Only When the Words Outdo the Silence

My first post under the category “Minutiae” on this blog:

a product. a product of your environment. a good. an item. a thing. something to be bought and sold on the market. solicit your wares to the pretty gal that comes walking along. in a sundress. free flowing hair; it’s long. she has on small hoop earrings and they shoot bits of bright light when the light hits them just right. blinded by her. the next thing he knows, he’s in a blind. a duck blind. it’s cold and soggy. soggy like a tortilla thats been put in the microwave a bit too long. not so long that it turns crispy, but not so short that it’s warm enough to put against your cheek. slippery, and yet it leaves a residue on your hands. residual income. he wishes he had the brains and the balls to build a stream of residual income and reside in the gated community. no trespassing. i always liked jim tressel. wait…who is that, anyway? football? college…something? it’s all a matter of demographics. all of it. put the wood to the machine and slice into smooth pieces. a cloud of dust descends on the floor. like army paratroopers. poised. punitive. pusillanimous. today they decoded the platypus’ genome with the decoder ring from the 25 cent machine in front of the wal mart in imboden, arkansas. supposedly, it reveals that it may look that way on purpose: “at first glance, the platypus appears as if it was the result of an evolutionary accident…” in fact, it is. however, the green lantern failed to make this distinction. trivial? no. imprecise thinking? maybe. imprecise choice of words? oh heck yes. what the heck? what the heck is he talking about? a product. the platypus is a product of its environment.

In the spirit of growing the web and spreading the link love, the last 10 sites I bookmarked:

• Themeforest – a website with themes to fit all of your content management system needs.  They’re mostly paid themes, but they look great.  They’ve got everything from WordPress themes to Drupal themes
• 35 Excellent Wireframing Resources – came across this page will scoping out new wireframing/idea visualization/presentation software.  Smashing Magazine is good, period, but if you’re not only looking for wireframing/idea visualization/presentation software and want to learn about how to do it correctly, what it means and so forth then check out this page
• n+1 – because you need interests outside of work – politics, literature and culture.  Enough said.
• The 150 Best Online Flash Games – because you need intere…because flash games are fun
• A List Apart – as the tagline says, “From pixels to prose, content to coding.”  Came across this site, via an article on the site, about content strategy.  Content needs to be created with much more purpose
• The Best Southern Movie of 2010 – I moved to Austin from Little Rock.  Arkansas is near and dear.
• McKinseyQuarterly – the CEO of Apogee is a former McKinsey guy; I figured it was about time I checked out their online presence
• Finding the Right Tweeple – looking to find people to follow on Twitter?  Here are a few tools
• PageRank Recovery Tool – looking to find the 404 errors on your site that are wasting away your precious PageRank?
• SEO Gadget – I like their posts

Lappé’s counter-argument centered on a number of scientific studies indicating that it is indeed possible to feed the world using a variety of organic and agroecological methods of farming. She pointed to a multi-year, multi-disciplinary study by Catherine Badgely and colleagues at the University of Michigan, which concluded that a hypothetical worldwide alternative agriculture system could produce between 95 and 157 percent of the calories presently produced—without agricultural expansion and with no net increased use of resources. Researchers at the University of Essex who analyzed 287 projects in 57 countries found similar improvements with a transition to less resource-intensive agriculture. And the seminal IAASTD report—engaging 400 scientists and development experts from 80 nations over a period of four years—also determined that “resource-extractive industrial agriculture is risky and unsustainable, particularly in the face of worsening climate, energy, and water crises.”

On: Words and phrases whose inclusion in this paragraph, considering the topic, strike me as tasting like burnt apple

• number
• scientific studies
• agroecological
• multi-disciplinary
• hypothetical worldwide alternative
• agriculture system
• percent
• produced
• agricultural expansion
• net
• increased
• analyzed
• development experts
• resource-extractive industrial agriculture

On: Exciting Evenings Entertaining Yourself
(Or, the first entry in the “Minutiae” category”)

I’m lying on the couch reading an article by favorite “public intellectual” - Nassim Taleb. From reading his stuff, I’m sure this label would bother him; awesome. Specifically, I’m reading an article by him the Edge website and came across this passage:

“Mediocristan corresponds to “random walk” style randomness that you tend to find in regular textbooks (and in popular books on randomness).”

My thought process:

1) Random walk. Hmm, I wrote a blog post for work with this phrase in it.

2) I should go to Wikipedia – there must be more to this phrase than a clever bit of imagery.

3) From Wikipedia. Random Walk:

A random walk, sometimes denoted RW, is a mathematical formalization of a trajectory that consists of taking successive random steps.

4) Rereads blog. Sees Dr. Larson link. Wants to check out Hendrix website.

4b) But first, brain juices slosh back to paragraph just above random walk phrase:

In Mediocristan, exceptions occur but don’t carry large consequences. Add the heaviest person on the planet to a sample of 1000. The total weight would barely change. In Extremistan, exceptions can be everything (they will eventually, in time, represent everything). Add Bill Gates to your sample: the wealth will jump by a factor of >100,000. So, in Mediocristan, large deviations occur but they are not consequential—unlike Extremistan.

Think consequential link building, link baiting, versus non-consequential link building, junk directories.  Think white hate versus black hat.

4c) Hmm, Google looks at the web and how to provide relevant search results through the Mediocristan lense? Microsoft says, nooo, nooo, nooo (c), we must look at how users interact with a website once they’re there – length of stay, click through path – because itdoes matter; it’s Extremistan. Determining relevant results (website rankings, of course) is not binary – we should care about how true it is that someone found a website useful outside of merely linking to a website. How did he or she interact with the website. How true is it that website A should be ranked number 1 for keyword X?

Think Google’s recent announcement that page load time is a factor.  Take that idea and run with it.  What is the meta keyword of “page load time”?  It’s website effectiveness or website conversion or conversion rate optimization.

5) Clicks on Dr. Larson link. Reads update on The Village @ Hendrix.

6) Thinks, that was random…

7) Heads back to Wikipedia.

8 ) Reaches See Also section of Random Walk entry. Markov Chain…this word has been bandied about by a coworker. Click.

9) From Wikipedia. Markov Chain:

In mathematics, a Markov chain, named after Andrey Markov, is a stochastic process with the Markov property. Having the Markov property means that, given the present state, future states are independent of the past states. In other words, the description of the present state fully captures all the information that could influence the future evolution of the process. Future states will be reached through a probabilistic process instead of a deterministic one.

10) Why not follow the random walk further back? Take into account links to determine the probability a user will randomly come across site X by clicking link after link after link on the web as well as on-site metrics like time on site, page load time, navigation path.  That or I’m completely off…

11) As I’m recollecting my thought process, I’m actually adding onto “what I thought.” What a liar. Voluntary memory.

12) In Search of Lost Time

13) I’m tired