Salon talks about the Amazon Mechanical Turk, and also pointed me to the Sheep Market:
In its earliest days, someone posted a request on Amazon Mechanical Turk, offering to pay 2 cents for a drawing of a sheep facing left. Peter Cohen, director of Amazon Mechanical Turk, says the company was “puzzled by” the request. The requester was Aaron Koblin, a student in UCLA’s Design/Media Arts program, who was writing his master’s thesis about the site. He was intrigued by Amazon’s effort to “establish a framework for the utilization of people as computers,” as he wrote in his thesis. “My project was very tongue-in-cheek,” he tells me. “On the one hand, it’s using the system the way it’s meant to be used. On the other hand, it’s asking them to do this ridiculous thing.”
The grad student invited turkers to draw up to five sheep at the rate of 2 cents apiece. Over 40 days and 40 nights, the sheep flooded in at a rate of 11 per hour. By the end, 7,599 turkers had participated. He collected 12,000 sheep and promptly put 10,000 of them up for sale at the rate of $20 for 20 sheep at the Sheep Market.
An abbreviated link of the day:
This is the most important thing I’ve learned about dating in a decade. I even thought of dating WASP bitches again, so long as I could keep this in mind. Never, never let her know that she’s the only game in town. As soon as she believes that she’s your “everything,” she’ll start whining and bitching and making demands.
…
Let’s face it: many women spend all day whining to their friends about how awful their lives are and listening to their neurotic friends responding in kind. The last thing they want to do is go out with you and hear more of the same.
A fun contest over San Diego Serenade:
To win a copy of the DVD, as well as a nice “Got Reefer?” shirt, just post a comment detailing your ideal 4/20 song, or your best related experience. I’ll pick one at random and send the winner the DVD and the shirt, hopefully in time for Thursday’s festivities. The Contest will end at 3 PM California time on Tuesday the 18th.
I already submitted mine, which was that the first time I got stoned, I ended up spending the night masturbating and listening to the Cure (at the same time).
Let us begin! The Link of the Day: INTERNET VIBES.
From “Ghost Shoes” (New Balances appearing ghostly in photos) to the destruction of the Internet via blogs, Internet Vibes offers a dandy perspective on the odd and curious. This is serious stuff, sometimes, wrapped in the most delicious humor you could imagine. Take for instance, this paragraph on Lacoste shirts:
Some time in high school I started having strong feelings about Lacoste shirts. My friends and I used to go to the rummage sale at the Congregational Church and find great old Izod/Lacoste stuff probably last worn at the Glen Ridge Country Club’s ’87 Fourth of July Gala.
I mostly liked Lacoste shirts because of the alligator; an image at once quirkily powerful and powerfully quirky (NON-DUALITY). I soon realized that the quirkiness was lost on most people. A substitute teacher saw me wearing a turquoise Lacoste shirt with a popped collar and said “You look like the bad guy from a John Hughes movie.” He was probably right, although I’m not blonde.
Unbelievable. And the handingly of being a non-Jewish ‘Jew’ living in America under the semi-typical progression of the Jewish-American family (I wonder if his grandparents refer to Israel using the first person — ‘we’)?
What is authentic for a guy like me? Fourth-generation Ivy League, deracinated, American Jew born on the UWS, raised in NJ to middle-class post-hippie parents with semi-Anglophilic tendencies AND propensity to put on Eastern European accents and use obscure Yiddish phrases. The obvious answer is that I, like all of us, should be a truly post-modern consumer, taking the bits and pieces I like from various traditions and cultures, letting my aesthetic instincts be my only guide. In fact, all of my friends (even the children of immigrants) seem to be in the same boat. We are BOTH disconnected from AND connected to EVERYTHING. Now we’ve transcended mere clothes.
Adding to this are slightly obscure and offbeat discussions. Even the non-sequitors hit a certain je ne sais quoi:
i like your comment about meaning, but i don’t respect your comment about triangles.
Anyway, head over and check out INTERNET VIBES. It will rock your semi-intelligent world.
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