333 Great books for kids is one of a dozen new interactive mosaics I’ve added to my coverpop website. You can find the others by noodling around on the menus on the right, after you go there. More books, more DVDs, more clothes & accessories.

All the amazon-powered mosaics on the site are now set up to update weekly, so the items shown within will be more timely.

While we’re on the subject of kids – I’ve also added some kid-friendly Sudoku puzzles (which I call “Kidoku”) to the puzzle collection.

Enjoy!

You asked for ’em, you got ’em. In addition to my new collection of 3,200 Jigoku puzzles, I have added 4,800 Kakuro puzzles and 1,600 Krypto Kakuro puzzles to my collection of free printable e-books.

For those of you new to Kakuro puzzles, I have also added an excerpt from my book, Masters Kakuro, which explains how to solve these addictive puzzles.

Enjoy!

I’m making some new varieties of Sudoku puzzles which will be added to the puzzle pages soon.

Here is a preview of my new Jigoku (also known as Comparison or “Greater Than”) Sudoku puzzles:

• Challenging
• Tough
• Super Tough
• Insane

I call these Jigoku because of their resemblence to Jigsaw puzzles. Jigoku also means hell in Japanese, and you will indeed find
these puzzles more hellishly difficult than regular Sudoku – especially if you haven’t done them before. A tip: Look for possible 1s or 9s first.

UPDATE: These puzzles were updated since I first posted them on Saturday.

I’ve been trawling thru the leaked AOL data with some perl scripts and came up with a few statistics.

The data contains search records for about 658 million users collected over a three month period from March to May 2006. According to AOL spokesperson Andrew Weinstein, this represents 0.33% of the search traffic conducted through AOL over that period. My own informal test indicates the actual fraction may be higher. The leaked data shows 30 visits to Krazydad over that period, and I actually had about about 480 visits from AOL search engines according to my web logs. Assuming that my web logs only account for half the traffic, this would still indicate that the leaked AOL data represents 3.0% of all AOL search traffic during that period.

Percentage of users who searched for, or landed on Google: 17%

Percentage of users who searched for, or landed on Yahoo: 18%

This is interesting because the number of users who actually searched for Google is about 3 times higher than Yahoo (you can see a list of the top 500 search terms here). A lot of folks are landing on Yahoo hosted sites without actually searching for Yahoo.

Percentage of users who searched for, or landed on AOL: 13%, Myspace: 11%, EBay: 10%, Amazon: 8.2%, Flickr: 1.2%, YouTube: 0.7%.

Percentage of users who did at least one search for porn, or visited a porn site: 20%.

This real number for this last figure may be a bit higher, since it’s difficult to suss out all the creative ways that users search for porn. I used a Bayesian filtering technique to come up with a list of likely keywords and sites, and then searched on users who searched for at least one of the candidate keywords or visited one of the candidate sites. Interestingly, the site most indicative that a user didn’t search for porn was a savings and loan.

Percentage of users who searched for “cream pie”: 0.2%

Percentage of users who searched for “cream pie” and actually wanted a recipe: 0.1%

Two weeks ago, AOL mistakenly released about 3 months worth of search logs. In the data, the user-ids were replaced with numbers, in an attempt to “anonymize” the data. Despite this anonymization, the release of this data clearly violated the privacy of a great number of AOL users, and AOL quickly stopped publishing the data, but by then it was too late. The cat was out of the bag.

The data can still be downloaded via BitTorrent, and you can sift thru the data using websites like this one and this one.

Other websites started publishing amusing and bizarre excerpts from the logs.

The data in these logs is fascinating and has already taught me a few things.

1) Most AOL users are noobs. Okay, I already knew this. I mean, c’mon: all the grandmas and grandpas in my family stopped using AOL over two years ago, so clearly anyone who is still using it has got to be pretty clueless (sorry grandma!). The logs make this pretty apparent: they are chock full of stuff like this:

2) AOL search isn’t very good. Okay, I knew this already too. The number one thing that AOL users type into their search box is the name of a better search engine. Google is #1, and Yahoo is #2. Clearly, these users are looking for something better, but just don’t quite know how to obtain it. Also there are are a very high number of searches in which the first 7-8 results are deemed to be insufficient, and the user continues looking.

3) “Anonymizing” web logs by using numbers of instead of user-ids does little to protect the privacy of the users. The New York Times very quickly sussed out the identity of one of these users, and I am sure others will follow. A search of phrases like “my password” reveals all kinds of potentially damaging stuff.

4) Anonymized search logs, in addition to not protecting privacy very well,are highly entertaining. It is incredibly easy to find search histories that read like dime store pulp fiction. Consider the following excerpts from user 14162375, which I dug up by searching for the phrase “kill my”.

