I took a trip to gnooks.com today - a site where you can get book selections. I had never heard of it before today, and it’s probably not the best place to get an accurate recommendation, but it’s the one stumbleupon threw at me.

I’ve always been curious how sites like this will inform me. As someone who knows a fair deal about books, literature and common authors, I assume that I can predict some of the authors I’ll like. Short stories come into play here as well - there’s not as much of a time commitment in reading a new author in these cases and recommendations pile up quickly.

So how accurate will the site be? And how is the information created?

I tested it to see. I entered John Steinbeck, Jonathan Safran Foer and Michael Chabon as some of my favorite authors. The first response? Nicole Krauss. I recognize her from shopping at Target, but that’s it. “I don’t know it,” I say.

Next: John Kennedy Toole. Love him and his one, Pulitzer Prize winning book. I like it.

Next: Gore Vidal. No thoughts either way; “I don’t know it.”

Glen David Gold. Joseph Mitchell. “Don’t Know.” Zadie Smith. Roddie (sp) Doyle. “I like.”

Here’s the inherent problem with sites like this. These authors aren’t actually recommendations. They are authors with similar fan bases.

Naturally - a cold, unfeeling computer can’t make a recommendation. It only knows data - it’s unable to ask follow up questions, and it’s unable to understand why you picked one book over another. It’s based not on themes or writing styles or anything specific - it’s simply saying “well, some people liked this, and they also happened to like this, so there you go!”

Each visitor makes connections between authors, and these connections are saved in the database. If I, for instance, enter the authors mentioned above, the database will make a connection between these three. If the program suggests Dave Eggers and I say “Yeah, like him,” then there’s another connection. The four authors are connected.

When the next person comes in and types in Michael Chabon, there’s already three authors connected to him. More connections equals a higher collaboration with readers.

I understand the concept, and it’s not a bad idea - it’s the entire basis of Amazon’s recommendations. What Amazon has going for it is information from millions of transactions. But even then, it’s the same concept on a larger scale. Sure, I like John Steinbeck, and I happen to like Michael Chabon, but it’s not necessarily the case that everyone who likes John Steinbeck will like Michael Chabon.

It’s the same for sites like Pandora. Music with the same fan base is listed as a recommendation. But it’s not based on your personal tastes, as a recommendation should be, but on a group of

When it comes down to it, sites like this are fun and interesting. But that’s it. Sure, you might learn a little bit about how the general public feels about an author or musician. But you can never get a real recommendation unless you talk to someone. A person. Who understands the connections not on a data analysis level, but on an emotional level.

Computers might be better data analysts than humans. But they’re not necessarily smarter.

Well, it’s Friday.

I took a break from constant posting to allow others to post. As you can see, it’s only been Kerrie. Misc.Asst. will probably end up turning into the Corey and Kerrie Variety Hour.

Eat your heart out, Nick and Jessica. Whoops — they’re divorced.

Maybe the Variety Hour idea isn’t as good as I had hoped.

I digress. The real reason for today’s post is to open up the world to some online comics that I regularly read. There’s a lot to choose from out there, and I’ve brought all of my favorites together in my RSS reader Newsgator — the best blog reading tool on earth.

Right. You don’t want to spend hours stumbling through Peanuts and Family Circus online sites to find your daily dose of pencil drawn humor, so here’s your guide — at least, a guide to the four or five that I frequent.

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Calvin and Hobbes

None of us should forget the brilliant Calvin and Hobbes. I found this at uComics.com, where you can nearly any comic strip published in the past ten years. The best part about getting Calvin and Hobbes daily is that I’ve realized just how good the strip was. At the age of 11 a lot of it was lost on me; yes, I knew it was funny, but I didn’t fully grasp what creator Bill Watterson was doing.

Now I know.

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Dinosaur Comics

There really isn’t much drawing involved with Dinosaur Comics — it’s a strictly text based comic in that creator Ryan North uses the same six frames every day. It’s the words themselves that change, and each day finds a new look into some philosophical rant by T-Rex, along with a rebuttal by this other orange dinosaur.

It’s a lot funnier than it sounds.

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Red Meat

I discovered Red Meat comics through some friends of mine. Of course, these are the same friends that had me convinced that watching professional wrestling was going to help my life in some way.

Red Meat features a variety of characters the likes of which are either completely crazy or incredibly familiar. There’s Milkman Dan and his ongoing feud with… There’s Ted Johnson and his family, and there’s Priest and his conversations with God — and there’s not a sane eye in the house.

Experiencing Red Meat is like watching your first good sketch comedy troupe — you’ll never go back to traditional humor again.

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The Perry Bible Fellowship

This series was shown to me by C00kedview — an alternative to the usual comic, the PBF leans heavily on irony to make their comics work. All are very artfully done, and while the main page seems difficult to navigate (each picture leads to a random comic) you can find an all-encompassing archive around there somewhere. The PBF is well worth checking out.

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This Modern World

Tom Tomorrow has perfected the satirical political comic. While Doonesbury is subtle, crafted primarily for the comics page of a major newspaper, This Modern World is more blunt, more to the point, and this has relegated the comic to the opening pages of more independent minded publications like The City Pages.

Tomorrow’s This Modern World does what it can to bring to light the foibles of our government — from both the right and the left, though since most injustices come form the right, they’re featured more prevalently. When I want to sound political, I’ll mention This Modern World and see if anyone notices.

They usually don’t, but it’s worth a try.

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Anyway, that’s it. Those are my comic choices for the day. If you have any other suggestions, let me know — I’m always open for more time-wasting endeavors, and reading comics sounds like a classic one.

