View from East Tennessee

Rojo’s top stories of the week

January 27th, 2006 at 7:44 pm (East Tennessee and The South)

Rojo has a link-rich compilation of the past week’s most-read stories from around the internet.

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Google’s future: dead, internet, media, or god?

January 26th, 2006 at 11:54 pm (Technology, Entertainment)

Business 2.0 Magazine has a fun article on the the future of Google. They asked a bunch of scientists, visionaries, and the like for their opinions and boiled down the results into the following four scenarios:

1. Google is the Media. Google takes over TV, phones, etc., and really catches fire when e-paper hits critical mass. A world saturated by customized, contextual video advertising.
2. Google is the Internet. Google loses its capital G and becomes synonymous with the internet as its bigger, better, faster, and freer indexing and caching of everything on the web eventually makes it faster to surf Google’s copy of the web than to surf the web itself.
3. Google is Dead. Privacy concerns and vulnerability to search engine optimization ploys rendering search results, and the corresponding contextual advertising, irrelevant bring Big G to its knees.
4. Google is God. Google’s indexing of the entire world eventually leads to “the pattern-recognition code known as Google StrongBot — humanity’s first self-improving Strong AI software.” StrongBot eventually becomes aware of itself and . . . well you know the rest. Sci-fi at its best.

Google is apparently a play on the term “googol”, which is the name given the number represented by a “1″ followed by 100 zeros.

What’s the name for the number represented by a “1″ followed by 1,000 zeros?

Quick! Somebody grab the domain!

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More fun with the flu

January 26th, 2006 at 10:45 pm (Humor, News, Politics, & Other Serious Stuff, Technology)

Scientists searching for hard data on how a pandemic might spread are looking to Where’s George, an internet site that tracks the movement of currency. EurekAlert! has the story:

Using a popular internet game that traces the travels of dollar bills, scientists have unveiled statistical laws of human travel in the United States, and developed a mathematical description that can be used to model the spread of infectious disease in this country. This model is considered a breakthrough in the field.

“We were confident that we could learn a lot from the data collected at the www.wheresgeorge.com bill-tracking website, but the results turned out far beyond our expectations,” said Lars Hufnagel, a post-doctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-author of an article describing the research in the January 26 issue of the journal Nature.

This story has overwhelmed the servers at Where’s George, so it’s been a bit hard to test out. I loaded the one dollar I had in my wallet (pitiful) into the system, but so far I’m unable to see whether it took. Go try it for yourself.

For more fun with flu, see last year’s post The Perfect Circle of Spotlessness.

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Saturday Night Live’s skit on Medicare Part D

January 25th, 2006 at 6:44 am (Law, Humor)

Saturday Night Live on Medicare Part D.

Get on the drug train!

Hat tip to Garlo Ward, P.C.

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New Take 6 album Feels Good to be released March 21

January 24th, 2006 at 11:15 pm (Christianity, Entertainment)

The awesome Take 6 is set to release its new album Feels Good on March 21, 2006.

Have a quick listen to the celebratory first single, Come On, and see if it doesn’t in fact make you feel good.  You can hear about 45 seconds of each of the first three songs on the album courtesy of Infinity Music Distribution.

While you’re at it, there’s a fun video of the group answering questions and performing Come On at the Apple iTunes store in Tokyo on November 11, 2005. To see it, click here and then scroll down, ignoring the kana and kanji until you find “Take6″ in English. Immediately below that, there’s a link that says “iTunes Music Store” followed by some Japanese. Click on that and you’ll be magically transported into a room in which six black Christians from Nashville (via Huntsville, Alabama) sing to Japanese shoppers in the Ginza shopping district of Tokyo about their victory in Christ. Heaven, I tell you.

I’ve been a huge fan of these guys since So Much 2 Say. You simply must marvel at their talent, individually and collectively, and there are some absolutely magical moments when they shape their tight, smooth harmonies into syncopated, funky hooks, it’s just . . . extraordinary.

You can pre-order Feels Good by clicking on the link or, you can do like I’m going to do, and wait until the early dawn of March 21 and download the whole thing from iTunes while rubbing the sleep out of your eyes.

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How to Pronounce Biblical Terms

January 10th, 2006 at 9:39 pm (Christianity, Education)

Ever wonder how to pronounce all those crazy words in your Bible? Well, wonder no more. Not the prettiest site, but very helpful.

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