if your looking for something to do on new years come spend it with Sunday Never Comes. As many of you have read a few posts below this one that Brandon will be in Las Vegas for Red Bull NO LIMITS. What an awesome event they got planned. Here in California I will be holding it down in Santa Cruz working @ The Catalyst on Dec 30 and 31. Come join me.

really want to see this documentary.

In the past, innovators saw the Internet as “the future,” but some of today’s innovators are sensing that the Internet can actually predict the future. Certain technological tools that scan the web are helping forecast - with a fair amount of accuracy - upcoming events ranging from flu outbreaks to natural disasters and turbulence in financial markets. Instead of employing the usual conscious marketing techniques, trailblazers are not so much emphasizing what Internet users are buying to shed light on future trends, but rather the subconscious use of - and searches for - certain key words and phrases.

The most mainstream manifestation of this comes from Google, a company that already intuitively scratched the trend-casting surface with its Year-End Zeitgeist search (of most popular terms for a given year). Topping itself, the corporation announced Google Flu Trends earlier this month. Google’s techies believe that a spike in searches by Americans for terms like “flu symptoms” precede regional flu outbreaks by a week to ten days. The company may eventually expand Flu Trends by adding more diseases, foreign countries, and languages.

On the other end of the spectrum, an interest in web bot-assisted intuitive mass intelligence, such as Cliff High’s Half Past Human project, is teeming just below the mainstream surface. Originally intended to foretell market fluctuations, the system has successfully predicted - High and his online followers allege - such major events as 9/11, the Indonesian Tsunami and the recent October Wall Street crash. According to High, he is not the only one to tap into this type of online “predictive linguistics” area: a similar project, he discovered, has also been underway in China.

When you consider the implications of these techniques - it is easy to see the major use of them - especially from a marketing perspective. Being able to forecast the week ahead events, even if intuitive and open for interpretation, could prove to provide a huge differential advantage over competition. Especially if the techniques were somewhat propietary and not all had access to them. Regardless - the shit is ill mcnilly.

HOLLA!

Longboarding? Downhill? Suits? That shit is for geeks. Sike. I came across this dope longboarding video of two dudes getting buck wild on a gnarly hill in claremont. One peek at this and you realize this isn’t for lames. Makes me want to tighten up the trucks throw on a helmet and get gnarly.

The video was produced by a fashion designer named adam kimmel which leaves it a bit suspect. By suspect I mean that I am not 100% sold that it is real, as it might be some sort of viral attempt at capturing the attention span of consumers. The only reason it seems a bit akward if that was the case, is I do not understand the tie in. I am left questioning why Adam Kimmel, a fashion designer fetaured in GQ and other metro beta-frat boy hip mags, would be targeting 20 something year old skateboarders? Grunge balls - mind you - who have probabaly not washed their hair or changed their clothes for 3 weeks. Maybe it is indeed real. Regardless it is worth a watch. Peeeeeep game.

Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont HD from adam kimmel on Vimeo.

I am typing here today to let you all in on a little secret. Rarely in todays music scene do you stumble across a talented, fresh, new face. Especially in hip hop. The synth-laden over processed vocals mixed with the electro pop riffs that lace todays hip hop music scene are dope, don’t get me wrong, but there’s something about an ill, real instrument snatched sample that will never fail to kick you in the stomach and make your head bob. When you combine a dope sample driven beat with a nasty lyricist, someone who knows how to breathe, duck the kick, duck the snare and consistently write 3+ syllables deep you’ve got gold. Ladies and gentleman, I am proud today to introduce you to Blue.

Hailing from the fucking metropolis that is LA this dude is dope. Not dope like kanye getting techno’d out over some drums, dope like brother ali meets cage, throws a little common in the mix and stirs it up with some tupac. That dope. So there you have it, my stamp of approval, meet Blu.

New Years Eve, Las Vegas. Where will you be? I know where i’ll be.

Hey, are you a dreamer? I haven’t seen too many around lately. Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore. It’s not dead it’s just that it’s been forgotten, removed from our language.

Nobody teaches it so nobody knows it exists. The dreamer is banished to obscurity. Well, I’m trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming, every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds.

Our planet is facing the greatest problems it’s ever faced, ever. So whatever you do, don’t be bored, this is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive and things are just starting

We all grew up watching Jean Claude Van Damme movies and all our other favorite action stars. Unlike some who head into politics or others who reprise the same role again and again Jean Claude might have created a gem. This movie looks pretty awesome.

Election results by state

Most of us are, by now, familiar with the maps the TV channels and web sites use to show the results of the presidential election:

The states are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate, John McCain, or the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, respectively. Looking at this map it gives the impression that the Republicans won the election handily, since there is rather more red on the map than there is blue. In fact, however, the reverse is true – the Democrats won by a substantial margin. The explanation for this apparent paradox, as pointed out by many people, is that the map fails to take account of the population distribution. It fails to allow for the fact that the population of the red states is on average significantly lower than that of the blue ones. The blue may be small in area, but they represent a large number of voters, which is what matters in an election.

We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground. On such a map, for example, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.

Here are the 2008 presidential election results on a population cartogram of this type:

As you can see, the states have been stretched and squashed, some of them substantially, to give them the appropriate sizes, though it’s done in such a way as to preserve the general appearance of the map, so far as that’s possible. On this map there is now clearly more blue than red.

The presidential election, however, is not actually decided on the basis of the number of people who vote for each candidate but on the basis of the electoral college. Under the US electoral system, each state in the union contributes a certain number of electors to the electoral college, who vote according to the majority in their state. The candidate receiving a majority of the votes in the electoral college wins the election. The electors are apportioned roughly according to states’ populations, as measured by the census, but with a small but deliberate bias in favor of smaller states.

We can represent the effects of the electoral college by scaling the sizes of states to be proportional to their number of electoral votes, which gives a map that looks like this:

This cartogram looks similar to the one above it, but it’s not identical. Wyoming, for instance, has approximately doubled in size, precisely because of the bias in favor of small states.

The areas of red and blue on the cartogram are now proportional to the actual numbers of electoral votes won by each candidate. Thus this map shows at a glance both which states went to which candidate and which candidate won more electoral college votes – something that you cannot tell easily from the normal election-night red and blue map.

Election results by county

But we can go further. We can do the same thing also with the county-level election results and the images are even more striking. Here is a map of US counties, again colored red and blue to indicate Republican and Democratic majorities respectively:

Now the effects we saw at the state level are even more pronounced: the red areas appear overwhelmingly in the majority, an appearance again at odds with the actual results of the election. Again, we can make a more helpful respresentation by using a cartogram. Here is what the cartogram looks like for the county-level election returns:

However, this map is still somewhat misleading because we have colored every county either red or blue, as if every voter voted the same way. This is of course not realistic: all counties contain both Republican and Democratic supporters and in using just the two colors on our map we lose any information about the balance between them. There is no way to tell whether a particular county went strongly for one candidate or the other or whether it was relatively evenly split.

One way to improve the map and reveal more nuance in the vote is to use not just two colors, red and blue, but to use red, blue, and shades of purple in between to indicate percentages of votes. Here is what the normal map looks like if you do this:

And here’s what the cartogram looks like:

and there you have it - KNOWLEDGE SON!

thanks to http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/ for this info.