The photos coming out of Haiti depict an apocalyptic nightmare. Yesterday I donated some money to Partners in Health, and I hope you do too. The website of Oakland's Food First has a post on organization to whom you should send some money, in case you want to donate but are not sure where to send your money. American Red Cross might be a good organization to contribute to as well. Do it soon. Read more here.

(a.k.a. Doctors Without Borders) has deployed doctors and emergency temporary hospitals. It takes them at least

. These temporary hospitals are important because, after the initial death toll of 40 to 50 thousand people, some estimate that another 50,000 will die due to poor medical capacity.

Perhaps because of my extreme dissatisfaction with the state of popular American music circa 2009, I have been going back a few decades to remind myself that it could be. Here's a great clip from the band Bad Brains, which pretty much invented hardcore punk music in the late 1970s. It's probably accurate to say that bands like Metallica, Slayer, and even the Beastie Boys (which started out as a hardcore band) wouldn't be quite the same without the influence of Bad Brains.

"Trip my World" is a news and photo browser that Abe Coffman, Dhawal Mujumdar, and I made to demonstrate search dimensionality reduction based on time and date. Ok, Abe did most of the work. I am supposed to add the Twitter API to it, but I have been too lazy busy. Anyway, try it out here - you will love it.

Random: After reading a few pages from "Introduction to Algorithms," (by Cormen et al.) I wrote this little code snippet to remind myself how to do a recursive quicksort! I think it is something like this... (O{n lg n} best case, right?)

#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
"""
quickSort.py
"""

def quickSort(unsortedList):
	
	# if the length of the unsorted list is less than one
	# return it
	if len(unsortedList) <= 1:
		return unsortedList

	# Otherwise, do this...
	
	# Choosing roughly the middle element as the pivot
	pivotIndex = int(len(unsortedList)/2)
	print "Pivot Index " + str(pivotIndex)
	
	pivotElement = unsortedList.pop(pivotIndex)
	print "Pivot Element " + str(pivotElement)
	
	# Lists to hold greater than and less than elements
	lessThanList = []
	greaterThanList = []
	
	# For each item, place into a 
	for item in unsortedList:
		if item <= pivotElement:
			lessThanList.append(item)
		else:
			greaterThanList.append(item)

	print "Less Than Array is: "
	print lessThanList
	
	print "Greater Then Array is: "
	print greaterThanList
	print

	# Create a new list to concat sublists
	sortedList = []
	
	if len(lessThanList) > 0:
		sortedList.extend(quickSort(lessThanList))
	
	sortedList.append(pivotElement)
	
	if len(greaterThanList) > 0:
		sortedList.extend(quickSort(greaterThanList))
	
	return sortedList
	

def main():
	myList = [99,87,234,4,5,222,5,7]
	mySortedList = quickSort(myList)

	print "The final, sorted list is... "
	print mySortedList

if __name__ == '__main__':
	main()

This blog post on the EFF website quotes Cory Doctorow, who discusses ways in which Digital Rights Management (DRM) destroys the access to books that we enjoy today:

Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this.

It has been interesting to follow media coverage of James Cameron's Avatar. Clearly a technically groundbreaking film, reviews of the plot have often focused on similarities to the narrative of movies such as "Dances with Wolves." Now that the shock of the incredible 3D effects have worn off a bit, more bloggers are taking a deeper look at the meaning of the narrative...

Mikhail Lyubansky posted a review about "The Racial Politics of Avatar": Extending the multicultural theme still further, I believe that, among other things, Avatar is a quintessential immigration story. At the start of the film, Jake was obviously human, but he felt betrayed by humanity, which withheld from him the technology to restore his legs. He came to Pandora for a new start, not knowing what he'd find but prepared to embrace something different. I think that when he arrived on Pandora, he was already "empty" or open. He didn't at first have any allegiance to the Na'vi, but nor did he have much loyalty to his country, certainly not to its corporate and military face. The article has many links to other opinions about the portrayal of race in the film, read more.