If like me, you’re tired of chopping your fingers off while trying to build that custom rocking chair with your traditional, unsafe table saw then feast your eyes on what could save your remaining phalanges. The SawStop:

The SawStop is pretty amazing when you think about it. Just watching the videos you’d swear it was a pre-tiger act by Siegfried and Roy. The saw blade basically detects when it comes in contact with the human finger based on the conduction of electricity through the human body, which is greater than that of wood. When it detects the surge in current, a brake is applied and stops and retracts the blade into the housing.

The result is not a missing finger, but rather (hopefully) a minor gash on the skin.

A couple videos are available from the website:
http://www.sawstop.com/media/Table%20Saw%20-%20WMV%20high.wmv
http://www.sawstop.com/media/high_speed_demo_WMV.wmv

I could definitely see something like this being used for shop class, or tech ed in school. Though, I don’t remember ever using a table saw myself I’m pretty sure there were certain parts that used one. Looking for numbers of saw-related injuries in schools I found a pretty in-depth article on Inc.com regarding the SawStop and its creator: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20050701/disruptor-gass.html, though I winced a bit when the article said, “Miraculously, the instant the blade made contact with the wiener, the saw shut down and the blade retracted.”

Reminds me a bit of the recent “Chuck Klosterman’s America” article in Esquire, where he talks about how most things that are necessity have already been invented and the things we’re coming up with now are being invented to solve non-existent problems. Though the SawStop seems much more practical and does put a damper on a multi-billion dollar injury category.

So again, how will I cut my hotdogs? (If you don’t get it, watch the video)

This will be my last post for a few days – I’ve been a little more prolific than I’d first expected, but there’s just so much random (or, miscellaneous, you could say) stuff that comes up in my life that doesn’t have much use on BMOWP that I needed to put it somewhere. I don’t want to hog up the site, so you’ll hear more from the other real contributors instead of my self-promoting ass.

Once a week, at most twice. I’m going to spend the rest of my Misc.Asst. time promoting the site to the hundreds of blog directories in the world. I promise.

Don’t hold me to that, though.

Anyway, you know this site’s about nothing in particular when I bring up Jesse Camp.

Thanks to an opinion piece in The Onion about Jesse Camp — “I Don’t Wonder What Jesse Camp Is Up To These Days” – I decided to do some hack reporting via Google to see what Jesse, a forgotten soul from my first year of college, has been up to.

What I found surprised me.

First, Jesse Camp has been immortalized by someone’s Angelfire.com website – in fact, this is the #1 site, according to Google, for Jesse Camp. My visit to Jesse Camp’s World taught me many interesting things about the former “I Want to be a MTV DJ” winner:

- “Jesse’s Bday is november 4, 1979 - he’s a scorpio.”

- “Jesse loves to draw and paint.”

- “He’s sooo tall and skinny (about 6′4 and 90 lbs, or so they say) that the MTV wardrobe people have trouble finding him cool clothes to wear.”

- “During his first times on the air, Jesse missed his cue because he wasn’t listening to his earpiece.”

I feel like I really know him already. I wanted to learn more, but unfortunately the aqua blue background and multiple Jesse Camp pictures started giving me a headache, so I left the site.

Knowing his desire to be in movies, it was no surprise to run across his Internet Movie Database profile. Camp was in two movies (a cameo in Brittany Spears’ Crossroads, and Skinwalker, a movie by Rob Howard). To see that Camp scored a Rob Howard film was impressive – I loved Cocoon, and A Brilliant Mind was, well, brilliant!

Wait. That’s Ron Howard? Oh. Never mind.

Another site, I Love Jesse Camp, presents to us a list of links that have become broken in the eight years since Camp’s relevancy waned, and the author and creator urges us to “go out and buy his self-titled album, Jesse Camp And the 8th street Kidz, because it is the best album in the world!”

Of course, I had to check the All Music review of Camp’s album. Let’s just say it didn’t get five stars.

There may be more irritating fringe figures in the history of rock & roll, but none are worse than Jesse Camp. A spoiled suburban rich kid who decided that acting as if he were mentally retarded would be wickedly funny, Camp rode MTV’s manipulations into quasi-stardom, including such ridiculous highlights as gracing the cover of Spin magazine. Since he had wormed his way into celebrity, only one thing was left — have him produce something of substance that would sustain his fame. Hence, a recording contract and his debut album, Jesse & the 8th Street Kidz, a record that sounds as if it was released in 1989.

Awesome.

I found one more crazy fan site, My Shrine to Jesse Camp, which seems incomplete. Consisting of one page, My Shrine lists a lot of great Camp stats:

Real Name: Read
Occupation: Read
Birthday: Read
Birth Place: Read
Sign: Read

I don’t know what is meant by “read,” but Jesse seems like a very well rounded person!

Finally, the official word in everything Jesse Camp: The Wikipedia page.

Of course, if you don’t like Jesse, you can just go here.

Jesse was a true star, a star that we’ll never get back, I fear. We miss you, Mr. Camp. You and all of the 8th Street Kidz. Your unending posing and oft-misunderstood voice will never be replaced.

(Thank God.)

I don’t know what’s more surreal – the fact that Stephanie Tanner was addicted to meth, or the fact that the intervention was brought on by Jesse Katsopolis, Danny Tanner, and both halves of Michelle Tanner.

Ex-Full House Star: I Was Hooked on Meth

From peoplenews.com
 
Seeking a “normal” life, (Jodie) Sweetin attended high school and college, and was married by age 20 – to a Los Angeles policeman. But two years ago, feeling bored and being unemployed, she says she began experimenting with drugs and got hooked on meth.

After a three-day “lost” weekend, reportedly followed by an intervention staged by her former Full House costars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, John Stamos and Bob Saget, Sweetin checked herself in to the Promises rehab facility for six weeks of intense treatment.

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Also, while you’re at it, check out this awesome brawl in Toronto: bike courier vs. sandwich litter bandit.  With pictures!