Baratunde exists at the intersection of comedy, politics and technology. His official duties include Web & Politics editor at The Onion, co-founder of Jack & Jill Politics and host of PopSci's Future Of on Science Channel. Basically, he's a smart, funny, extremely handsome dude.
Featured Videos
Team Baratunde
Management: Liz Gallagher and Meredith Saunders of DGS Talent.
In 2006, Tim said to me, "If you don't get out of Boston and move to L.A. or New York, I'll run you out of town myself." That's not a precise quote, but that was definitely the sentiment. When a bald-headed white guy tells a black guy to leave the city of Boston, the smart black guy leaves. I moved to NYC in August 2007.
Tim's sincere point was that I was ready to move on, and he was right. In part because of his encouragement, I now live in Brooklyn and hold more dream jobs than any one man could ever deserve. Tim's good nature and openness are evident in the way Mottley's operates.
Biking and cycling are in my family. I recently found a contract my mother made me sign when she bought me my first real bike. It was a long time coming, and she didn't want anything to happen to it, so she drafted a contract right in the store essentially saying, "I will take care of this bike and won't let anyone else ride it, or else my mother gets the bike back." Then we both signed it, and she had the bike shop owners sign it too! When I find the note again, I'll scan it and post here.
So many of my childhood adventures are bicycle-based. My sister and I went on an unauthorized bike trip along the Rock Creek Park trail and got injured. When my mother found out, she was furious with my sister, and I had to write one thousand times, "I will not leave the house without my mother's permission." I was probably eight or 9 years old.
There was another time when my mother chaperoned me and my friends on a bike trip from DC to Mount Vernon. My friends though she was so cool, and their parents thought she was insane and superhuman to be willing and able to keep up with us.
Around the 10th grade, my mother and I visited some friends in Colorado Springs and also visited the US Olympic training facility there. I got to walk inside a velodrome and just about fell in love. I actually thought I was gonna go to the Olympics!
The height of my cycling adventures occurred after college, however. I rode from NYC to Boston in the AIDSRide over four days, raised some money, lost some weight and gained mad confidence. It was the most difficult physical challenge I have ever faced.
Wow, I have a lot of bike memories. I'll share more later, but this TV trailer really got me going. This dude, Rahsaan Bahati, has an amazing story. Be sure to check out The Bahati Foundation which is also on Twitter.
Monday this week I sat on a panel called "Real Time" at the Digital Life Design (DLD) conference in Munich Germany. It was an incredible experience overall and with this panel. Moderated by Jeff Pulver, the panel explored the technology, challenges and cool opportunities presented by a web experience that is much more fast-paced than what we've been used to.
By Camping's understanding, the Bible was dictated by God and every word and number carries a spiritual significance. He noticed that particular numbers appeared in the Bible at the same time particular themes are discussed.
The number 5, Camping concluded, equals "atonement." Ten is "completeness." Seventeen means "heaven." Camping patiently explained how he reached his conclusion for May 21, 2011. "Christ hung on the cross April 1, 33 A.D.," he began. "Now go to April 1 of 2011 A.D., and that's 1,978 years."
Camping then multiplied 1,978 by 365.2422 days - the number of days in each solar year, not to be confused with a calendar year. Next, Camping noted that April 1 to May 21 encompasses 51 days. Add 51 to the sum of previous multiplication total, and it equals 722,500.
Camping realized that (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17) = 722,500.
Or put into words: (Atonement x Completeness x Heaven), squared.
"Five times 10 times 17 is telling you a story," Camping said. "It's the story from the time Christ made payment for your sins until you're completely saved.
"I tell ya, I just about fell off my chair when I realized that," Camping said.
Now, I've found that if you count the number of raisins in two scoops of Kellog's Raisin Bran, that figure corresponds to the number of times religious zealots have been wrong about their end of the world predictions, despite their best efforts to substitute faith for reason and science and thus accelerate that end.
Here's a satirical talk I gave on the subject of the Left Behind series many years ago in Boston. Something about this rapture math article made me think of it. Enjoy.
The image above is my new profile picture for a while. Yes, I was in Avatar. This is from the scene with all the heavy-handed moralizing and white man's burden. Hotness.
But seriously, you can grab the original file from Flickr, and put me in crazy ass settings. Put me in a White House state dinner, a field of unobtanium, under the sea, in a war zone, wherever. Post a link to your photo in the comment box below.
With more than two billion links a month passed through its link shortening service, bit.ly can see what is some of the most buzzed about and shared content on the Web. Today, it is exposing the most popular videos people share through bit.ly on Bitly.TV, which is the second project under bit.ly Labs (the super-short j.mp URL shortener was the first).
With bit.ly being the main way people share links on Twitter, Bitly.TV might as well be called Twitter TV. The videos featured are based on bit.ly’s bitrank algorithm. “The algorithm looks at velocity, popularity and persistence,” says general manager Andrew Cohen. “We’re examining the social distribution history of each video to determine what is trending, and to predict what will go viral.”
I especially love the concept of mathematically measuring velocity, popularity and persistence. It treats the data flowing through the web (well, the bitlyfied web) like a flowing liquid. In fact, I wonder if the principal of fluid dynamics (plus network theory) could be applied to build some super geeky model. Wow, that might have been the nerdiest sentence I've ever typed!
Monday, February 8, 2010 at 12:46 
