Special Interest Group on CRAP

I’ve written in the past about the interpretation of the PageRank probability distribution as an economic utility function. Recall that one interpretation is PageRank(url) = probability that a random surfer arrives at the url. This can be used to estimating monetary value for advertising on the page, because it is correlated to the number of [...]

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I recently went to buy a dock for my iPod, to try and play music from the iPod through my stereo system. I read a bunch of reviews of devices, and opted to purchase a Keyspace Tuneview through Amazon. Step 1 is realizing that you aren’t purchasing it through Amazon, but that’s typical (and extremely [...]

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I recently was around someone who used the term “war on terror”. I almost started ranting, but decided to pause and think about why that term bugs me so much. Sometimes it’s better to think before you speak. I was reminded of it again when I heard a talk by Thomas Barnett from the TED [...]

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There have been a lot of complaints about Hillary having voted for funding the war in Iraq, and I’m sure that she regrets that decision just as those who voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution regretted it later. It’s easy to forget but at the time, the Bush administration was spreading lies about WMD [...]

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For some reason today I was wondering what the oldest email address is at this point. All addresses in RFC 821 are from the now-defunct .ARPA domain, but presumably the postmaster user at the oldest domain is a reasonable contender. root@localhost is another popular one, but the real question is – what is the oldest [...]

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