A good way to find salacious material in this database is to search for phrases like “clear all” or “erase history” which almost always follow searches the user would prefer to cover up.

Anonymous User 4320454, is one of a handful of users who attempted to clear their search history by typing “clear all searches”, in this case because he had been searching for “how many days or hours for cocaine to leave the system to be clean for drug urine test for employment”. It didn’t take.

Ohio user 4838451, interrupted a long night of searching for Fran Drescher porn to search for Senator Mike Dewine, followed by a few more porn searches and then “clear all searches”. It didn’t take.

The majority of folks visiting this website for puzzles prefer the easy and intermediate puzzles. However, there is a small but vocal contingent campaigning for hard puzzles. Yes, even harder than my “super toughs”. So, I’ve added a 6th difficulty level, insane, which includes the puzzles that I omit from the super-tough class as basically being “unsolveable”. I’m not even going to pretend that you can use basic logic to solve these ones. It’s guesswork and trial-and-error all the way.

Hey masochists! You can get your insane puzzles right here.

Enjoy!

The Old Time Candy website has over 200 kinds of classic candy, many of which are hard to find at the local candy store.

I created a new coverpop mosaic showing all their selections, and you can play with it here.

I used YouTube’s APIs to help make this graph. It shows thumbnails of all the videos that match the tag “joke” which were submitted
over the past year. There are about 7800 of them. I can’t show all the thumbnails because they are just too many of them. I used ‘joke’ as a kind of random sample.

The thumbnails create a kind of heat signature which shows the increase in activity in YouTube in the last few months. Vertically, the thumbnails are positioned by the hour of the day they were uploaded, and horizontally by the day of the year.

Here’s a similar graph showing videos that match the tag “wedding”:

The bright spot in November are a number of similar looking videos all from the same wedding:

PaViral’s Wedding

Finally, here is a graph showing the more popular tag, “cat”, which has over 33,300 videos.

Here’s a new coverpop I just made of 1512 of the most popular (according to various criteria) videos on YouTube™.

The videos are arranged horizontally by the date they were uploaded, and vertically by the color of the thumbnail. Mouse over a thumbnail to see more info about the video. Click to play the video in a pop-up window (you may need to bypass pop-up detection for this to work).

Enjoy!

After watching seasons one and two of HBO’s excellent series Carnivale on DVD, I wanted to learn more about carnivals and circuses in the early 20th century, so I picked up four different books on the subject. Here is my report.

Mark Sloan’s Wild Weird and Wonderful, The American Circus 1901-1927 is my favorite book of the bunch. This is a large coffee-table book containing a collection of amazing photographs taken by F.W. Glasier, a commercial portrait photographer who photographed all the circuses that came through northern Massachusetts for the first third of the twentieth century. Glasier is not a well known photographer, and his photographs do not appear to be available online.

Opening this book made my jaw drop. There are two-page spreads that show panoramic views of huge circuses unloading from trains, with endless queues of elephants. Incredible portraits of animal handlers, troops of period clowns, freaks and coochie girls. The photographs are printed large enough that you can just get lost in them, and there is an amazing amount of period detail lurking in the corners.

A.W. Stencell’s Seeing is Believing, America’s Sideshows is the second standout book in the group. The author of this book is a 40 year veteran of the carnival and circus business. He writes about the lost art of sideshows, the entertainments which once were the mainstay of the midway, but which gradually supplanted by thrill rides in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The book is generously illustrated, telling and illustrating the origins and development of all different kinds of shows, from ten-in-ones, to faked devil fish, animal shows, peep shows, torture shows, crime shows, motorcycle stunts, monkey races, minstrel shows, and pickled punks, to name just a few.

Stencell omits the Coochie and Burlesque shows, which he covers in his other book Girl Show: Into the Canvas World of Bump and Grind, which sounds excellent as well.

Janet M. Davis’s The Circus Age, Culture & Society Under the American Big Top is, as it’s title and publisher (the University of North Carolina) would suggest, a more academic look at the influence of the American Circuses on popular culture. There are not too many illustrations, but the text is well researched and thoughtful, covering such issues and class and gender.

Francine Hornberger, the author of Carny Folk, The World’s Weirdest Sideshow Acts reveals in the introduction that she was inspired to research the subject after watching HBO’s Carnivale (just as I was). The book is a compendium of performers, mostly famous freaks, such as Johnny Eck and Cheng and Eng Bunker. It is cheaply printed, and the illustrations did not reproduce particularly well. Much of this information is available elsewhere, in similar books.

UPDATE: Lily pointed me to some very cool photos by Mark Ellen Mark, of Indian, Mexican and Vietnamese circuses (Circi?)