Jay Neff

Everything we do can go so much further if we share. The difference between feeling good and sharing that good feeling with others is huge. Extending our experiences by including others is a huge thing. Think hard about how to share, how to extend, how to include, how to get more people into the blend. It’s the real big part of social media and why we should care, but it’s also important in face-to-face life. We can do a lot to improve the world by getting involved, and then by sharing with others. Getting more people gathered around a project is a wonderful way to be successful.

— Chris Brogan

Twitter: #Inspiration →

Thanksgiving Digg Links:

Top 10 Turkey Disaster Videos

100-Proof Turkey

Talking Turkey: Thanksgiving Facts and Figures (PIC)

5 Awesomely Odd (& Tasty?) Thanksgiving Dishes

The De-Evolution of Thanksgiving Dinner (Pic)

The Secret to Moist Turkey: Brining

7 Creative Ways to Use Your Leftover Turkey

What to Do About the Leftovers?

6 Awesome Thanksgiving Leftover Meal Ideas

5 Surprising Facts About Turkeys

How to make perfect gravy - Thanksgiving food

Top 50 Search Terms for Thanksgiving Recipes [INFOGRAPHIC]

8 Funny Thanksgiving Songs and Videos

21 Classic Thanksgiving TV Episodes, Specials

5 Thanksgiving Apps: Cook that Turkey, Drink that Wine!

Stop Eating Turkeys, Eat the Bald Eagle for Thanksgiving

Roving Gang of Thanksgiving Turkeys Steal Little Boy’s Bike

32 Bizarre and Fascinating Facts about Thanksgiving →

Whenever November hits, you can be sure that a lot of people will be talking turkey. Thanksgiving is one of the country’s most beloved holidays, a four-day weekend of football, food, friends, and family. The annual celebration of the feast between the pilgrims at Plymouth and the Wampanoag tribesmen is eagerly anticipated by kids and adults alike.

Over the course of its history, this cherished national holiday has had more than a few interesting facts pop up about itself. These fascinating pieces of trivia are not only fun to know, but they have the tendency to make you fall in love with the holiday even more. Here are 32 of the more intriguing tidbits about Thanksgiving:

1. Mary Had a Little… Turkey? — Thanksgiving wasn’t always a national holiday. In fact, it was only declared as one in 1863, thanks in large parts to a campaign started by magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, you might know her better as the author of the popular nursery rhyme, “Mary Had a Little Lamb”.

2. Roosevelt’s Mistake — Although the official proclamation was to celebrate Thanksgiving on every fourth Thursday of November, Franklin Delano Roosevelt actually changed the date to the third Thursday of March November from 1939-1941. He made the change on the assumption that the economy would benefit from a longer holiday shopping season. Public outrage, however, soon changed that and Thanksgiving was back on schedule ever since.

3. Franklin’s Fine Feathered Friend — Not everyone was happy when the bald eagle was chosen as the country’s national bird. Benjamin Franklin was among those opposed to the decision, saying that the eagle had a “bad moral character”. Instead, he preferred the turkey, a more respectable bird and a true native of America.

4. That’s a Heavy Meal! —We sure do love our turkey. According to a study done by the National Turkey Foundation, Americans consumed over 690 million pounds of turkey during Thanksgiving in 2007. If that number doesn’t stun you enough, think about this — that is just about the same weight as the entire population of Singapore!

5. Brand New Menu — The original Thanksgiving dinner never had pumpkin pie on the table. In fact, it was a lot different from what we traditionally enjoy each year. The pilgrims and Native Americans at the first dinner feasted on wild fowl and venison, along with more exotic seafood like lobster, eel, seal, and swan! Can you imagine stuffing a seal?

Check out the rest at StarCostumes

Find Movies Playing Nearby With Google Mobile Search

via XKCD

Roku Launches Channel Store →

Roku owners will now be able to get content on their big screen TV from:

blip.tv: web shows
Facebook photos: see yours and your friend’s pics on your TV, or use…
Flickr: for photos, if you prefer
FrameChannel: lets you view photos and updates from your social networks
MediaFly: web shows and podcasts
MobileTribe: another service to connect you to multiple social media sites
Motionbox: for personal video sharing
Pandora: lets you listen to Internet radio
Revision3: original web shows like Diggnation
TWiT.TV: Leo Laporte’s raft of tech-related content

Power-ups for your Firefox browser →

Greasemonkey is a plugin for the Firefox web browser. It allows you to change how your favorite pages behave and look. There are many scripts that have already been written, and if you know javascript you can easily create your own! Userscripts is a repository to download and install Greasemonkey scripts.

