emconsteroids

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I recently found a video called Drum solo 4 on YouTube and I found it would crash my browser. I tried Firefox, Safari and found, it would even crash Chrome. It would block my computer until the browser prompts me to abort the script.

The video plays nicely on the iPhone, however. What struck me was, that it had almost 140′000 views in less than 3 days. This is a lot. Particularly for video of average content like this.

I soon found the explanation for the count: Enter any two words of the English language in YouTube search, and this video would show up. You can find a list of words from http://scenari-platform.org/svn/dev-core/trunk/Lib_XulRunner/mac/dictionaries/en-US.dic. Somehow, this kid has managed to get all those words in as tags or YouTube’s new closed caption which YouTube also uses for displaying search result. Try it out, for example search for “Admiralty” and “Marzipan”.

Hopefully YouTube will fix this before everyone will spam their search!

Swiss Miss – the famous swiss designer based in New York City has blogged about my sister’s RRR Ribbons project!

Those ribbons are great, I am wearing one myself. Helps keeping awareness and stands for responsibility and sustainability.

See how to make one on youtube:

OECD composite leading indicators (CLIs) for June 2009 point to stronger signs of improvement in the economic outlook of OECD economies compared with last month’s release. This is typified by stronger recovery signals in Italy and France and clearer signals of troughs in Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. In Japan tentative signs of improvement have also emerged. Troughs can also be observed in China and India, with tentative trough signals now appearing in Brazil and Russia.. etc.

Source: oecd.org

Good news! Details here as PDF.

Young Chuck moved to Texas and bought a Donkey from a farmer for $100. The farmer agreed to deliver the Donkey the next day. The next day the farmer drove up and said, “Sorry son, but I have some bad news, the donkey died”.

Chuck: “Well, then just give me my money back.”

The farmer: “Can’t do that. I went and spent it already.”

Chuck: “OK, then, just bring me the dead donkey.”

The farmer: “What ya gonna do with him?” Chuck: “I’m going to raffle him off.”

The farmer: “You can’t raffle off a dead donkey!”

Chuck: “Sure I can. Watch me. I just won’t tell anybody he’s dead.” A month later the farmer met up with Chuck and asked, “What happened with that dead donkey?”

Chuck: “I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars apiece and made $998.”

The farmer: “Didn’t anyone complain?”

Chuck: “Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back.”

Chuck works in a large US investment bank.

Via e-mail.

I’m sure, all of you have heard of the new “find my iPhone” functionality which ships on the 17th of June with the new iPhone OS 3.0.

As a developer, you can download and install the final iPhone OS 3.0 already. If you do that and have a .mac (.me) account, you can go to “Settings”, select “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”, select your mac account and scroll to the bottom of the next screen. There you can switch on “Find My iPhone”.

Once you’ve done that, log in to your .me account and find a new setting at the right hand side of the “settings” section saying “find my iPhone”.

And now it’s all there: Find your phone, ping it, send it messages (you even get an e-mail if the message gets read) or if worse comes to worse, just remotely erase it. Good, if your phone gets stolen! Let’s just hope, the thugs don’t get to know this feature too soon, they may be up for a few surprise visits…

In the last couple of days, rumors have appeared claiming Apple wanted to buy Twitter. At the first glance, this doesn’t make much sense.

It just occurred to me, that there is actually a perfect reason for Apple to buy Twitter. In fact, it could turn Twitter into a massive money making machinery. Let me explain:

Three key elements lead to this perfect deal:

You probably already guessed what I’m going to write next: Twitter will replace SMS on the iPhone! Or in other words: If you have an iPhone, you can send free push notification messages (i.e. Tweets) to other iPhone users AND across the Twitter community. For free! Because of the large user base, there is no chasm to cross or no Metcalfe’s law to deal with.

Who wins? Apple! They have established a new USP for the iPhone with 25m users who can see immediate benefit: free peer-to-peer push messaging!

This is all just a hypothesis. One thing’s for sure though: The operators wouldn’t like that idea.

My colleague Nicolas has created an interesting website which compares the Dow Jones Industrial Index in the years of the Great Depression 1929 vs today.

Have a look at the chart, it is updated on a daily basis:

The days are market days.

He is not claiming today’s crisis is supposed to follow the same pattern nor is he making any statement regarding the approach and its scientific aspects. It’s just an interesting graph to look at, whatever the meaning should or could be.

The full article including the comments can be found here.

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends.

From: Ratatouille, Anton Ego’s critics speech

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