On Slashdot today was an entry about Google Search if it was designed for Google. Basically redesigning the page for a higher pagerank.

Fun, but the interesting thing was a comment from the comments:

Should read: What if Google was a useless site…

…and had to design for Google?

Lets see… counter examples… how about searching Google for the word “shipping”. What do you know, UPS and Fedex are #1 and #2, and their front pages aren’t a mess of useless, Google-pleasing crap. Maybe because they are real businesses and aren’t pandering some direct ship junk or get rich quick scheme.

Makes sense, and is the basis for what I tell people who are concerned about SEO disproportionately to having a useful and relevant website: concentrate on having a good service and a useful website first.

Today I was helping a work-study student down the hall from my office on a film studies essay. Her assignment was to analyze what critics had to say on Woody Allen, specifically whether his films were comedies or dramas.

She had only read one of three critics ( Carney) but it was interesting to map out with her what her finished assignment would look like; she was (as was typical of my undergraduate experience) unsure of what the final product would look like, other than a page count (12-15). I gave her my best idea I could of what I would expect:

Coming up with a thesis, even as simple as “Many critics disagree as to whether Woody Allen’s films are comedic or dramatic.”

Then deconstruct and explain those elements in a logical fashion:

1. Who is Woody Allen, what are his films and why do we care enough to write 12-15 pages on what other people think of him.
2. Who are the said critics, what are their backgrounds and how may that affect their opinions (which we still aren’t sure we care about)?
3. What defines a comedy or drama? Can they agree on that?(nope)
4. What are they using to apply these definitions to? (the scenes). Describe and deconstruct.
5. Restate what is now obvious (the thesis)
6. Conclude with why all this is important? —this was my response to her confusion with the teacher asking for a personal reflection

I thought it was interesting how that one critic strongly seems to use fantasy (I only scanned the first few pages) to define a comedy. And that Woody Allen is masterful at creating squirmy, deep situations, and ending them prematurely before any sort of conclusion can be made (the non-dramatic part).

• 1-1/2 c. corn meal
• 1 c. flour
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 2 eggs (optional: separate and beat egg white until stiff)
• 1/3 c. oil
• 2 c. milk
• ~1-2 tsp. vinegar

via Rebecca

Always interesting to see who is using Drupal for their website:

• John Birch Society

Sic transit gloria mundi Thus passes the glory of the world Noticed in The Sportswriter by Richard Ford (p. 284)

Giving the keynote at last weekend’s Craigslist Foundation’s Nonprofit Bootcamp in New York, was Nancy Lublin, CEO and Chief Old Person of Do Something and founder of Dress for Success.

She gave us her Top Ten List of things she hates about nonprofits:

1. Being told “Be more like a for-profit”. In response: “I wish you would act more like you had the soul of a nonprofit.”
2. The people who say that. In response to the “venture philanthropists”: “I’d like you to behave like an ATM with legs.
3. My grandfather thinks he can find me at home in the middle of the day.
4. The way you people dress: flannel, cotton turtlenecks, socks with sandals
5. Redundancy. There are no market forces to force collaboration: every cosmetic corporation has a breast cancer organization.
6. Fundraising dinners: it’s always salmon.
7. Used Computers. If it’s not good enough for them, why should it be for us?
8. Direct Mail: antiquated, wastes time, money, trees.
9. The standard business model: “We do good work. Give us money”. In response: “Monetize your core competency”. You should hope to put yourself out of business.
10. Cute names: Do you think you’ll raise more money if your name rhymes?

Congratulations are in order. You’ve earned an important distinction – a Card that reflects your achievements and perfectly complements your life. A Card designed to reward you and bring you the extra services and privileges you require. From an American Express Rewards Plus Gold Card promo letter. Glad I can have my life affirmed via direct mail. Apparently my life doesn’t mean enough for Platinum. Sigh.

There are so many overlapping assumptions and statements in this congressman’s statement it’s amazing. It’s also amazing how 40 years of history inures you to something viciously contested by minds great and small.

On September 21st [1964], Congressman Donald C. Bruce of Indiana lashed out at the Daisy and Ice Cream ads at a Republican Ward dinner. He suggested that the spots aided Soviet political goals by “repeating as fact a Communist-sponsored lie which for years has been Kremlin-directed propaganda aimed at neutralizing the American will to resist the Communist program for world conquest by promoting fear of ‘the bomb.’”

William Bernbach himself defended the Daisy spot in no uncertain terms to the New York Times in October of 1964:

“The little girl commercial was deplored on absolutely erroneous grounds. The central theme of this campaign—whether you like it or not—is nuclear responsibility. Perhaps that theme is not a tasteful one; there is no way to make death pleasant.”

The divisiveness of the ad seems understandable considering the studies of mortality awareness.

from CONELRAD’s history of Lyndon Johnson’s atomic responsibility, anti-Goldwater Daisy Ad. (via BoingBoing)

I’m partial to the following WYSIWYG editors for Drupal:

• WidgEditor - stupid simple
• TinyMCE - way complicated powerful

But neither of them work well enough for me to want to use them. The trade-off for using these is that it’s easy to make pretty text, but if you ever need to manually edit, it’s incredibly painful. The biggest problem is that they don’t make new lines for paragraph breaks, smashing everything together into one huge, ugly block. And since Drupal has a nice, built-in filter for creating paragraph elements, it’s redundant (and infuriating).

The only markup you need is bold, emphasis, links, pictures and a way to turn it off. Wordpress seems to get it.

I just started auditing a Mathematical Models in Biology class and Matlab is one of the requirements. I had relatively good experience with the free, open source alternative, Octave back in college, but then I was running Linux, not OSX. It took me about an hour to figure out how to set it up (I was a little worried for a bit).

1. Download the Octave binary for OSX from Octaveforge.

2. Install Octave and Gnuplot (in the extras folder). I just dragged them to /Applications (X11 is required for Gnuplot—should be found on OSX install disk)

3. If you are using OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or 10.5.8+ you may need to perform some additional steps outlined here

4. Set the environment variable for gnuplot (Octave is supposed to do this automatically, but it didn’t for me): `

sudo ln -s /Applications/GnuPlot.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnuplot /usr/bin/gnuplot

`

(thanks for the help, Toby)

1. Download and install (again in /Applications) Aquaterm which will actually render the gnuplot graphs.

2. Within Gnuplot, set the renderer: “terminal aqua”

3. Try it out in Octave (I had to restart Octave and Gnuplot to get it all to work): `

x = linspace(-pi, pi, 100);

y = sin(x);

plot(x, y);

`

Thank you: High Performance Computing for Mac OS X, the Octave Wiki and Google for helping me find what I needed.

Update (January 24, 2010): updated the link in step #1 to the latest version of Octave. Added an additional step described by Zack in the comments (thanks!)