After you’ve watched it, check this out.

Have a great weekend!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any Animaniacs clips. Here’s a fun song about the US Presidents.

This is just my way of saying that the surroundings may be new, but it’s still the same old blog. Enjoy!

Okay, I’m playing around with a new look for the site (finally!) and I wanted to get some reader input before committing to anything. I have a few specific questions for readers of this site:

1. Do you like the way the site looks now, compared to the old look?
2. Is it easier or harder to read than the old style?
3. Is there anything you were able to do in the old style that you can no longer do?
4. Is anything about this style distracting or confusing?
5. Should I keep it how it is, or put it back how it used to be?

It’s the age-old debate of form vs. function, but I have to say that the site looks a lot more like a ShakespeareTeacher.com than the old style, which looked more like SomeGuysWebsiteIDontCareAbout.org.* Also, I like that there’s a calendar, which I haven’t had before.

Anyway, let’s try this out for a while and see how it goes.

*SomeGuysWebsiteIDontCareAbout.com was taken.

Via the original creators of Charlie the Unicorn, it is my great honor to be able to share the German re-dub of Charlie the Unicorn.

Discuss.

I’m off to the baby naming for Lilah, so no time to post anything original this morning. Instead, I leave you with this Animaniacs song about Magellan, that for some reason really cracks me up. Enjoy!

It’s Saturday afternoon, and I don’t feel like writing any more than I imagine you feel like reading. So let’s look at some cool pictures.

You definitely want to check out this photoset of the amazing hand painting of Guido Daniele.

Or perhaps, you might enjoy these pictures taken at just the right angle.

Then, imagine what “Relativity” by M.C. Escher might look like if it were made entirely out of Legos. Now, imagine no longer.

Finally, see what nice co-workers Walt has. They covered his Jaguar with post-it notes. Then they put the photos online.

Enjoy!

Blinking electronic signs advertising Aqua Teen Hunger Force recently triggered a terrorism scare in Boston.

Fortunately, the staff of the National Lampoon reacted quickly and professionally, and put together this 24/ATHF mash-up parody before any damage was done:

I found this really compelling, both in form and content:

I gave my take on the long-term ramifications of this in earlier posts Beggar’s Canyon and Optimism. What really struck me about this video was the idea that HTML tags define the form, while XML tags define the content. So when text from an XML document is exported, it can be classified and formatted by any number of disparate machines. That’s why I can have a blog, because I can just fill in fields in a form, rather than having to understand what a MySQL database is, or how to create one.

I also enjoyed the idea of the users of the Internet teaching the Internet about ideas that only humans can have. What is a hyperlink if not one person’s definition of the relationship between two realms of information? And with machines powerful enough to process those definitions in the aggregate, the Internet becomes an über-democratic negotiation about the nature of meaning. It’s a step beyond Wikipedia, where anyone can visit to add or revise content. It’s Google News, which proactively aggregates news stories from thousands of sources worldwide.

What about pictures? How can we really search for images, when computers can only see them in pixels? Some people tag their photos, but that’s just a start. Enter schemes like The ESP Game in which players log in and are randomly assigned an anonymous partner. The pair is then shown images and they have to come up with words to describe each image. Once they agree on a word, they may move on to the next image. They win if they can label a certain number of images in the pre-determined time. It’s packaged as a game, but what it’s really doing is finding humans to complete a task that computers can’t do, which is label a large quantity of images, so that they can join this network of information.

Some might be troubled by the thought of the “average” person defining the nature of information. Don’t we have specialists and experts who constitute a small minority of the population, but who can give us a much richer understanding of their field of study? Yes, and as their influence grows, we will be able to identify and access them much more easily through the shared mind of the Web. And they, in turn, will have greater access and ability to share their ideas with a wider audience. It will be a pure meritocracy.

There’s a website, FaceResearch.org, that allows you to digitally create the average of a number of different faces that you select or upload to their site. They discuss the hypothesis that the more average a face looks, the more attractive it is perceived to be. This may be partially because average faces tend to be more symmetrical and have smoother skin. But it’s a wonderfully egalitarian idea, if you think about it. The most attractive among us may not be any one of us, but may just be the average of all of us.

Web 2.0, then, may ultimately be a way of taking the average of all of our conceptions of the world and finding the most attractive face, the essential truths of human understanding, heretofore locked only within our collective unconscious. And then we may say, along with John Keats:

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

A few days ago, I included a long discussion about the brain in a post about Daniel Tammet, the mildly-autistic, but highly-savant “Brain Man” of Britain. I’m aware that some of you may still have some questions about the way the brain is configured. As a public service, it is my pleasure to provide this illumination from one of the world’s leading authorities on the brain.