Some of my favorites:

Twitter Remove Non-Followers

Realtime Twitter Search Results on Google

Twitter Friends Bio at a Glance

Facebook Mass Accept Requests

A complete list of useful Greasemonkey scripts I’ve bookmarked can be found here

Six Crazy Internet Money Making Ideas (That Worked)

This Week in Startups

Jason’s guest on this week’s show was everyone’s favorite Twittering wine guy, Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary has a new book out (Crush It!) detailing how to turn your passions into businesses and achievements. Of course Gary and Jason are both very passionate speakers (and very engaging) so check out the full episode to see this amazing level of energy.

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose

In this talk from FOWA London (bit.ly/fowa-london-09) Kevin shares the secrets to digg.com and wefollow.com explosive user growth. He covers nine unique strategies that turn passive users into passionate advocates.

You’ll learn:

1. How to encourage users to tweet about your app
2. The concept of “The Circle of Life” in web apps and how it affects you
3. Growing your userbase: What worked and what didn’t for digg, WeFollow and Pownce
4. And more …

Farkle on Facebook →

I’ve been spending some time on the facebook application “Farkle”. It’s a ridiculously simple dice game, but I’ve found it to be excellent to play while you’re doing something else that demands less than your full attention - watching videos, listening to podcasts, etcetera. It’s also nice to post the highest score among your friends each week, although I don’t have as much raw time as some of my friends and, consequently, less chance for luck to feed me great scores. Despite that, I’ve done some looking at the odds and kept track round-by-round of some of these games. I have found a handful of rules that I now play by, and wanted to share some tips and tricks and odds here.

Rule 1 - Be willing to leave points on the table. Just because there are two fives or you rolled three twos, don’t cash them if you don’t have to. The more dice you leave on the table, the better chance of surviving subsequent rounds and rolling the high-scoring threes of a kind. I see this one violated all the time.

Rule 2 - When you have 4-6 die to roll, it’s about points. When you have 1-3 die to roll, it’s about damage control. All of the higher scoring combinations require three or more die, and your best chance of a farkle is under three die.

Rule 3 - Related to Rule 1, only take three twos if you can’t avoid it, it clears all 6 die, or you are ready to cash out. The points are not worth taking the dice and the potential for higher scores off the table. Also, if you roll six dice and have three threes, don’t take it if you can cash out something else instead. Odds are you’ll make up the 300 points by continuing to roll.

In my sample of 100 rounds of farkle, the highest single round I scored was a 3550. The lowest, naturally, was a farkle, and I scored 39 of those. Following my own rules (which I developed after examining this set) would undoubtedly have reduced those a bunch.

I found some great odds posted at farklefun.com, which is intended more for a non-facebook version of the game. Still, its odds are useful:

Odds of getting AT LEAST one 1 or 5 with one roll of…

• 6 dice: 91% chance you will get a 1 or 5 (so, one in eleven 6 dice rolls will Farkle)
• 5 dice: 87% chance you will get a 1 or 5
• 4 dice: 80% chance you will get a 1 or 5
• 3 dice: 70% chance you will get a 1 or 5
• 2 dice: 55% chance you will get a 1 or 5
• 1 dice: 33% chance you will get a 1 or 5 (so, 2 of 3 one dice rolls will Farkle)

With 6 dice:

• Odds of getting a straight, is 1 in 65 or 1.5 %
• Odds of getting 3 pairs: 9.7 % (or 1 in 10.3 rolls)
• Odds of getting six of one specific value: 1 in 46656. (I.e., odds of getting 111111)
• Odds of getting ANY six of a kind: 1 in 7776 (I.e., 222222 OR 333333 OR 555555,etc)
• Odds of ANY triple: 55%, or more than 1 in 2.
• Odds of SPECIFIC triple (555, for example) is 9.3% or 1 in 11 
• Odds of getting 2 triples (333666 or 222555, etc): 1 in 62 or 1.6 %
• Odds of any 4 of kind: 6% or about 6 in 100, or 1 in 17 
• Odds of any 5 of a kind: 1 in 216 rolls or 0.5 %

With these stats in mind, I’ve developed a few other rules:

• Always roll six dice. My current tolerance for pain starts making exceptions around 1400. Much beyond that, and I’d prefer to bank than take the chance of farkling with six die. Still, you have less than a 9% chance of farkling. You also have a 1 in 11 chance of a straight, a 1 in 10 chance of three pair, and a 1 of 2 chance of getting three of a kind. It seems that high scores are directly proportional to the number of times you get to roll six dice.
• Always roll five dice unless your score is over 1250. (when you have less than a 13% chance of farkle)
• Always roll four dice unless your score is over 1100. (You have less than a 20% chance of farkling, and a score higher than 80% of my set of rounds.)

