Have a group on ESPN for the NCAA tournament? I've been working on a nifty little tool for a group myself and my friends are in and have decided to open it up. The purpose of the tool is two-fold:
See all your individual brackets at once on 1 large group bracket so you can compare picks easily, and see who lost different teams all at the same time
See the individual scores all on 1 bracket, and updated faster than ESPN updates the group pages. ESPN marks your individual brackets within a few minutes of a game ending, but the overall group page doesn't update scores until much later. In this utility, I score the brackets based on the markings, so you can get your group scores quicker.
The issue with mashing the brackets up like this is that it can get very large. So this mashup takes the current top 7 individuals from the group page at any given time, and mashes those together. In order to avoid getting banned for hitting ESPN too frequently, your group mashups will update every 10 minutes.
Let me know what you think in the comments...I am considering this a work in progress right now.
The new trailer for the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, Pirates of the Caribbean at World's End, is now out. You can check it out below, and it seems like it will automatically update with new trailers/related footage as they become available, according to the message that appears after the trailer ends.
It looks like they've set out this season to reintroduce every character that's been on the past 5 seasons.
It was hilarious how Milo was using Chloe as a human breathalyzer, and how Chloe wasn't even remotely inconspicous about it.
I love how Jack gets to do whatever the hell he wants, like going after Audrey's killers. Doesn't matter who they are, where they're from, or if it's legal, he's going to destroy them. You don't question Jack Bauer.
It was way too easy to determine where the drone was going (it took Jack 2 seconds) and for them to create a link to send the data to CTU. If they suspect radiation, why the hell wouldn't they send a HAZMAT team first? Who sends normal firemen? Retards. Almost as retarded as the VP, who would blow up the ambassador's country if Assad had sneezed, saying he was using biological warfare.
Is Marcy the new Nadia? (Random hot girl that has done nothing useful - Bill gave her one senseless task)
You know how global warming is being blamed for melting the Arctic ice caps? It looks like it's also increasing the possibility of allowing for sea travel which wasn't possible previously. And ironically, it can also allow for more oil drilling since there could be as much as 25% of the oil left in the world up there.
"Diminishing sea ice conditions in the Arctic Ocean are changing ecosystems, most conspicuously for polar bears," said the [US Arctic Research Commission]'s report, prepared for US President George W. Bush and Congress. "This also creates unprecedented access for ships that will bring people to the north, and will significantly shorten global marine transportation routes," it said.
The cost difference is dramatic, according to Mead Treadwell, the commission chairman. The estimated cost of transporting a shipping container between northern Europe and Alaska's Aleutian Islands is about $500 he said; moving the same container between Europe and the port of Yokohama, through the Suez Canal, costs about $1500.
So if burning oil is the major cause of global warming, which in turn will allow us to discover more oil to burn, this sounds environmentally healthy. I wonder if either those estimates of how quickly oil is running out counted what may be in the Arctic, and also if it turns out there is far less oil than expected up there.
First there was the standalone Google Talk program, which at the time seemed like a crippled version of AIM and not all that useful. Then they went and integrated with Gmail and it became a much bigger deal. You could save your conversations in Gmail and chat without an additional program. Now the Talk service has a third way to access your contacts - you can add it to the Google Personalized Homepage (or your own website). They've also added a couple of features: "We've also added a few new features to make your chats a bit more colorful, like the ability to view YouTube videos and Picasa Web Albums photos in your chats. And just like many other gadgets, you can also add the Google Talk Gadget to your own webpage or blog."
No need to be logged into Gmail, and I already use the personalized homepage as a hub where I get tons of info at a glance. I can see the newest news stories, see if dave, TVSquad, or a handful of other blogs have posted new stories, get TV listings, and now chat with people in my Gmail contacts list. Awesome.
In case you didn't know, Yellowstone National Park is sitting on top of a supervolcano, which builds up pressure over a long period of time, and eventually releases it in a massive eruption capable of covering an entire continent in ash. So it's definitely scary when you hear that it is behaving unexpectedly and unpredictably:
Though the Yellowstone system is active and expected to eventually blow its top, scientists don’t think it will erupt any time soon. ...the activity has been increasing lately, scientists have discovered. In addition, the nearby Teton Range, in a total surprise, is getting shorter.
For the past 17 years, researchers used [GPS] satellites to monitor the horizontal and vertical motion of the Yellowstone caldera—a huge volcanic crater formed by a super-eruption more than 600,000 years ago. The movement of the caldera indicates what's going on underground where magma is stored for the next eruption. When magma builds up, some of it starts to rise toward the surface, where it presses against the floor of the caldera. The pressure makes the caldera bulge, while a decrease in pressure makes it sink.
