Month: July 2007
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Harry Potter and the Structural Plagiarism
The Harry Potter books look like they’re pretty strongly in the Fantasy genre: dragons, magic, centaurs, etc. But there’s actually an older genre that the Harry Potter series shares a lot more with, the boarding school novel. Boarding schools are getting pretty rare these days – the idea of sending kids as young as 10-years-old…
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Fighting illegal posters
[A very clever way to fight illegal posters](http://www.boingboing.net/2007/06/08/city_fights_illegal_.html).
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Parking culture
[A fascinating description of the parking culture in New York](http://www.personism.com/2007/06/15/parking/).
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Approval ratings
[US presidential ratings back to 1946](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-presapp0605-31.html).
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Book to movie
[Some authors pick their favourites](http://bookforum.org/inprint/issue=200703&id=257).
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Profit maximisation
Ticket scalping has always puzzled me – why can’t they just get the price right in the first place? [Now TicketMaster has an auction service that might just fix that](http://www.ticketmaster.com.au/ticketauctions).
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Harry Potter and the Book to Film Adaptation
Adapting a book to film is not easy. There are not many succesful examples around, and what few there are (Blade Runner, for instance) drift a very long way from their source material. The five books of the Harry Potter film series so far have been a distinctly mixed bag. Why? In my opinion, because…
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More Wikipedia bias
A nice summary of [the pro-nerd bias of Wikipedia](http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/07/wikipedias-huge-nerd-bias/).
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What explains terrorism?
Bruce Schneir explores [the incompetence of most recent attempted terrorists](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/06/portrait_of_the.html).
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Today’s pretty picture
Pictures made from [the patterns of air traffic movements in the US](http://users.design.ucla.edu/~akoblin/work/faa/index.html).