After three, it’s damage control:

• Roll three dice with 450 points, but bank points at 500.
• Roll two dice with 400 points, but bank points at 450.
• Roll one dice with less than 400 points. Bank points at 400. The rationale is that you have little to lose and a 1/3 shot to roll six dice again.

Naturally, these strategies should lead you to an average round of around 600, which should score you 6000 in a ten-round game. Luck should make that vary anywhere between 3500 and 8500 without much trouble. If you’re after a much higher score, however, you’re going to have to push these chances harder and be willing to accept more Farkles.

If you have corrections or other thoughts on these strategies, please comment!

via ChrisDillingham.com

Links:

Farkle Score Sheet

Play Farkle (Not on Facebook)

10 Things About Google You May Not Have Known →

1. The name Google is a spelling error. The founders of the site, Larry page and Sergey Brin, thought they were going for ‘Googol.’ Googol is the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, Mathematics and the Imagination by Kasner and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web. Initially, Larry and Sergey Brin called their search engine BackRub, named for its analysis of the of the web’s “back links.” The search for a new name began in 1997, with Larry and his officemates starting a hunt for a number of possible new names for the rapidly improving search technology.
2. The reason the google page is so bare is because the founder didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just kept sitting staring at the screen, waiting for the rest to appear. To solve the particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as an end of page marker.
3. Google started as a research project by Larry page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 and 23 years respectively. Google’s mission statement is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
   The company’s first office was in a garage, in Menlo Park, California. Google’s first employee was Craig Silverstein, now Google’s director of technology. The basis of Google’s search technology is called PageRank that assigns an “importance” value to each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that is not why it is called PageRank. It is actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.
4. Google receives about 20 million search queries each day from every part of the world, including Antarctica and Vatican. You can have the Google homepage set up in as many as 116 different languages — including Urdu, Latin, Cambodia, Tonga, and Yoruba. In fact, Google has the largest network of translators in the world.
5. In the earliest stage of Google, there was no submit button, rather the Enter key needed to be pressed.Google has banned computer-generated search requests, which can sop up substantial system resources and help unscrupulous marketers manipulate its search rankings.
6. The Google’s free web mail service Gmail was used internally for nearly two years prior to launch to the public. The researchers found out six types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these six.The free e-mail service recently changed its name for new UK users. Following a trademark dispute with a London-based Independent International Investment Research, the mail account has been renamed Google Mail.
7. It would take 5,707 years for a person to search Google’s 3 billion pages. The Google software does it in 0.5 seconds.Google Groups comprises more than 845 million Usenet messages, which is the world’s largest collection of messages or the equivalent of more than a terabyte of human conversation.
8. The logos that appear on the Google homepage during noteworthy days and dates and important events are called Google Doodle. The company has also created an online museum where it has all the logos it has put on various occasions so far.Dennis Hwang, a Korean computer artist in the United States, is the guy behind these witty Doodles. Hwang has been drawing the face of Google for over two years.
9. You have heard of Google Earth , but not many know there is a site called Google Moon, which maps the Lunar surface.
   Google Moon is an extension of Google Maps and Google Earth that, courtesy of NASA imagery, enables you to surf the Moon’s surface and check out the exact spots that the Apollo astronauts made their landings
10. Keyhole, the satellite imaging company that Google acquired in October 2004 was funded by CIA. Keyhole’s technology runs Google’s popular program Google Earth that allows users to quickly view stored satellite images from all around  the world.

via ruhanirabin

Inspirational videos to supercharge your day →

Need to jumpstart your day? Mashable’s rounded up seven inspirational videos. As a taste, here are two of them.

Jason McElwain: the Autistic Basketball player

How a blind teenager sees with sound

Click over to see all seven.

Here’s a firehose of inspiration.