arkster: Excited dragon is excited. (O reeeeeeeeeeally)
MIT discovered fandom! No wait, they call it a "co-viewing clique". A BNF is now, officially, according to the MIT computer-graphics-and-wordbarf-processing department, a ~"pro-amateur media critic"~.

Don't you all just feel so validated?

:')

But seriously, data wonks: somebody help me out here. The comments over there seem evenly split between awe and kudos for the sheer volume of data processed and/or the shiny visualizations created therefrom, and serious underwhelm-ment at the results. What exactly, other than discovering fandom*, has this guy done?

More to the point, and p'raps more fun to think about, what COULD he do? What would YOU do with all that linked data? It seems a bit like a 3D map of a web we all navigate, by years of practice that's made the moves instinctual to us but maybe completely foreign, to non-fen.

Think of how you might hear about, and then find, a piece of fanfic. Maybe somebody on your friendslist links it, but the link's broken, so you end up trawling FF.net or AO3 before you realize, wait, it must be posted on the kink meme! So off you go, and by the time you've read it (and six other fics in the same thread) you've forgotten how you got there. This data could, presumably, plot your course on a physical-seeming map...? but the practical applications of this, to me, are not evident.

It could also, I suppose, plot the course of a fanfic to all its readers? Marketers do this kind of data-mining in the hopes of better selling through statistics, but... otherwise, again, why?



*He could have walked down the hall to the MIT Anime Club. They could've at least told him what it's called.
arkster: Excited dragon is excited. (Default)
Reasons I'm a math major, #6:

I much prefer reading five pages of extremely dense and complicated information which, when parsed, reveal absolute truth via cold hard logic in a good solid language. Particularily over reading a hundred pages which tell me what an ancient philosopher thought about concepts too vague for language to hold in an imperfect translation of a dead language.

It's like playing Phoenix Wright. The effort is all in my head.

As opposed to, say, playing Xenosaga. In which the effort is in figuring out why I care.


...


And then of course there's the eighty pages about how an artist's life is paaaain and his sufferings are almost beyond human imagining, because when he was 17 he embarassed himself in front of the girl he liked and when he was 14 the boy he liked said his name was weird. In German.

I'm not sure if there's a videogame analogy for that.

o.o

Oct. 14th, 2007 01:09 am
arkster: Excited dragon is excited. (Default)
I just finished Gyakuten Saiban 3.

WOW.

I want to... to track down the author of this thing and, and send him flowers. Or something. I don't know. I just know that was the most incredible, intricate, amazing... wow.

yeah. wow.

Phewww.

Oct. 10th, 2007 06:34 pm
arkster: Excited dragon is excited. (Tir: =])
Another long workday, done and over with.

Select vocab from today's German Lit: Vergewaltigung, Abtreibung, Sexualerwachen. Sündenbock, Schandbube, Fünfgroschendirne. Gooo Germany. Next week: Kafka at last.

Today in Phil I compared God's treatment of humanity to behavorial psych experiments with lab rats, amused myself over God's intelligence being countable, and queried whether or not Anselm's proof actually bothers to first show that greatness even converges. It was not bad for a two-hour session on Augustine. City of God is, I freely admit, much easier on the eyes and the brain than Confessions.

Alas that it nevertheless destroys one of my favorite images of last year: Augustine is no longer Edgeworth to me, for his logic is circular and made of terrible fail. Edgeworthustine is dead.

My second (and much more colorful) shot at no-beef beef stew awaits only reheating, sitting happily in the fridge in all of its purple-orange-green splendor. I think it is going to get tofu and eggs in, just for tonight.

*edit: Out of tofu. There's something terribly, terribly sinful about an entire spoonful of beef-flavored egg yolk.

Simply awful.
arkster: Excited dragon is excited. (Default)
Matthew 19:30 is loltastic now.

The rest of the New Testament can bite me.

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