The Planarity Flash Game, where you have to drag around the vertices of increasingly larger and larger graphs to prove that they are planar. (via Eszter over at Crooked Timber)

It of course got me thinking about the fastest algorithm to planarize a graph that you know is planar. You’d have to define all the quantities you have pre-computed (the smart thing seems to be to find a vertex with minimal degree and work up from there), but it could be an interesting problem. It’s probably been solved already or exists as an exercise in CLR.

I came across a management company, Shaw Properties, that uses Blogger to list apartments. It’s pretty clever, all things considered — using a blogging tool as a CMS (content management system) is a bit like using wire cutters to trim fat, but it’s an off-the-shelf solution for their needs. I wonder where they thought of it.

Poor little Linty.

In case the old jive filter still amuses you, someone has written Gizoogle. According to its version of my homepage:

This was one of tha first projects I worked on at Berkeley spittin’ that real shit. We present a way of sippin’ a priority queue fo` optical data, where pimpin’ is not feasible.

Actually, I don’t find this sort of thing that funny after about 30 seconds.

You should read this article by Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia who has since left the project. He calls for greater respect for experts and less tolerance towards trolls:

Nevertheless, everyone familiar with Wikipedia can now see the power of the basic Wikipedia idea and the crying need to get more experts on board and a publicly credible review process in place (so that there is a subset of “approved” articles–not a heavy-handed, complicated process, of course). The only way Wikipedia can achieve these things is to jettison its anti-elitism and to moderate its openness to trolls and fools; but it will almost certainly not do these things.

This is one of the things that bugs me about Wikipedia as well, and why I don’t use it for anything that really care a lot about getting right. Some of the articles are slipshod and others are misleading. If I know nothing about a topic (statistical physics, for example), I’m not going to look on Wikipedia to find out. However, if I wanted to know around when Abelard lived, I could look it up there and be reasonably sure it’s correct, or at least correct enough for my purposes.

A new group blog, Left2Right has started up, and boasts a pretty impressive collection of contributors. So far, so good. I think it might move up in mylist of blogs which have real ideas that provoke real thinking.

[Via Ranjit] Ouch.

I was up until 4 revising my roomate Dustin’s website before he heads off to Siggraph. That boy is eternally on the hunt for a job, but the world of animation is rough and tumble. I was also having crazy flashbacks to mystery hunt website coding. My only real comment about the whole ordeal is that I absolutely hate IE and it’s ridiculous non-compliancy with CSS. Trying to figure out some obscure resizing hack at 2 in the morning to make IE/Win even render your page is like shaving with a dull rusty scythe.

Speaking of shaving, pictures coming soon.

This is seriously funny. Even more so because I recall as an undergraduate some discussion of excess ham at Networks being used to make ham smoothies. After reading this I will always think of the dinosaurs being killed off by a giant fat man on fire crashing into the earth.

Update: On poking around, I see that this has been posted on Crooked Timber as well.

Yesterday I went to have lunch with my friend Brandon, who is now the Technology Director of OJC Technologies. He told me about a piece of software he had been working on called WebEasel, which seemed pretty neat, even if I don’t have an aunt named Millie. We went to the Courier Cafe, where I had a canonical lunch of skinny dippers (the best potato skins, hands down, that I will ever find), soup (gaspacho) and half a turkey club sandwich, and a Green River phosphate. When I visit home I have very little time, so when I go to my old stomping grounds I end up ordering the same thing each time. I wonder if this serves to calcify my memory or something.

I also got to talk to Dave Young, who also works at OJC, but on the Champaign Urbana Community Wireless Network project, which got a grant from the Soros Open Society Foundation to build a free community wireless network. They are sticking wireless radios in streetlamps and on buildings and trying to make some sort of multi-hop network that is free to the community.

Another cool idea Dave was telling me about was using buses to deliver email wirelessly. So that when the bus drives by your house it drops off your email and picks up any email that you have to send. It’s a weird idea, and I’m not sure if it’s much more inexpensive then providing some sort of free low bandwidth internet access, but it’s a fun mental image. It reminds me of old scifi novels which try to high-tech-ify existing technologies.