Virgil Griffith is in the House
Yesterday my campus hosted hacker Virgil Griffith for a talk entitled "Wikiscanner: My Summer of Dilettante Data-Mining or Making a Corporation-Sized Cannon and Letting the Internet Decide Where to Point It." A summary of Griffith's talk is here.
Highlights of his presentation about database mash-ups included his personal favorites among the embarrassing WikiScanner results, which included two CIA Wikipedia edits, one on "Light Saber Combat" styles and one that was a mini-memoir about black ops during "Black September" in Jordan. Among the work by others that he showcased, I liked the dynamic text of this diagram of a speech by Alberto Gonzales (best viewed in Safari) and Nation under Siege, which combines Google mapping information with elevation data from the USGS, to show what a mere five meters of added sea level would mean for heavily populated coastal communities.
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