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i did something like it 6-7 years ago with friendster when it got 'who looked at me' new feature then. i scrapped million ids of teenagers to below-age-30 women. my friend list went from below hundred to full 3000 (the max at the time) in a week or two. facebook was not popular in my country (not usa)

the scrapper was written in newlisp (save search result pages with curl, use regex to match and collect the ids). it's probably easier to write in other languages, but that's what i knew.

i used wget and curl to loop over the ids but it's too slow because they download the whole page. later i found out about 'curl -i' (header only) and a million ids was done in about hour or two (i moved my operation from my home's 64kbps to my colo datacenter mbps internet).

my account is no longer exist (probably banned); however, i do still have a screenshot of me having 3000 female-only-friends and 70000 non-hidden-females 'look back at my profile'

initially, i talked to any interesting woman; however, later i made a strict rule to only respond to women who wrote at me. there were just too many fake female-accounts.

i got a couple of dates from this feat; however, i met my wife in a traditional catholic youth retreat. when i let her know about this friendster thingy, she just laughed. now i'm happily married with a 15-months-old boy.


ember -- flame that burns bugs


there is trend in the 'key cause of cancer' down in the article, throat and colon cancer follow power distribution, while breat cancer kinda follows uniform dist

for breast cancer: the highest offender = obesity is 8.7%, only a multiple of two to the mean <4%

to me it only means that the cause of throat and colon cancer is relatively known (smoke and meat) while it's gray area for breast cancer

smoke -> throat kinda makes sense meat -> bowel? (turns out meat contains no fiber, and lack of fiber accounts for 12.2% so lumping meat and lack of fiber equal a whopping 33.3%) ... makes sense?


i find it interesting that 'meat' is not written (thus not searchable) in the main article (it's down there in 'key causes of cancer' as icon)

FTA (scroll down): Colorectal / Bowel : meat 21.1%, obesity 13%, lack-of-fibre 12.2%

it's not surprising meat and lack-of-fibre are correlated (meat contains no fibre)


what happens when luxury becomes comodity?


i'm actually switching to archlinux after using mint for a year or so


or what if there exist many goods with same unique barcode, scattered around the world.

this requires a mean to identify where the unique good is (if it exists at all). would rfid fix this? hmmm shrug


for you who don't have flash and don't feel like clicking to download, you can download an xml format file from http://metated.petarmaric.com/metalinks/TED-talks-grouped-by...

then we can script to extract the xml file get the ted videos, like:

wget -c -O "1984/Nicholas Negroponte in 1984 makes 5 predictions.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/4837/talk/230 wget -c -O "1990/Frank Gehry as a young rebel.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/4047/talk/231 wget -c -O "1998/Aimee Mullins on running.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/5996/talk/443

...

wget -c -O "2011/Wadah Khanfar - A historic moment in the Arab world.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/11071/talk/1084 wget -c -O "2011/Wael Ghonim - Inside the Egyptian revolution.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/11086/talk/1086


I wrote a script to do that for you. [1] (and am having my server download the first fifty listed in the xml file). I'd like to point out that there's a little bit under a thousand talks, so I highly recommend you only download a few videos at a time. (each video is about 40 mebibytes. [2] Roughly 40 gigs of video.)

[1] http://pastebin.com/RXzTpbGt

[2] Average obtained by downloading 50 videos, and averaging those.

Edit: fixed bug in script.


"Download 'em all" for firefox supports metalink, no need for a script


Can OpenBSD use Android USB tether? (I use Android Wifi Tether but my milestone battery runs too hot)


Depends on entirely the gadget. Some phones show up as one of a dozen different serial devices and work with ppp. Others will work as cdce, which is very nice.


of the three countries that have highest (and surprisingly parallel) slope: japan, south kore, mexico ... it suggests that #visit correlates with LE ... and health coverage is unimportant

but there are countries that have less #visit but more expensive (it suggests patients go to doctor not only for consultation) ... so #visit is an unreliable predictor so is cost

to me it seems the most predictive is location (yes, the country names are data points too) ... if i want to live long, i'll settle in japan and do what the average japanese for their healthy lifestyle


The slope of the line is an artifact of the visualization choice.


I think the slope is the whole point of the graph and it is supposed represent efficiency although in a very unfortunate way. The angle of the slope is defined by arcsin((life_expectancy - healthcare_costs) / constant). It's a bit like subtracting apples from oranges.

If there's one thing I've learned at engineering school it's that mixing up units of measurement is not a good idea. If you subtract years from dollars the value you get will carry no meaning. And that's why this visualisation is completely meaningless. They should come up with a more clearly defined and sane approach.


You could probably get 90% of the benefit of the Japanese lifestyle by moving to a walkable urban environment like NYC, selling the car, and eating the japanese diet. You'd probably have to visit there first to see what that actually is. Any other East Asian diet would be fine as well - hell, a pre-1970s American diet would probably be fine.

I am curious if those life expectancy figures have been controlled for smoking, though. If not - wow.


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