The Obama campaign fundraising machine has debuted a new text message tool with encouraging results for the President’s bean counters. On Wednesday, the Obama campaign sent out an SMS message to cell phones and smart phones of tens of thousands of previous donors asking them to give more money. “Support Pres Obama in less than a minute,” the message read, “using our new secure system: just reply with the amount you want to give and we’ll charge your saved credit card.” There is nothing new about asking for money via text message, but the technology behind collecting the money was a first for a presidential campaign. All potential donors had to do to give more money was to type a number into their phone. Write “25,” or “10″ and that amount of dollars was immediately drawn from their credit cards into the campaign’s coffers.
Singing Snoop Dogg to my kid is functionally equivalent to my parents singing me Tony Bennett songs
A tautonym is a zoological name of a species consisting of two identical words such as Lemmus lemmus.
Not sure the best part about this:
- That a “tautonym” is an actual concept
- That Wikipedia has such a comprehensive list
- That tautonyms are not allowed in botany
(Thanks for the enlightenment, nsomn)
Great blog post on optimal Hangman strategy.
TL;DR our usual intuition about letter frequency in English text (E-T-A-O-I-N) doesn’t apply to isolated words like in Hangman, and furthermore doesn’t apply when we know the word length, and furthermore doesn’t apply when we have already guessed some letters in the word.
I’m pretty annoyed that this wasn’t written by kennyfreelance though.
Why launch your start-up in NYC? Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others tell you why. (via nycdigital)
The Daily Show’s amazing coverage of the Park Slope Food Co-Op proposed boycott of Israeli goods.
Sometimes it’s tough to tell if Daily Show is serious or kidding.
This time it’s IMPOSSIBLE to tell.
The Comcast Center in Philly looks a LOT like a giant USB thumb drive
I have a Word doc with weird spaces between some of the words. When I turn on “show non printable characters” they show up as the unicode character TILDE WITH DOT BELOW instead of the usual DOT.
Any idea what it means?
Earlier today I posted a great quote from A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness:
Spending 2 years doing something you don’t enjoy is a full 3.4% of your life. What are you getting back for that investment? Money? What are you going to do with that money that will be worth the non-refundable 3.4% of your life? An extra room in your house?
I’ve been thinking about this quote since I posted it. At the time, it seemed so apropos and inspirational.
But wait! I did spend 2 years of my life doing something that I didn’t enjoy. What? Why did I do it? Do I regret it? Was it to get that extra room in my house?
Nope! It was so I could live with little-to-no salary for a year while getting my startup off the ground. It was a very deliberate and calculated plan.
Money takes on a very different value depending on where you are in your life. $25,000 isn’t that interesting at the end of your life, but it’s VERY interesting at the start.
And spending those 2 years that I didn’t really enjoy so I could save enough money to do something I believed in something was one of the best things I’ve ever done.
So in retrospect, those 2 years WERE a non-refundable investment. But it was an investment that is paying dividends many times over. And I’m very happy with my decision.
