The Secret Powers of Time by Philip Zimbardo.

It’s worth your time to watch this video. :)

Related: The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory a TED talk by Daniel Kahneman

P.S. Zimbardo was the led researcher behind the famous Standford Prison Experiment.

Lessons from fashion’s free culture a TED talk by Johanna Blakely of Ready to Share.

These are interesting ideas to ponder considering that our Canadian government is about to propose a major (and perhaps heavy-handed) restructuring of our copyright laws.

Related: Terms & Conditions - A short video on Digital Rights Management.

A dark solar filament seen across the surface of the sun.

Related: Video of Large Eruptive Solar Prominence.

Web 3.0 - A short documentary on the semantic web.

The Greatest Hip-Hop Samples

The 50 greatest Hip-Hop samples according to Kon & Amir. [via]

Pangram

This Pangram contains four as, one b, two cs, one d, thirty es, six fs, five gs, seven hs, eleven is, one j, one k, two ls, two ms, eighteen ns, fifteen os, two ps, one q, five rs, twenty-seven ss, eighteen ts, two us, seven vs, eight ws, two xs, three ys, & one z.

Two days ago I released my first Ruby gem. In coding parlance gems are software libraries created to enhance the Ruby programming language.

My gem is call glutton_lastfm. It’s a wrapper library for version 2.0 of the last.fm API. The source code and documentation is available on my github account.

This gem allows you to query last.fm for:

• artist information by name
• top albums by artist
• top tracks by artist
• top user-submitted tags by artist
• upcoming events by artist
• album information by name

For example, here’s a program that searches for tags and images related to Buck 65: artist_tags_and_images.rb

I wrote this library to:

• Learn the gem creation process. (Facilitated by the jeweler gem.)
• Better understand the mechanics of web-based APIs. (Facilitated by the httparty gem.)
• Brush up on my unit-testing skills. (Facilitated by the fakeweb gem.)
• Distance myself from years of return-code function creation in favour of exceptions.

I also wrote it as part of a larger data-mining project I’m working on. (Which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to write a post on datasets and the soon to explode dataset market.)

The glutton_lastfm source-code is released unlicensed into the public domain.

Jody and I went hiking on the Mantario trail last weekend.

Nomic, a Game of Self-Amendment

Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. The Initial Set of rules does little more than regulate the rule-changing process.

• How to play Nomic
• Initial Set of Rules