Cycle Helmets and Other Religious Symbols : there appears to be a lack of published research suggesting that bike helmets help avoid serious injury and death — in fact, research seems to suggest the _opposite_.
(tags: cycling helmets safety research bikes equipment)Clever method of near duplicate detection : ‘SIGIR 2008 paper, “SpotSigs: Robust and Efficient Near Duplicate Detection in Large Web Collections”‘. may be useful, although we’ve pretty much stopped deduping in SpamAssassin nowadays
(tags: corpora dupes duplicates spotsigs collections sigir papers via:jzawodny)HadoopStreaming : ‘Using the streaming system you can develop working hadoop jobs with extremely limited knowldge of Java. [..] Hadoop basically becomes a system for making pipes from shell-scripting work (with some fudging) on a cluster.’
(tags: hadoop perl streams unix distcomp clusters mapreduce)political zealot using GMail’s “this is spam” button to deliberately cause spamfilter problems for Obama’s campaign : ‘Tablemate at benihana confided how he subscribes to Obama’s mailing list and marks it all as spam to train Gmail. Urge to kill rising.’ – Kevin Fox on Twitter
(tags: twitter kevin-fox foaf-story benihana obama anti-spam filtering this-is-spam us-politics moveon)“Jake Leg” : ‘large numbers of [adulterated Prohibition-era alcohol, Jamaican Ginger Extract] users began to lose use of their hands and feet. Some victims could walk, but they had no control over the muscles which would normally have enabled them to point their toes upward. Therefore, they would raise their feet high with the toes flopping downward, which would touch the pavement first followed by their heels. The toe first, heel second pattern made a distinctive “tap-click, tap-click” sound as they walked. This very peculiar gait became known as the jake walk and those afflicted were said to have jake leg’
(tags: jake-leg walking history prohibition alcohol odd bizarre adulteration poison 1930s)