The most comprehensive list I’ve found so far on Twitter accounts for our Federal Level government officials…from the President down to each member of the House of Representatives.  Here are a few examples…

National Science Foundation: NSF
Environmental Protection Agency: EPA
Department of State: America.gov
Department of Health & Human Services: Food & Drug Administration: FDA Recalls
Department of Agriculture: Food Safety Information Center
U.S. Geological Survey: Earthquake & Tsunami Warning

For the whole list, visit:  http://twitter.pbworks.com/USGovernment

I was a guest on Chris Matthieu’s Rubyology podcast today.   We talked about the upcoming AdhearsionConf 2010 in San Francisco August 14-15 2010. (among other things)…

You can jump to the Rubyology site or listen below:

 

 Rubyology 86: Adhearsion: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The above picture represents the amount of junk food one child in the UK eats in a year.  One in Three kids in the UK between the ages of 5-13 is already considered obese.  It’s worse in the United States.

Junk food mountain: The astonishing amount of rubbish one child eats every year | Mail Online.

For all my fellow Firefly fans out there…enjoy:

YouTube – Firefly Intro… The Awesome Edition.

I was recently introduced to an outfit called Klout, a San Francisco-based startup that measures social influence on Twitter.   How do they measure social influence?  I have no idea.  I just I know I want it, and lots of it.

Apparently someone else agrees, because investors pumped $1.5 million into Klout in April of this year.   Launched in 2008, Klout evaluates your tweets and those of your connections using some magical algorithms and pixie dust.

Upon this, they’ve built an API which is now used by several other third-party Twitter tool makers including CoTweet, HootSuite, and  Tweetup.  What do they use it for?  I’m sure I don’t want to know.

When I first was shown Klout, a co-worker was showing it to me and he typed in his Twitter handle… he came out with a Klout score of 31.  Then he typed in another co-worker’s handle…he was a 20.  Then he typed in mine…6.

6????

MF’N 6????

You bet I was pissed.  Who were these Klout Krouts anyway with their stupid made up Social Influence Meter???  Don’t they know who I am???

Of course, I let this stew for a couple days and then returned to the scene of the insult:  Klout.com.  When I checked my score, it was a more respectable 19.  Not sure what happened in the interim, but I did notice that the site had cached an older version of my Twitter Bio so perhaps they had older data.  The newer number was accompanied with my newer Twitter Bio.  Whatever the cause, I was certainly happy to have more Klout.

Anyway, while I was writing this I looked at the Klout website and noticed they have some featured users displayed on their home page…two of which I happen to follow on Twitter.  One is Lee Stranahan, (@Stranahan), a filmmaker, blogger and contributor to the Huffington Post who I met through Jeff Pulver’s 140 Character’s Conference.  Stranahan has a Klout Score of 49.

What’s funny is that on another tab on the same Klout homepage was the Klout Score of the lovely and talented singer/songwriter/vaudevillian Amanda Palmer, (@AmandaPalmer), who Stranahan interviewed very recently (last night I think??) and who also happens to have a much more appropriate Klout Score:

I wonder if writing a blog post about Klout will increase my Klout?

Asshat of the day award goes to Terry Savage, a columnist for the Chicago Sun Times, who yelled at some little girls who were giving away free beverages at their lemonade stand, ostensibly offending Savage’s perception of how to run a proper lemonade business.

“No!” I exclaimed from the back seat. “That’s not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They’re giving away their parents’ things — the lemonade, cups, candy. It’s not theirs to give.”

I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.

“You must charge something for the lemonade,” I explained. “That’s the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs — how much the lemonade costs, and the cups — and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money.”

You can’t blame Savage…she is just a cog in the wheel of a larger market.  BP was just trying to make more lemonade in the Gulf after all, right?

Free lemonade stands aren’t what’s wrong with America, it’s asshats like Terry Savage who yell at little girls from the air conditioned comfort of her BP-Oil chugging SUV.

There is no ‘free’ lemonade :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Terry Savage.

The Pythagoreans were a persecuted sect, sometimes violently persecuted.  They were a threat to traditional religion, like many new sects. Plato’s teacher, Socrates, was famously executed for religious heresy.

“The Pythagoreans realized that when we hear beauty and music, when we hear notes harmonizing, that’s because the notes have simple ratios, like 1:2 or 3:4. So the beauty of music is direct perception of the mathematical order underlying the world. They worshipped that mathematics.”

“Simply put, they were threatening to overthrow the gods on Olympus and put numbers and mathematics in its place. Prior to Socrates being executed, a number of other philosophers were banished or fled because of threats to themselves. It was dangerous in those days to be a philosopher.”

Now it appears that Plato may have hidden secret musical message in his writings.  Read More:  A Musical Message Discovered In Plato’s Works : NPR.

“The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it.

“The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.

“They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

THE INTERNET IS COMPLETELY OVER?  Funny, that’s what I thought about Prince when I first heard “Bat Dance”.

via Prince – world exclusive interview: Peter Willis goes inside the star’s secret world – mirror.co.uk.

Of course, Kevin Smith already outed Prince’s batshit crazy…

More and more people are running their businesses, quite successfully, as solo founders.  If you happen to follow the world of startups, especially web startups, you’ll know that venture capital is undergoing a change and more startups are being run on less initial investment and that the size of each investment is getting smaller.  More:Royal We: Single Founder Startups | Ginzametrics.