Crowdsourcing Is Dead

For a brief, shiny moment back around 2007, it seemed like crowdsourcing would really take of
f. However, by now it’s become pretty obvious that we just saw an enormous influx of Can Do people as (pretty much) the entire Western world got reliable Interweb connections at all at once.

Then most of these people grew tired of updating and fixing stuff on corporate web sites, because, after all, where was the pay off?

And the trickle of new, helpful people isn’t sufficient to keep up with the attrition rate.

I’ve been relying on the concert listings on Underskog and last.fm for years, but they have been growing increasingly erratic. After missing a few shows that I really wanted to see, I’ve now gone back to old-fashioned web scraping and aggregation. The thing we imagined to be a thing of the past.

What’s next? Newspapers paying journalists to maintain listings?

I’ve put the source code up on GitHub, but it’s just a trivial Emacs Lisp HTML parsing and extraction script which outputs the result to this web page. I’ve just added the clubs I’m interested in, and I’m not going to extend the listing to anything beyond what it’s displaying at the present.

So: Welcome back to 1999. The brave new world was kinda amusing while it lasted.

Mercantilism

The September t-shirts were finally ready yesterday, so I picked them up today, along with stamps, envelopes, rum, ginger beer, DVDs and other things necessary for packing stuff.

The number of shirts wasn’t enormous (just 30 or 40 or something), so carrying them up the stairs was no problem.

The Norwegian postage system changed since the last time I did this, which has to be more than five years ago. Using big envelopes is like 2x more expensive than smaller ones…

So I used magical Japanese folding techniques to fold the shirts into the allowed size.

Quality entertainment is necessary when doing repetetive tasks.

Look at all those envelopes! Gotta love plastics.

And here we see our model modelling the shirt in the traditional Internet manner. I hope I got all the details right. Directing is so challenging.

Dear Interwebs

I’m not really the most observant person in the world. However, having this escaping my attention is a pretty big achievement.

But today, while watering the plants, I noticed something odd on one of the aloes:

Some white fluffy things on the leaves. Hm. Then I looked further down:

Lots more! And the soil! More fluffy white mold!

Infected! And behind the potted plant?

EEEK! SPORES!!!!

Dear Interwebs, what is this? And what’s the best way to deal with this? Should I kill it with fire, before going into one of those scenes you see in the movies when somebody has detected something yucky (i.e., scrub my skin in the shower until it bleeds)?

Or is there a less drastic solution?

I can just throw away that aloe, but I see that it’s spread to the plant next to it:

And that’s a huge one that I’m not that keen on throwing away.

Please advise.

One Weird Trick

A cow-orker taught me this awesome trick:

Instead of putting all cables and stuff into a box and letting them get all tangled, put them into transparent plastic bags.

See?

And it’s not like I have OCD, so it’s not a sign of mental problems or anything. It saves time in the long run! It actually does!

And the other tip for today is: You can never have too many cables. But you only need one (or two) of each kind. Edit your collection!

Guest Blog: Pearls. Before: Swine

By guest blogger Bjørn Konestabo

In the world of candy, there is chocolate. There is liquorice. And then there is gummy. The gelatin based candy from the wondrous animal that just keeps on giving. Among the producers of such delights, the German based Haribo is the original G, molding the first gummy candy in the shape of a bear in 1922. The gummy bear is still their flagship product, and while other candy producers might foolishly boast to be still using their original recipe, Haribo claims to have continuously improved it for more than 90 years.

What sets these collagen-derived ursī apart from the rest are the flavors. While other gummy may contain barely enough flavors to mask the porcine origins, these gummy bears are positively bursting with flavor. The real magic happens when you scoff down multiple bears at once, unleashing a torrent of fruity excitement.

While Haribo has had a local presence in Norway for decades, the full assortment has not been available, most notably their most famous product, the golden bears, “Goldbären”, have been unavailable to norwegian consumers for quite some time, but today they can be found in a cheap household and party supply chain. This is an odd location for a premium product.

So are they the same thing? Amazon reviews suggest that all bears are not created equal, depending on country of origin. Preliminary testing finds the Norwegian sourced bears to be enjoyable, but unable to match cherished childhood memories of the originals. Then again, what is?

Science

The way of finding things out.

The bags seem similar enough. Pictures of fruit featured prominently on both bags. The Norwegian sourced on the left is revealed to come from Denmark. Only the German one offers Freizeitspaß it seems. Production and best-before dates are close enough for comparison, with only a two month disadvantage to the German bag.

There are six flavors of bears: Raspberry, strawberry, orange, lemon, pineapple and apple. Selection of candidate bears revealed color differences that complicated testing. This meant that the tester was not allowed to view the bear before consumption. It is surprisingly hard to guess the correct flavor without a visual cue, and only one flavor was correctly identified: The highest scoring german bear, pineapple.

Test was randomized in the order of bears and blinded.

Results

Type of bear	German score	Norwegian score
Raspberry	5	3
Strawberry	4	3
Orange	4	3
Lemon	5	4
Pineapple	6	2
Apple	5	4
Sum	29	19

It became clear for the tester that the bears could be segmented in two groups. One harder and more chewy, one softer and more flavorful.

Danish version states real fruit juices but not much. Also color additives are used.

Look at all the stuff that’s in the German bag! Brennessel? Stinging nettle? Seriously?

There can be no doubt. The Germans are keeping the good stuff for themselves, and while the ersatz bears are not an unpleasant experience, they fall far short of the greatness of the original.