So, I’ve actually been blogging quite a bit in the last few months. I’m using Tumblr and I’ve moved things over to rw.adamrice.org and it’s just me these days, but the dream is alive, and as random as ever. Won’t you join me?

Get Lost: Francis Alÿs

Dear FTP user:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement.

Blogger’s FTP support enabled this web logger to move randomWalks from a subdomain at pitas to its very own dot com.

www.mnftiu.cc (David Rees) is blogging.

How to Stop Receiving Phone Books and Yellow Pages – thanks Dru!

Informed by the mathematical random walk and the Situationist dérive, or “drift,” these fantastic roller shoes harvest energy from your motion and direct you via toe-mounted LCD on a random walk.

“Fixing a small iPhone annoyance” with a bookmarklet which opens links in new windows.

The interface for completing a form in Safari on iPhone is quite nice. “Previous” and “next” buttons swoop the focus through the form elements, so there’s no need to zoom when moving from one input to the next. The magnifying loupe is a brilliant solution to the daunting problem of intuitive cursor control, and as I type this, I’m delighted to find that simply tapping a word places the cursor smartly at the end of it. Which means it’s pretty easy to post to your weblog when you’re sitting on the toilet.

In which we give up some Google love to randomwalks, a budding blog by an economics student.

Celebrating hope in randomness is fine for monks and physicists, but it seems much less empowering in the service of someone holding a scratchoff card and a "lucky bear."

del.icio.us/merlinmann

Mahalanobis

Karl Pearson introduced the term "Random Walk". He was interested in describing the spatial/temporal evolutions of mosquito populations invading cleared jungle regions. He found it too complex to model deterministically, so he conceptualized a simple random model.

Pearson posed his problem in Nature (27 July 1905):

A man starts from a point 0 and walks l yards in a straight line; he then turns through any angle whatever and walks another l yards in a second straight line. He repeats this process n times. I require the probability that after n of these stretches he is at a distance between r and r 'r from his starting point.

David has a guest author at hello, typepad this week. Anna Lappé is all about food, health and politics. She’s pretty awesome.

randomWalks is a (non-commercial) group weblog. The site is actually assembled using three weblogs in Movable Type: the main weblog, Flux the miniblog, and the tagline (“I can no longer shop happily”) blog. At least 27 authors have access to the various randomWalks blogs. Only about six of those post regularly, but another ten post often enough to be considered active authors. In addition to the three randomWalks blogs, our Movable Type installation supports six other weblogs including four personal weblogs kept by editors and friends of randomWalks: blue period., dru blood, gargoyle drumming, and zagg, and two (non-commercial) member projects which are rather idiosyncratic and difficult to describe. These other six blogs have some overlapping authorship with the randomWalks blogs and also account for about another half dozen active authors in the system. We have four other defunct weblogs in the system, and a total of 53 author accounts. All told our installation is used by 9 weblogs and about 22 authors. U: Make that seven “active” weblogs and 22 authors. cf. Six Log: How are you using the tool?

LVX23 reminds me what can be so great about weblogs — it’s like he’s blogging just for me.

Random Walk Generator

Humans have seemingly always been fascinated by random phenomena. Randomness is a pervasive component of our everyday lives. It characterizes the patterns of raindrops, shape and location of clouds, traffic on the freeway. It describes the selection of winning numbers in the lottery and day-to-day changes in the weather. The science of chaos says that everything began in pure randomness and will end that way.

The computer provides a means for the systematic extended study of randomness and pseudo-randomness that is impractical using simpler methods such as flipping coins or rolling dice. A graphics-oriented computer and a simple algorithm such as a two-dimensional random walk is ideal for the visual display and exploration of random principles. The random walk decision procedure, like the eight queens and knight's tour problems, predates computers. In one college finite math textbook (Kemeny et. al. , 1962) it is described in the context of an absorbing (i.e. terminating) Markov chain process wherein, at each decision point, only the most recent decision is considered when making the current one. Variations of the random walk method are currently used with computers to simulate systems in the fields of physics, biology, chemistry, statistics, marketing, population dynamics, and others. A bit of Internet prowling will unearth information on many current applications. An Alta Vista search on the key "random walk" generated 2988 hits, many of them redundant, but containing at least one hit for most of the current applications of the method. Sourcecode for various implementations is freely available on the net in languages ranging from Java to C to Lisp.

Blogs Against War aggregates posts for peace across a growing number of weblogs. If you use Movable Type, it’s easy to have links to (and excerpts of) your peace-related posts show up on Blogs Against War automatically. If you don’t use Movable Type, there’s a form you can fill out which will accomplish the same thing. I really hope this takes off. Please encourage your favorite peacebloggers to contribute.

Other weblogs about peaceblogs:
• "PeaceTrack is a site devoted to gathering reports of peace activities"
• Peaceblogs.org is a site devoted to making connections between bloggers who oppose the impending war against Iraq
• Diveintomark.org has collected a list of blogs for peace

See also the wonderful A Beginners Guide to Trackback from the brilliant folks at Movable Type.

Mrs. Xowie is on TSG today (via Drudge Report).

originally posted by xowie

randomWalks archives for Dec., Jan., Feb.
rW posts about music, books, peace, prison, marijuana.

originally posted by xowie

How many is too many?

This one’s a keeper: Browser News: Resources > Fonts features samples of just about every font it’s safe to assume a Mac and/or Windows user will have installed – with the necessary caveat that “fonts will not be depicted properly if they are not installed or if your browser’s CSS support is poor.”

Google buys Blogger; randomwalks moves to Movable Type. Coincidence? Well, yeah.

AllAboutGeorge’s Imperial tearoom with occasional randomWalkers.

originally posted by daiichi

Click the strip.

originally posted by xowie

THIS IS EARL.
toon by Mr. John Van Vliet.

originally posted by daiichi

At last it happened...my name was called. It was time to be questioned for jury selection. The merry, chubby attorney for the plaintiff asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a food writer, and that I had just returned from the legendary Peter Luger Steak House...where I had eaten during the lunch break. His mind boggled...I was in like Flynn!

originally posted by daiichi

Boing Boing is the top blog.

rW is #252.

originally posted by daiichi

Hey neat, we’re on top of the google results for “links open windows”! I wonder what other searches put randomWalks on top? (If you find any, pls [discuss] – posting works, though the comment count is gone.)

Don’t forget you can find older entries in the archives. Also, check out the new blue period. We didn’t have any hot water this morning, I had to take a cold shower. It was ok (well, it sucked but I could bear it) until I washed my hair. Have you ever drank a slurpee too fast and had that brain freeze they talk about? My brain froze from the outside… it was a terrible experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone.