osunickA blog about tech, gadgets, Eichlers, and budding entrepreneurship (in no particular order)

True assholes care more about how they’re regarded by their strangers than they care about how they’re regarded by their friends.

True assholes constantly talk about others behind their back.

True assholes are not honest about what they believe, and avoid any controversy.

True assholes try to blend in by not sticking out too far.

True assholes care more about themselves than they care about you.

True assholes punish you for the favors they do for you.

We call lots of people ‘assholes’, but there’s a difference between someone with poor social skills and an asshole.

A pedant values details and wants to infect you with what they believe is a virtue.

Brutal honesty is practiced by people who value honesty in kind.

These are not true assholes, and they deserve kindness and friendship.

I am truly fortunate to lead an asshole-free life, and I urge you to strive to do the same.

Via Autoblog, I found this article in the Detroit News, which says that Japanese automakers are worried about sales in Japan because young people are shifting their interest away from cars and towards gadgets.

The appeal of driving yourself boils down to personal space and freedom.  But nowadays we spent most of our driving going to one of two places, and portable devices allow you to create a personal space virtually anywhere.  While they don’t erect a physical barrier with the outside world, an iPod or Kindle allows its user to effectively shut out the outside world, even in the middle of a crowded train.

Technology has also diminished the significance of physical location; half of Mozilla’s employees are remote and they seem to have no trouble getting as much done as the rest of us.  How long will it be until commuting and travel become obsolete altogether?

Joshua showed me Facebook Lexicon today, which launched a few months ago but apparently I live under a rock. Lexicon is a feature that lets you see the relative frequencies of words that occur on Wall posts, and it’s really fun to play with.

For instance, comparing “blond” to “blonde”, it appears that the latter is far more popular:

Another interesting faceoff is “you” and “your” vs “u” and “ur”.   I predict some sort of apocalypse when “u” overtakes “you”.

Individual wall posts are basically throwaway messages, analogous to that whiteboard you had on the door of your dorm room.  Not terribly interesting, but being able to see this data in aggregate is much more interesting, especially since the throwaway nature of these posts means that people write in a way that is most natural to them.

I could imagine this being useful for SEO, creating online ad campaigns, or just general zeitgeist tracking.  For instance, looking at ‘obama’ and ‘mccain’ in Lexicon shows a real dropoff after the election, with McCain all but dying out and Obama maintaining a slow but steady trickle of wall posts.  I imagine we’ll see a spike as we approach the inauguration (yay!).