What would Supreme Court originalism look like in other disciplines? This delightful little post is sort of an originalist approach to geography.

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This BoingBoing post by Cory Doctorow briefly introduces a site/tool created as a result of a tweet he sent just a few months ago.

Mekki and a friend ran with an idea I tweeted last October: “Who’s got a web-based service that will take a huge pastebomb (300K of text) and smarten all quotes, turn — into em-dash, etc?” They created something called Cleantext. I just pasted in the entire text of my next short story collection (written as plain ASCII in a text editor) and out came something that was beautifully formatted and ready to be pasted into a layout program for further massaging. I’m delighted by this — how useful!

I’m really excited by this: it shows that there are people who can execute on an idea and create something. I’m also very encouraged that Cory doesn’t seem interested in getting his “piece of the action.” Of course, given his writing and his recent approach to publishing his books as free ebooks, that’s about what you’d expect.

Congratulations to Cleantext and a hearty well-done to Cory for providing inspiration without no strings attached. Even better, he just gave this site scads of good great word of mouth.

Maybe I’ll finally break out my comp (fka Senior Comprehensive Project) or my not-quite-finished note from law school and give this a try.

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I started the orphan ideas category of posts because I wanted to accomplish three goals: first, get these ideas out of my mental baggage list, second, maybe give someone else a little spark, and third, maybe, just maybe, see something get built or done.

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Create personalized stock portfolios for savings or profit

23 February 2010

One of my favorite sources for inspiration is Springwise. The latest issue spat out a few interesting ideas.  Mybrandz (perhaps seeking to be the “Bratz” of the investment world) is a stock portfolio (not an actual mutual fund that you can invest in but rather a faux fund) of “brands people love.”
Basically, these folks made [...]

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Fauxtivation

27 January 2010

What is Fauxtivation?
It’s hiding the ball from your customers to try to create a motivation to engage with your company that they wouldn’t naturally have, i.e., don’t need and don’t want.
Example: “emailing” travel reservation info that consists of a link to a website rather than, you know, the actual itinerary info. (Tip: that means you, [...]

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Sites must create value for users

26 December 2009

http://unclutterer.com/2009/03/30/swap-baby-goods/
This site recommendation falls into my category of “they have a word for that: it’s called Craigslist.” Seriously, there are too many “me-too” sites on the web that don’t add sufficient value to really, deep down, justify the cognitive overhead of keeping track of something new. I’m not saying that a new social network site [...]

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Elsewhere: personal financial statements

6 December 2009

Posted a quick reply about personal financial statements to one of Fred Wilson’s thoughts about the importance of saving and investing.
As I think about it now, I suppose I should edit to make that point clearer. But it’s there even without the keywords. I’ll explore this framework further on Simplifying Complexity if there’s interest: are [...]

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New page of observations

27 November 2009

Following in the footsteps of giants, I’ve decided to create a separate page to track my notes on shared items from Google Reader. One reason for this is to encourage me to comment on GReader items rather than save them until I have time to write full-fledged blog posts. The only issue I see with [...]

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More fodder for evidence-based diets

24 November 2009

UPDATE: In a post on evidence-based diets, I wrote about the potential benefits to be gained if private chef, meal replacement, or even frozen dinner companies would structure their meals around evidence of benefits from particular dietary combinations, which could in turn be tailored to customer demographics: Garanimals for your tummy.
This WSJ article on nutrients [...]

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Definitions: gwitter

9 November 2009

gwitter
A Gwitter is someone who ghost-writes twitter updates for a celebrity who (A) can’t be bothered, (B) can’t be trusted not to go “off-message,” or (C) can’t type as many as 140 characters on a phone.
Dude, President Obama just sent a tweet about Autism Awareness!
Sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s just his gwitter.
UPDATE: So [...]

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Project: I Vote Autism

29 October 2009

In this earlier post on single-issue voting, I described the genesis of my new political strategy/philosophy. So what? My goal is to create a framework for very specific, detailed information about politicians and voting records at all levels of government: federal, state, and local. We need to track not just voting on new laws but [...]

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