Chilled Out Bearded Man

Microsoft’s Bing Website doesn’t have an RSS feed, only Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook and Twitter seem to be outshining plain old blogs as a source of basic information. I doubt the blog will die anytime soon, but perhaps we’re seeing the beginning of the end for blogs.

Just by chance, Chilled Out Bearded Man joined Twitter today. Perhaps its time to join Facebook, as well. We’ll see how long that lasts, as rumor has it that alternate personalities are removed from Facebook (without notice) if they get too much attention. Might test this soon.

https://twitter.com/chilledoutbman

Wolfram|Alpha has been live for one week and it sounds like its a huge success. They received a ton of feedback from users and seem satisfied with how the system functioned for the week. The latest from the Wolfram Blog:

- Subjects of interest need to be expanded.

- 25% of queries were not interpretable by the system. but most of them had partial interpretations.

- Mathematics notation is working very well

- For testing, validating code symbolically using Mathematica saves them time

Go Wolfram! Its not there yet. But the concept is still awesome and will change the way we find information over the next few years.

Keep up with the latest about Wolfram Alpha on the Wolfram Alpha Blog:
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/26/the-first-week-of-wolframalpha-thank-you/

Originally, it sounded as though Wolfram|Alpha would be able to answer any question under the sun – and perhaps that is the eventual goal. For now, it seems as though Wolfram is capable of answering only Factual questions. In other words, unless there is an exact answer to your question, Wolfram cannot answer.

For example, type in Thomas Jefferson. You get a few dates and the fact that he was “head of state”. But it does not tell you that he was the President of the United States of America, nor that he wrote the Declaration of Independence.

Something cool to note is that there is a link at the bottom of the page that tells you where the information most likely came from. It says, “This list is intended as a guide to sources of further information.” Then it follows with, “The inclusion of an item in this list does not necessarily mean that its content was used as the basis for any specific Wolfram|Alpha result.” In other words, it seems like Wolfram Alpha checks a variety of the most respectable and accepted sources of knowledge to find the correct value.

Tell me more. This thing is cool and will only get cooler.

I am curious what will happen once there is too much information about a specific topic. How will it get organized on a page. A simple example of this is entering the names of 3 public companies:

Dell Citigroup johnson & johnson

It gives you quite a lot of information for that question. But it is still nowhere near the length of a long Wikipedia article. But what will happen when you ask it an extremely complex and convoluted question? Will it spit out a 100,000 line answer that your browser will barely be able to load? Or will it find some beautiful way to organize the information?
Tell me more, please.

Wolfram Alpha might be the most useful innovation on the internet since Google’s search and page rank algorithms. Wolfram Alpha organizes human knowledge in a computable manner so that you can ask it a question and it will give you the answer. Rather than showing you search results like Google would do, Wolfram|Alpha actually tells you useful answers to your question.

Wolfram|Alpha is being released in May 2009, so we should be able to see it any day now. In the meantime…

See and hear the sneak preview:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/04/wolfram

Its coming May 2009. And its lookin’ oh so cool.

Its gonna show you everything you need to know about everything.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

In the movie Zeitgeist, Jacques Fresco says that politicians cannot solve problems because unlike engineers, they are not trained to solve problems. The Venus Project, who is behind Zeitgeist, is a new solution civilization – a redesign of civilization by scientists. Discussing the implications of this is another discussion for another time. The point I want to make right now is that Barack Obama is doing a wonderful job of using technology to communicate with the people.

Just the fact that he is using the internet to send updates to the people (i.e. his weekly addresses) and to receive questions and ideas from the people (i.e. his town hall meeting) is impressive. The idea that he is pushing for innovation in technology is just above and beyond anything we could have asked for in a president. He wants the US to be the leader in renewable energy. That is incredible, forward thinking, respectable, beneficial, and economical.

Every person wants to find a job that they love. In other words, they want the ability to do what they love at the same time that they are winning bread. Use the same actions to create things as to supply yourself with necessities.

Obama is saying, lets improve energy technology, but lets create jobs and fix the economy in the process. Do what we as a country love – innovating, and at the same time do what we need – create jobs, so that people can spend and reinvigorate the economy.

I still believe that Zeitgeist and the Venus Project are wonderful movements with the best intentions of humanity in mind. Unfortunately, the solutions they recommend will take time to implement on a grande scale. In the meantime, it is good to know that we have a leader who is focusing his energy in a positive and innovative direction.

Check out Obama’s Weekly address here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/weekly_address/

I found the RSS feed for the White House Weekly Addresses here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/rss/speeches.xml

Here is a link to the “experimental” White House Town Hall Meeting:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/03/26/Wrapping-Up-Open-for-Questions/
(That’s right, an experiment… Its when you try new things – generally because there is a problem with no currently viable solution. And don’t try to tell me that militarily attacking Iraq was a useful experiment.)

I came across this beautiful design work:
http://www.lee-magazine.com/

This is so aesthetically pleasing. The artist did a wonderful job with the visual elements.

Unfortunately, the design is not very functional or practical.

1) The homepage is currently serving as an about page:
The homepage should not be an about page. The homepage is meant to get the user into the content. Don’t waste time introducing the site. The user will find the about page if they are confused about the site. They probably came here for a reason, anyway, so they have an idea of what they are getting into. The beautiful navigation content on the page is too far down. It should be front and center.

2) The page realestate is being wasted:
- The logo is way too big and takes up too much space.
- The woman’s head is nice, but maybe it could be smaller.
- The “about” content does not need to be here. This needs to be actual content that gets the user involved in the site.

3) The navigation is disconcerting:
- The bottom of the right navigation is off the screen for me. I don’t want to “navigate” down to find more navigation.
- The right navigation seems like it should be worked into the left navigation. This would save space and make things more organized.

One thing that is very impressive about the design is that it is designed using the Drupal CMS (“Content Management System”). Drupal is very good for dynamically managing large amounts of content, users, and administrators. Creating the template for this design and making it work throughout every page was probably a very large task. But once it was done once, every new page gets created dynamically and the only thing that needs to be added is the new content.

All in all, to improve the user experience, I would say that the visual appeal needs to come in a close second after the functionality.

What do you think?

Try this quick and fun experiment.
Run this in Internet Explorer or Firefox. Then try it in Google’s Chrome Browser.
http://balldroppings.com/js/

For me it is much, much faster in Google’s Chrome Browser than in other browsers.

Are you seeing the same result?

If you have any questions about society, the economy and why things are the way they are, then watch the Zeigeist films. They offer many real world solutions to some of our biggest societal, cultural, and financial issues.

WARNING: This beautiful movie may blow your mind! (At worst, it will get you thinking.)

You can watch the movie for free at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912

If you enjoy the Zeitgeist movie, I would love it if you write a comment with your highlight or your personal commentary on the film.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.