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The new website CommonTreasure promises to provide a very cool way to visualize the federal budget. You can see the big picture, or drill in by, for example, type of spending, year, or agency.

To modern audiences, the laugh track — that cheesy pre-recorded laughter you hear in old sitcoms — is a real head-shaker. But stranger than the existence of the laugh track is the fact that during its apex in the 60′s, one man was responsible for it. Not only that, he built a special machine specifically for the dispensing of canned guffaws: the laff box.

The biggest reason the laugh track caught on was simply because historically, live audiences could not be relied upon to laugh at the correct moment. Other times, the audiences could laugh too long or too loud, sounding unnatural and forced or throwing off the performers’ rhythms.

CBS sound engineer Charley Douglass noticed these, as he put it, “God-awful” responses, and took it upon himself to remedy the situation. If a joke did not get the desired chuckle, Douglass inserted additional laughter.

Douglass eventually spent countless hours extracting laughter, applause, and other reactions (right down to people moving around in their seats) from live soundtracks he had recorded (mainly from the dialogue-less The Red Skelton Show) and then placed the recorded sounds into a huge tape machine, dubbed the “laff box”…

The one-of-a-kind device was tightly secured with padlocks, stood more than two feet tall, and operated like an organ. Douglass used a keyboard to select the style, gender and age of the laugh as well as a foot pedal to time the length of the reaction. Inside the padlocked concoction was an array of recorded chuckles, yocks, and belly laughs; exactly 320 laughs on 32 tape loops, 10 to a loop. Each loop contained 10 individual audience laughs spliced end-to-end, whirling around simultaneously waiting to be cued up.

From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Charley Douglass had a monopoly on the expensive and painstaking “laff” business. By 1960, nearly every prime time show in America was “sweetened” by Douglass’ laff box.

‪A quote from Clay Shirky I heard in an NPR interview the other day led me an interesting talk by Ethan Zuckerman about social media web apps and activism.‬

‪The quote, which is the title of this post, ‬comes from a 2008 talk Zuckerman gave at the O’Reilly Etech conference. Zuckerman points out that the widespread usage of certain internet applications for activities like sharing cute cat photos makes it harder for governments to shut down said applications when they’re used for activist activities.  ‬Says Zuckerman:

With web 2.0, we’ve embraced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. As a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists. There are twin revolutions going on – the ease of creating content and the ease of sharing it with local and global audiences.

Shirkey reiterates the point in his interview: social media platforms and environments that are designed to allow citizens to share anything they like are better environments for political activism than tools that are specifically designed for political activism.
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Zuckerman also puts forth a formula that describes the effectiveness of social media platforms: if a platform isn’t being used for porn, it doesn’t work, and if it isn’t being used for activism, it doesn’t work well.

Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media – it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test – if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.

The whole article is worth a read.‬

An excerpt from the chart.

TLDR: Should you work for free? No, unless it is for your Mom.

Last weekend, we here at DLB decided that we’re going to decrease our post frequency to fewer days per week.  Don’t worry, we’re still committed to quality slogging, but at the moment, we’re all over-committed in other areas, too.

We felt like it was only fair to you, readers, to be as transparent as possible, and to make sure you don’t suspect us of fizzling out like so many blogs do. It starts with less frequent posting, followed inevitably by a post with the obligatory “sorry I haven’t posted in a while” opening (which Cory Arcangel collects at his “Sorry I Haven’t Posted” re-blog). Rarely do blog authors have the foresight of Momus, who, prior to writing his final “This is my last entry” post, posted several weeks worth of re-visits to his musical projects for future visitors to stumble upon.

(Looking at last posts also reminded me how awkward first posts are, too. I re-admired  the collection of first posts Paul collected in our first post.)

Check out this beautiful, sad animated short.

Thanks, Megan.

There is no explanation of the analysis, so it’s difficult to understand the distribution. But I like the presentation, nonetheless.