The 45-by-30-mile caldera bulged and deflated significantly during the study period, resulting in a series of small earthquakes that produced 10 times more energy than would occur if the ground were to move suddenly in a large eruption. "We think it's a combination of magma being intruded under the caldera and hot water released from the magma being pressurized because it's trapped," said lead study author Robert Smith from the University of Utah. "I don’t believe this is evidence for an impending volcanic eruption, but it would be prudent to keep monitoring the volcano."
liquid hot "mag-ma"
The data shows that the caldera floor sank 4.4 inches from 1987 until 1995. From 1995 until 2000, the northwest rim of the caldera rose about 3 inches, followed by another 1.4-inch rise until 2003. Then between 2000 and 2003, the caldera floor sank a little more than an inch. And then from 2004 to 2006 the central caldera floor rose faster than ever, springing up nearly 7 inches during the three-year span.
"The rate is unprecedented, at least in terms of what scientists have been able to observe in Yellowstone," Smith said.
What the researchers think is happening, on a short-term basis at least, is that the bulging Yellowstone hotspot north of the Tetons is pushing against the north edge of Jackson Hole and jamming it against the mountains. (This is also causing the southwest part of the Yellowstone plateau, under the hotspot, to slide downhill at a rate of one-sixth of an inch each year.). "The textbook model for a normal fault is not what's happening at the Teton fault," Smith said. "The mountains are going down relative to the valley going up. That's a total surprise." This motion, according to researchers, is also expected to produce bigger quakes, confusing the picture of how earthquakes occur in that area.
The Gmail login page updated to reflect new targets for the amount of space each account gets. The counter on that page is always counting up, and you can actually see what it is counting to. With the new update, here's the new space targets and how many days until that much space is hit by the counter on the page:
2800MB: Already reached
2835MB: In 18.22 days
2980MB: In 384 days
3125MB: In 749 days
3270MB: In 1114 days
3415MB: In 1479 days
3560MB: In 1845 days
The last target is 3560MB, which is about 3.47GB of space. But that's over 60 months (5 years) away! But they usually change the targets over time to reach them faster or slower.
Update: For those wondering where the numbers came from, the Gmail login page uses Javascript for the counter. If you hit "view source," you can see the matrix of storage space and time when that space is to be reached. Using some simple Javascript, I calculated how far off that is from now. I will update this post as it changes.
Definitely an interesting episode this week.
Both Jack and Logan are injured...Jack rarely struggles to deal with pain and he looked ready to collapse.
The Logan stabbing came out of nowhere...didn't I say Logan's wife was going to suck? And why the heck is Aaron with her? That's disturbing.
It looks like they're setting up the new CTU guy to be a mole within CTU...if that's the case it seems kind of stupid that he appeared and annoyed everyone and then acted moley in the next episode. But I don't know who else would be leaking stuff from inside CTU. Except maybe Nadia since she doesn't really do anything.
Check out the character countdown for a good recap of the episode's highlights and funny moments...it's not up yet as of this posting.
Looks like online betting site PicksPal is beating Vegas odds on sports bets. The site lets users bet against each other for fun on a variety of things like the spread, individual player points, number of fouls/penalties in a game, etc...all for fun - no money changes hands.
It's all for fun, but the company started selling the top picks of its best users in October. For $10, you can get the collective picks of the top 30 users on five games. The idea was that people could use these for-fun picks to win bets in Vegas. The question was, would PicksPal be able to consistently beat Vegas odds, and the spread, with these picks.
So far, yes. By a lot. PicksPal’s overall record, against the spread, has been 562-338, or a 63% win rate. In college basketball, the win rate is 66%. In pro football, 62%. They are even getting a 52% win rate in pro hockey, their worst sport. Some of the recent results can be viewed here.
If PicksPal’s win rate over the long run remains over 50% against the spread, they will begin to disrupt the betting markets.
Pickspal also expanded into pop culture "betting" earlier this year, with PicksPop.
This is crazy! Time to place some bets before Vegas catches wind of this.
It was 35 degrees last Monday, and today it's supposed to hit 62. Not that I'm complaining.
Last week (3/5/2007):
This week (3/12/2007):
So we've suddenly jumped out of winter and kind of skipped over spring. Of course if the past few weeks have been any indication, it could very well be down in the 30's again next week (or up in the 90's...gotta love Chicago weather).
Update: Looks like I was right...it's nearly 70 degrees on Tuesday, and nearly 30 degrees on Friday. Looks like it's going to be an interesting spring.
