This ties in nicely with a few different things, such as Google Opinion Rewards in which you answer a couple of questions and get Google Play store credit. The surveys are infrequent but you're still trading data for credit.

Haggling for your personal data has also become a big part of the NCAA college basketball tournament with this years Warren Buffett / Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Challenge. This goes as far as giving a billion dollars for a perfect bracket, and I believe $100,000 each to the top 20 people. But look at how much personal information everybody that enters is giving away in order to enter:

"Any time you have self-reported data where they fill in their name and address and phone number, email, do they have a house or not, what's the mortgage like, are you looking for a new house, it's extremely valuable," Gupta says. "It's all opt-in at that time, and that's where the value is."

Then factor this by an estimated 9+ million people.

I arrived in town late last night and awaiting me was this smiling face with a blind tasting of four different gins set up:

Each gin was numbered and shuffled around so that myself, cW and Olive had no idea which we were trying. What's really cool is that we all described each one similarly and our choices aligned with the each gin.

cW can report more, but I wanted to share these photos from what was a very fun and very LATE evening. -I don't know how you two do it.

Gin and Aperol.

As a side bit of awesomeness, cW unveiled this mixed CD I made for him and Olive the first time we had them over for dinner years ago. -something that has occurred many times since and shall occur many more times, I hope.

Cheers cW and Olive. Thanks for a grand evening. Who knew 3am would come that quickly!

Logic sounds pretty watertight to me.

Work = tax kickbacks for sluts. Don't know what in that equation leaves you confused.

For the record, Danah Boyd REALLY wants you to buy her book despite the fact that she has nothing to add to the literature. She's taken a handful of interviews and extrapolates them out into a social trend while ignoring legitimate peer-reviewed research by the MIT media lab and others.

And holy fuck there's a lot of words there.

I stand by all my criticisms from the last time this book came up.

1. From a past blog post on The Advanced Apes:

However, when the JWST (successor to the Hubble Space Telescope) is launched in 2018, we will be able to directly detect exoplanets within 25 light-years of our star system. This means that if Kopparapu and others are correct we are going to be able to see images of other earth-like planets in the 2020s.

We'll also be able to get a better understanding of what astronomers currently call the "dark ages" which is a period between the release of the cosmic microwave background radiation and the first galaxies/stars.

2. We have a audio studio recording the sound - but if this one is the best than the sound production is getting worse - because this was the first video we made!

3. Creatively I do the research/writing/storyboard - I discuss this with Lish and then she takes over - asking questions and getting some feedback throughout the animating process - but mostly she just creates her vision of what the script inspires! Then we record the audio last.

Well I hope the new crew goes back and reads those threads in their entirety. That was some of the best back-and-forth that I've ever seen here. Kids needs to get some knowledge.

Death and Life is sadly all too correct. Although it's a retrospective of what's killing the US inner cities, it's also remarkable prescient, as in the 1960s, we hadn't even begun to scratch the surface of urban decline.

Fukkit. Now I gotta share this shit just 'cuz.

The magazine I ordered just arrived. Unfortunately it arrived in Key West and I'm in Canada, but I'll see it eventually. I'm into swapping some time in the future.

I'd like to see something from anyone who got one: a poem of note, perhaps? cW

humanodon

louderwords

To answer your question, I imagine there are several million Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, and that's a very conservative estimate.

Combine that with the fact that 100 billion other galaxies each harbor several million Earth-like planets, and you're left with that familiar feeling of overwhelming smallness that cosmology so typically imparts us with. This is in our observable universe alone; there are likely other galaxies and who-knows-whats outside of our visible horizon in the universe, not to mention the infinite multiverse hypothesis.

I like to say that when it comes to space-time and civilizations, there's too much space and not enough time... that is, the distances separating intelligent life are so daunting that it requires a species to reach a technologically mature level prior to their ability to make contact with other species. It's probably safe to assume that with technological maturity comes ethical maturity, which is why I find the beloved scenario of aliens attacking Earth for its resources pretty outlandish.

Great production, thanks for spreading the gospel of science!