one of the major hindrances to quick decision making and quite common in the current information age. The term was apparently coined by Alvin Toffler in his book “Future Shock“. So, I also looked up the page on this book and found another interesting term “Adhocracy” which was also popularized by Alvin Toffler. As per the page, adhocracy is the opposite of bureaucracy and the seems to be quite relevant for innovative organizations. The basic idea is behind adhocracy is to have a dynamism and flexibility to tackling different situations which is absent from bureaucracy.
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The 7 habits and the 6 hats
I purchased the book “How to have a beautiful mind” by Edward de Bono last weekend. I have covered about half the book so far. It talks about the different angles to discussions in general and the thoughts behind them along with ways to make interactions more meaningful for all the parties concerned. It also had a chapter on de Bono’s six thinking hats (it is also supposed to be covered in the “Start Thinking” course on Learning@IBM). The concepts are quite interesting, and does give some tips to make make you think.
I also found many of the concepts discussed about the thinking hats in particular to be quite similar to the 7 habits discussed by Stephen Covey in his book “The 7 habits of highly effective people” (I have not read this particular book, but the one by his son Sean Covey for teenagers about 6-7 years back). In particular, the concept of the six hats is quite similar to habits 4 (think win/win) and 5 (seek first to understand, then to be understood). So, in effect, both de Bono and Stephen Covey’s concepts aim at making interactions between people more productive and trying to look at things from different angles rather than just putting forward one’s thoughts and trying to get the better of an interaction.
I also think that these concepts are quite relevant in today’s world where social collaboration, networking (which would also be in some ways bring in “the wisdom of the crowds“) and innovation are the buzzwords. It is important to see things form various angles and seek different opinions, especially given the degree of connectivity available to us. So, although both the concepts are close to 2 decades old, they still retain their values in today’s environment.
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Pangrams & Golygons
I was browsing wikipedia where I came across self-enumerating pangrams which are sentences that describe exactly the number of letters in itself. As per the wikipedia page on pangrams, Lee Sallows came up with one of the first self-enumerating pangrams, in 1984. In fact, he constructed a machine for this task when solving the problem through software alone failed.
As for pangrams, they are sentences using every letter of the alphabet atleast once, with perfect pangrams being sentences in which each alphabet appears exactly once. A well known English pangram is The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
I also found some information on another interesting piece – golygons – when I was looking for more information on Lee Sallows, who invented them. Golygons are polygons with side lengths as consecutive integers and all right angles.
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Fractal flames for visual delight
I was having a look at some beautiful fractal flames on the Techrepulic gallery. The gallery mentioned an open source fractal flame editor – Apophysis – which I checked out. The software seems to be quite interesting and allows you to generate random fractal flames or create/edit some of your own. It also includes a scripting engine similar to Pascal which allows you to create/edit/animate the fractals among other features. It can make for quite some interesting viewings. The animations of the fractals is something similar to the visualizations available with various audio players (iTunes, Winamp etc). There is also screen saver called electric sheep which lets you generate & view fractal flames.
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Tags, ratings, dynamic playlists and the iPod
It turns out that tagging and ratings are useful not only for blogs and other web content, but also for music on your iPod (the 30 GB video version), especially when you have over 4000 songs in it. Audio files were probably one of the first to support tagging which was really useful for the user. iPod/iTunes (and many other players) can also use these tags to create dynamic playlists based on given criteria. This makes the tags all the more useful.
I listen to a variety of music, and unless the music is properly tagged, it would be nearly impossible (or atleast too tedious) to locate and listen to the song(s) I want to at a given time. The basic tags like title, artist, album and genre are pretty much a necessity, and identifying songs in their absence would be impossible without actually listening to them. Ratings also serve as a useful filtering criterion.
I have also found the dynamic or smart playlists feature of iTunes/iPod to be particularly useful when it comes to listening to music of a certain variety. I create a set of smart playlists based on different moods, ratings, genres etc and when the music tags are updated, songs automatically get into the appropriate playlist(s). This saves a considerable amount of effort and also keeps my playlists up to date.
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IE7 & FF2 flaws being blown out of proportion
The blog post » Can we STOP with the sensational browser flaw reporting? Please!
gives a pretty good indicator of the way the relatively minor flaws in
the latest Internet Explorer 7 & Firefox 2.0 browsers are being
blown out of proportion. In fact, as per the links given by the author,
the older versions of the browsers have had several critical flaws
being reported, and these have pretty much gone by unnoticed. -
Neodymium in my headphones
Ever wondered what’s so special about speakers and headphones which proudly exhbit the fact that they have Neodymium? Well, I certainly have. First of all, what is Neodymium? It is a rare earth metal which is used for a variety of purposes like making magnets. That explains its presence in speakers & headphones. It turns out that Neodymium is used to make some of the strongest magnets. Also, looks like we have our share of Neodymium in computers too – its used in the hard drive head motors.
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Encyclopaedia of cartoons and comics
Ever wondered when and how many of the popular cartoons and comic strips originated? The following site – Toonopedia – contains a lot of information about many a popular cartoon/comic strip along with some information on the persons behind them. Mel Blanc is one of them (in case you’re wondering who he is, he has voiced a majority of the Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies characters like Tweetie, Sylvester, Road Runner etc).
