As Mud and I sat around luxuriously drinking coffee this morning, she mentioned one of the ways in which she felt that the history department had failed her: it was difficult, if not impossible, to gain a sense of the entire world's history at any point in time. Because the events of the world are so vast through time and space, it is difficult to figure out what was happening in different locations at the same point in time.

And thus the idea of the as-of-yet-unnamed map of the history of the world was born. Picture a map of the world that sits on a webpage. Below the map is a little slider which represents time. As you slide it back and forth, nation borders change before your very eyes. But that's just the very surface of what's available on this map.

The backend data of this map is controlled by a wikipedia-like repository of information. If you click on any point in time on the map and then click at a part of the world, you can find out what was happening in that part of the world at that time. You can zoom in to the map to gain more information about a specific place (Athens, as opposed to all of Greece), or zoom in to a more specific period of time (714 AD as opposed to the 6th century AD).

The wiki backend means that specialists can contribute descriptions, photos and links to whatever part of the world they are the most familiar with. Users can mod entries as being more or less general/important, which affects how "deep" you have to travel before the information appears. Contributers can choose the region and time range that their information affects.

Add the power of google searches to the whole time frame, a hefty start of historical data, a few editors (librarians and historians), and a slick interface, and what you end up with is an awesome repository of data about any country, at any point in time, and its neighbours in time and space. A project of this size is just the sort of thing that public wikis would be needed for: everyone from high school students who did research for a project, to the world's leading experts on the subject, could contribute.

Does anything like this already exist? Would there be a critical mass of contributions? Would it actually be useful? Would it be worth (money, time, effort) doing? What do you think?

But in an other, more accurate way, I am the winner.

My parents are doing spring cleaning which means I was sent home to go through boxes of my stuff and get rid of everything I don't need anymore. This includes a lot of paper. For some reason I'd saved all of my school binders since about grade 1 and onwards which means I had several hours worth of paper to go through. You can learn a lot about yourself by looking at what notes you're taking in class, what doodles you're drawing on the sidelines, etc.

I thought that this teacher's comments were just too precious to keep to myself, however. I was nine years old when I wrote the below. The bold represents Assignment Description, the italics are my answer and the text in red is the teacher's corrections. Note that at this point in time, I hadn't displayed any real sort of interest in computers yet. That occurred about two years after this point, so I wouldn't've been able to defend myself from the teacher's comments yet.

Assignment:
Select something that affects society and has society affect it. Write a few sentences explaining the system in terms of one (1) of the three (3) generalizations that we talked about in class.

Computer programs are made up of hundreds of lines of code which are used to display and store information. Both the information and the programs are provided by humans. Humans can use this information if they pay money for the program. Since you cannot go to the store to buy information, programs are used to wrap this information into something that you can pay for. So programs are like a bridge between raw information and the world of humans. This would also work with free programs because money is not part of the system. Money is on the human side. We can then use the "bridge" generalization to explain what computer programs are.

Grade: C
There is no such thing as a "free" program. It's in business to make money. If a program did not make money, no one would write it. It's obvious that you didn't spend much time thinking about this assignment before writing it.

No free software, eh? I wonder if it's too late to go -- thirteen years later -- and complain about my grade...

A few years ago, I overheard a conversation that I wasn't supposed to hear between two profs over a stir that I was causing at the time. "[Catspaw]'s just an undergrad", one said, "she's not equipped yet to deal with the kind of backlash she's getting." The other prof replied, "She'll be fine. I'm sure that between everything she does, there will be enough positive messages to cancel out the negative ones."

The backlash that they were talking about passed, but he was right about how that kind of thing works. Positive feedback cancels out negative feedback. Reassurance like this cancels out "jokes" like this. Feedback like this cancels out feedback like this.

Of course, the amount of positive versus negative to achieve balance isn't the same for everyone.

If "feeling good"ness could be quantified, I'm sure that an equation could be written and everyone would have their own unique ratio. It's worth taking a few minutes to think about: how much do you need to be reaffirmed after you've been shot down? Some people need a whole lot of positive feedback to cancel a tiny negative blip. Others require only the smallest pat on the back to fix a complete disaster.

Paul Graham just released his latest essay on undergrads. I read it and breathed a sigh of relief. Even if I wasn't the target undergrad group that he was referring to, being able to hear someone say it seemed to cancel out this. The e-mail message probably wasn't meant to sting, but it was still nice to have it cancelled out.

So what happens if, at the end of the day, your life hasn't quite balanced itself out yet? That's when it's best to find some random links to amuse yourself with in the meantime. And, if all else fails, there's always zookeeper.

http://news.com.com/You+Are+Jizzmopper+If+You+Still+Use+IE/2100-7344_3-5704750.html

Thanks to Floach for the idea.

I was standing in a Starbucks this morning (shamelessly supporting The Man) when I overheard two guys behind me discussing blogs. They were both dressed in lawyeresque business suits. Each had one hand on a briefcase and the other running through their matching hair that was beginning to turn a "management material" shade of silver.

FirstGuy: "I like the idea of blogs, I just prefer my newspaper because it comes in hard copy every morning."
SecondGuy: "You could print them out. Then they would be hard copy too."
FirstGuy: "That's a good idea! Except I like to click on the links on blogs."
SecondGuy: "Well, you could print out all the links too."
FirstGuy: "You know what they need? A program that goes to a page and prints it out, then goes to all the links on that page and prints those out too and then prints out all the links on that page and keeps going until you have a hard copy of all the links."
SecondGuy: "Yeah! I would totally use that. Google should offer that since they index all the sites anyway. A print out of all the sites they crawl."
FirstGuy: "Yeah. So you could just read the book instead of using the internet."
SecondGuy: "You know what? This is a really great idea. Because then you could just distribute the Internet Book to people who can't afford the real internet. Or live in places without access."
FirstGuy: "I don't know why they don't do that."

...................................................because you would need a helicopter the size of Brazil to transport it?

This is my life. ;)

Well, okay, this entry isn't really about robot flying ninja stickmonkeys from space.

But it is about a Christian alien puppet who sings songs about God in space.

When I say that this is going to give me nightmares for weeks, I mean it.

I laughed for the first three minutes. Then the tears started.