Kottke thinks that the Na'vi lifestyle contrasted tremendously with their knowledge and access to technology: In Avatar, the Na'vi are portrayed as a Stone Age tribe, living in relatively small groups and essentially ignorant or uninterested in technology beyond simple knives and bows. But the Na'vi are also very physically capable, obviously very intelligent, aware of their global environment, well-nourished, healthy, omnivorous, adaptive, and even inventive. Read more.

Rob Beschizza on "What storytelling risks could Avatar have taken?": The Colonel knows he's lost, after all, and getting irony thrown in his face offers him a chance to choose his own doom--without any need for the leaden pathos that often comes with such turnarounds. Consider the many suggestions that Quaritch is the only human on Pandora to feel at home there in his own body--he is much more like the Na'vi than he'd like to admit. Read more.

Jon Gossier, founder of Appfrica, created this visualization depicting, among other things, the amount of people alive versus the amount who have ever lived. He writes:

We know all too well that with the current estimated 3 billion people living in poverty, things will be a lot worse for the vast majority of the unborn, as many of them will be born into conditions of ‘extreme poverty’.

Read more here.

Check out my latest blog post on Programmable Web about Twitter's new Lists API.

This Brand Freak post is already pretty old, but I just came across it today. I recall the day before the Nook was announced, Gizmodo posted something about how the name was horrible, but they were embargoed against reporting it to the public. Since then, I have often pondered the name, despite all of the positive media attention (by the way... somebody buy me a Nook).

Here is an excerpt from the Brand Freak article: "Danny Altman, creative director of the naming firm A Hundred Monkeys, admits Nook does sound a bit dirty, but he thinks it's a good name overall. "We think it's the top of all e-reader names out there so far," he said. He points out that a reading nook "is a place where you can be in your own little world." John Hoeppner, president of NameQuest, also liked the name, calling it a "short, easy-to-spell, one-syllable word that will be memorable to consumers," though he noted it may have more appeal to consumers over 30, as younger ones may snicker at the "nookie" connotation."

Whether or not you think the Nook brand is a FAIL or not, there is worse. I had never heard of some of the other eReaders mentioned in this post... the Ectaco jetBook? The eSlick? Wha? Read the whole post here!

I just found this interesting blog post on ESPN article about the a legal case between Chris Bosh and a domain name squatter company known as "Hoopology.com" (which now redirects to a press release about the case on the website of Bosh's lawyers). Basically, Bosh wanted the rights to "chrisbosh.com," but the domain was registered by the owners of Hooplogy. Bosh won the case, but along with his own domain name, he was also granted ownership of about 800 other domain names that represented celebrity names of athletes and entertainers.

The New York Times' Howard beck also covered the story. He writes:

A federal judge in California has ordered a cybersquatter to surrender chrisbosh .com to Bosh, the Toronto Raptors forward, settling a lawsuit filed last year. But the court went a step further — or several hundred steps. Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of United States District Court ordered Luis Zavala and his company, Hoopology.com, to release some 800 illegally registered domain names to Bosh.

Bosh and "Max Deal" released a pdf of every squatted domain, with instructions on how to claim domains registered on behalf of the trademark owners:

Chris Bosh and Max Deal offer the return of the domain name free of charge as a courtesy to the celebrity named herein, provided that such person promptly requests the return of such domain name in writing from Max Deal.

Domain name squatting in the United States is forbidden by the provision of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA), 15 USC §1125. Martin Samson has written a good summary of this law, which is posted here. He writes:

If your mark is "famous," you can prevail not only if the domain name at issue is identical or confusingly similar to your mark, but also if it is "dilutive." "Generic" terms are never protected as marks — think here of the term "baseball" as a mark for the sale of baseballs. The final element you need to establish is the most difficult to demonstrate, namely the motivation for defendant's conduct.

On behalf of celebrity athletes everywhere, I offer my thanks, Chris Bosh.