New photo posted at rightreading.com

The millions of regular readers of rightreading.com probably know that I have begun posting featured photos on my photography page. Latest up is a photo of the central garden at the Getty Center.

Speaking of the GC, I've been preparing a new batch of photos of the Getty and will post them to my travel section soon.

Over the years I've experimented with various ways of handling web photo albums, with the result that the presentation of these is inconsistent. I think I'm ready to standardize now (with a bit of tweaking) on a style like the one I used for bouquets to art.

Congratulations, Ellen

Congratulations to Ellen Christensen, winner of the William Stout Prize in Architectural History, offered for the best architectural history paper written at the University of California-Berkeley during the current year. Papers are submitted for the award by the department’s GSIs (graduate student instructors) and then refereed by an outside committee. This year there were around twenty papers that made the pool of finalists.

So Ellen, what do you think about this unexpected honor?

Ellen (surprised): But ... it’s not even my major!

Two more pictures follow.

Erin and Ellen

Ellen on the way to her awards ceremony

Faster than a speeding ... well, faster than anything

A Rochester professor of optics reports creating impulses that exceed the speed of light.

Google Trends

Google announced a new product today, Google Trends.

Google Trends tracks popularity over time by region and language of search terms entered in Google.

A few preliminary results are interesting:

* Firefox has leveled off since rising rapidly throughout 2004. It is especially popular in Germany

* Del.icio.us peaked at the end of 2005 but may be recovering. It's especially popular in Southeast Asia.

Result timelines may include landmarks dates: For example:

A After 125 years, ukulele still keeps 'em smiling
Arizona Republic - Apr 21 2004

B Hawaiian musician takes ukulele to stardom
KVUE (subscription) - Aug 26 2004

C Warren Buffett plays ukulele, answers tough questions in packed Berkshire weekend
San Diego Union Tribune - May 2 2005

D Hawaiian ukulele star rockets up charts
Wilkes Barre Times-Leader - Jun 13 2005

E Ukulele shop grew into historic status
Honolulu Star-Bulletin - Jul 17 2005

F Ukulele kids rock in class and after school, travelling the world to perform
Brandon Sun - Feb 18 2006

You can also compare trends. For example:

Yahoo consistly scores higher than Google (because searchers are already at Google?).

Japanese art consistently scores higher than Chinese art (but interest in both is declining, if search queries are an indication).

Attention, Hit Sluts

1. Obsessed with the number of hits your website is getting? Check out McDar's Google Watch Tool. It allows you to compare results from most of Google's data centers.

2. What's up with Google anyway? Webmasters are reporting weird results all over the net. This thread covers the subject pretty thoroughly. (You don't have to log in, just click on "passed url.") It seems to me that Google is doing spring cleaning. I hope so, because my old site, webs.lanset.com/bookfolk, which has been defunct for almost a year, still ranks higher on some things that my current site, www.rightreading.com, even though the content is often identical at the new site.

3. THIS IS COOL: What kind of a tree would you be? Check out this remarkable visual representation of the spidering mechanisms of Google, Yahoo, and MSNSearch.

Must-See Video

Stephen Colbert’s gutsy performance at the White House Press Correspondents Dinner.

You can thank him here.

Photo of the Day

Water lilies.

Visions of Geekery

When you start to dream about SEO (search engine optimization) stuff, you know you’ve gone over the line. Besides, most of the techniques that used to work get you penalized now. For my money, Google Blogoscoped is the most entertaining search engine blog (although Google these days is about a lot more than searching). SEO Chat's Google Dance Tool will tell you when the techtonic plates of Google’s ratings start to shift. And at XSEO you can see the history of such changes. (For more, see this introduction to search engines.)

ISP woes

More internet issues. This seems to be the year for them. On Monday the server of my ISP (Hostik)went down. I didn't get back up until Thursday night. "During a routine backup Plesk [the internet interface] was corrupted," they said. Must have been some corruption. So I'm talking to their tech support guy. "Is this going to happen again?" I ask. "Absolutely not!" he assures me. "What was different this time?" I ask. His answer: "I do not know."

A New Rendering of the Yi Jing

I've made a new rendering of the Yi jing (I Ching) and posted it
here

Check it out. It has a random flash component that will cast a hexagram for you.

Bouquets to Art

I've posted some photos from this year's Bouquets to Art over at www.rightreading.com. This year it was at the de Young again, instead of the Legion.

Assays

I've finally got around to putting several things up on the web that I've been intended to post. What's new is listed here.

Herd on the Street

Check out this new feature at my companion site, www.rightreading.com.

Bush changes a light bulb

This picture purports to show GWB "pitching in" to change a light fixture in New Orleans.

Me: How many presidents does it take to change a light bulb?

Carol: Forget the light bulb, just change the president.

Still a ways to go, however

Okay, I'm going to shut up about Google now. But first, I want to say that using the "site:" search command I find that Google has information about 126 pages from the site that I turned off more than six months ago, but only 22 pages from the new site with the same (or better) content. (Plus, the old site had 580 links or mentions.) Okay, nothing more about Google. (Unless I change my mind.)

Free at last!

Well, I'm back in Google's index, after only a couple weeks of e-mails.

I will give them that they did take care of it finally (good thing I don't live in China). But it's a little scary when a single entity has so much power to conceal or make visible parts of the web. That's one reason why it's a good idea to check out other search engines from time to time. I have some info about this here.

Gagged by Google!

For some reason Google has decided my website www.rightreading.com) is some sort of scam or spam or something. It's ironic because I have services and stuff I could sell but I've purposely kept the website completely noncommerical.

I noticed that Google wasn't indexing it. (Determined by putting the url in Google's search box.) All other search engines that I've tested do index me. By being persistent, I finally got this response from Google:

"Your page has been blocked from our index because it does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index."

But I haven't done any of those things! What can I do?

The Hypothetical President

On Tuesday Mr. Bush announced that the U.S. is "addicted to oil." And he should know -- he's the pusher. After all, what can you expect when you put oil men in the executive office? But that's not the story. That speech made front pages everywhere -- but did this?

"One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent, his energy secretary and national economic advisor said Wednesday the president didn't mean it literally." (Knight Ridder)

See, when he said cut imports he didn't mean, you know, cut imports. He meant, um, something else. It was like a general sort of, er, example.

Hey, how's a guy to govern if people take what he says as if he means it?

It's hard. It's hard work.