e pur si muove

Champaign-Urbana finally gets its own Craigslist! W00t! Now if only people will start posting free rides info on it…

I’d write some about the lovely fireflies that are sparkling around the evening campus these few weeks, but I have to pack. So here’s a random collection of links that I never got round to blogging:

Hearts to aemii for pointing me to the evil genius flask light!

Social scientists are beginning to grok blogs, according to a Scienceblog article. “Today it is hard to ignore the public opinions reflected in the blogosphere. Major bloggers are understood to represent much more than their personal point of view.”

The Washington Post reported that the state of California ended up reimbursing registered sex offenders for erectile dysfunction drugs, such as Viagra. Meep.

Donncha O Caoimh has a nice tutorial on how to create sketchy, cartoonlike images from digital photos using the GIMP.

Sean Carroll referenced the New York Times special focus on culture. It’s nice to know that a lowly graduate student can grasp at being at the 61st percentile.

Jenny Hogan of the New Scientist has an article on why the redistribution of wealth is so difficult. The collective demographics of citizens exhibits a phase transition with net worth as an order parameter, dividing society into two broad classes; the flow of money in the two classes have qualitatively different characteristics.

Chris (GrynX) has a nifty idea for my new home: to slaughter my ageing laptop to create a walltop. Just what I always wanted, an animated framed picture.

BoingBoing featured a recent study on the Pepsi Challenge and how advertising has made use of neurolinguistic programming to spawn the so-called field of neuromarketing.

I’m so screwed. I’m leaving tomorrow for the Big Apple, and I haven’t quite figured out what I want to do yet!

It’s amazing how quickly one goes from “I don’t know what else to do besides the Statue of Liberty” to “Hot damn there are 49,823,317 things going on!”. Is ignorance bliss?

Friday

• Bum around Columbia University

Saturday

• 1200: Wall Street Walking Tour. 90 min.

Sunday

• 1100: St. Bartholomew’s Summer Festival
• 1600: Walt Whitman recital, South Street Seaport

Monday

• 0200!: All Night Walking Tour
• 1030: Coney Island, Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. Viewing only
• 1100: Water Street street fair, between State and Fulton
• 2100: Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks from a convenient viewing point
• Meet up with Kevin and Penny

Tuesday

• 1300: The Cloisters: Garden Tours
• 1500: Collection Highlights at The Cloisters

Wednesday

• Go home

Things to see:

• Empire State Building
• Statue of Liberty
• Ground Zero
• The Strand bookstore
• TriBeCa
• Greenwich Village
• West Side
• Shakespeare in the Park, Central Park
• Richmond Town

Maybe:

• FAO Schwarz, 5th and 58th
• Find felumpfus
• Central Park
• Les Halles?

It’s a tough act to clean up after a fatal driving accident, but must one resort to believing in flesh-eating monsters in order to skip out of life imprisonment? Californian aims to avoid jail by pleading insanity. « Drudge Report « Court TV.

For those of you who are too cheap/busy/etc. to travel to/in America, let Google Maps show you the world from above!

Here’s a short list of American tourist attractions to whet your appetite

• Hollywood Sign, Los Angeles, CA
• Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, CA
• Navy Pier, Chicago, IL
• Sears Tower, Chicago, IL
• Gateway Arch, St. Louis, MO
• Statue of Liberty, New York, NY
• Mount Rushmore, Rapid City, SD

Selected Campuses:

• Dartmouth College
• Harvard University
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• University of British Columbia
• University of California at Berkeley
• University of Chicago
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• University of Minnesota at Minneapolis-St. Paul
• University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

Hint: if you can’t figure out what you’re looking at, look at Google’s conventional Map view rather than satellite imagery.

Update: Google just launched Google Earth today, a 3D interface to Google Maps and search engine, which also doubles up as a mini-browser. « Science Blog. No, the 3D feature doesn’t mean that buildings pop up off the ground, but it does mean that mountain ranges and hills do their vertical thing on Google Maps. But it does work for the pyramids of Teotihuacan, Mexico! Amazing! (The much more famous ones in Egypt didn’t make the cut.)