Link Menagerie

Other interestingness. Salman Rushdie, Bernard-Henri Lévy, et al. offer an anti-Islamism manifesto pleading for "universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas... that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism." (via 3 Quarks Daily). Venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki has been blogging about the prevention of Bozo Explosion; that is, when companies grow too fast and lower the bar to get more people. If you're just starting to get your feet wet in data mining and machine learning (or you'd like to), these slides and tutorials by CMU's Andrew Moore are very well done. Also, I just found a link to videos of Martin Wainwright's class on graphical models (via Machine Learning, etc.). Danny O'Brien's talk Open Source and the State of Evil is hilarious (even if you're not interested in the subject). Links to both the audio and the slides can be found here at Big Picture's Essays and Effluvia. In the strange and interesting eye candy department, Katamari Damacy wallpaper over at Drawn! Celebrity champ Ken Jennings was pretty funny on the Not My Job Quiz on Wait wait... don't tell me last week (there's a link to the quiz on the linked page). What happens when you stun gun yourself? is hilarious (via Big Picture: Essays & Effluvia again). And, this awesome real-life reënactment of the Simpson's intro (via Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant).