Hey everyone, look! It’s Ham Solo… as played by a Canadian version of Kevin Bacon!
Yeah, yeah, I know, this is a horrid joke :)
[Via]
Ham Solo [Pic]
Happy Birthday, the Internet!
On April 7, 1969, RFC 1 was distributed on the spankin’-new ARPANET by Steve Crocker of UCLA. Today, the RFC is the official publication channel for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and the global community of computer network researchers. ARPANET would later be incorporated with other networks to giveth life to our modern Internet.
Though most people don’t know how it works (“it’s a series of tubes“), the Internet has provided us with information and entertainment beyond the imagination of ARPANET’s creators. Without it, we’d have no Wikipedia to deliberately falsify, no YouTube stars like Double-Rainbow Guy, and (worst of all, of course) no Geeks Are Sexy–or sexy geeks, probably, since so many areas of geek culture are firmly grounded in teh interwebz.
In celebration of the Internet’s symbolic birthday, why don’t we do something fun? What’s the best thing about the Internet, Geeks? Why do you love it? Choose something you think is a shining achievement / a horrible omen / mind-bendingly memetic / straight-up web geekery and drop a link in the comments.
Hello Watchmen! [Pics]
Flickr user Joseph Senior, aka. Yodaflicker, plans to illustrates 101 kitties so that he can then compile them into a nice coffee table book. We’ve already featured a few of his illustrations here on [GAS] in the past, but Joseph has recently released a new batch of hello kitty characters, including a few Watchmen-themed ones. Check ’em out!
Hello Night Owl
Hello Rorschach
Hello Silk Spectre
Hello Dr Manhattan
Hello Comedian
George Takei Should Be The Next Amazing Spiderman!
In the following video, George Takei, best known for his role as Sulu in the original Star Trek, auditions for the role of Spiderman in the upcoming Broadway show: Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. You go George!
[Via]
Mrs. Nesbitt Cosplay [Pic]
For those who don’t get the reference, check this clip out:
Some Fresh Perspectives
Surfing the Internet: Feast or Famine [Comic]
Twitter moods match money moves
Can Twitter predict the stock market? So one PhD student believes.
The BBC reports that Timm Sprenger of the Technical University of Munich found that buying and selling in response to an analysis of 250,000 tweets over six months would have produced a 15% return.
Sprenger looked at comments that had been marked with the hashtag relating to a company’s stock market symbol. He also paid attention to which comments were widely retweeted.
The logic seems to be along similar lines to the “wisdom of the crowd” theory, best known from a book by James Surowiecki. The idea is that a single Twitter user’s comment, hunches or “insider info” about a stock may be unreliable, but taken in aggregate Twitter users correctly indicate the mood of the market, which is effective because stock prices ultimately come down to nothing but the balance between demand and supply.
A similar study that looks at the market as a whole (and uses the wonderful phrase “Self-Organizing Fuzzy Neural Network”) claimed that looking through Twitter posts and measuring six elements of positivity or negativity (Alert, Calm, Happy, Kind, Sure and Vital) could predict whether the Dow Jones Industrial Average would move up or down on a particular day — based on the mood of the previous three days — with 87.6% accuracy.
Of course, to take advantage of that “prediction” you’d have to trade in market tracker funds rather than individual stocks, which may limit your ability to cash in on a day-to-day basis.
There’s even a website, TweetTrader (pictured), dedicated to tracking tweets about markets, industry sectors and specific stocks. It’s tough to say it’s effective though: of the top six stocks that were moving up in “sentiment” and the top six that were moving down, barely half had price patterns that matched this sentiment. It’s also hard to say in this specific set-up how much of the sentiment was genuinely a predictor, and how much was a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the sentiment a reaction to existing movements.