parker higgins

I wrote about some of the things I learned from @choochoobot’s development (and popularity) for Source for its annual #botweek. It’s a little strange writing about programming projects, because I still feel very inexperienced, but I think there are some easy lessons to pull out here.

To my tremendous honor, Sarah’s Motherboard article about instilling ethics in Twitter bots quotes me in a few places. In particular, it recounts a story I hadn’t told publicly about a bot I didn’t make.

It’s a goofy idea: After a few happy-hour drinks on Thursday, I decided to write a little Python script to make emoji “trains” of random length, combining the steam engine with the two styles of rail cars. Once I got that running, I remembered reading about Emma Winston’s “Tiny Gallery” bot, which tweets little scenes of generative emoji “art galleries.”

After years of toying with the idea, Kash finally convinced me to write up the bizarre copyright story that started seven years after Mark Twain’s death, when his ghost reportedly dictated a new novel, via Ouija board, to Emily Grant Hutchings. His publisher said: well, if Twain wrote it, we own it.

A few media outlets reported last summer that the NYPD, in its continuing efforts to crack down on the sometimes-annoying costumed characters in Times Square, had asked Disney and Marvel to initiate copyright action there. Disney and Marvel didn’t bite. I requested the communications (or records thereof) under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, and got told — months later — there were no such records. Strange.

A few weeks back, Gautam Tejas Ganeshan invited me to display selections from the Pomological Watercolor Collection behind his performance at San Francisco’s Artists’ Television Access space. I jumped at the opportunity, but stressed a little at how I was going to present them. I didn’t want to do a plain old slideshow, and I didn’t want to do anything that looked cheesy.

I’m happy to say I’ve fixed the most frequent complaint I’ve gotten about @pomological: the images, while great, are overwhelmingly in the portrait orientation, making the preview images on many Twitter clients—and especially Twitter.com—kind of lousy.

There’s an article circulating right now about how Amazon customer service can be exploited to reveal targeted mailing addresses. I discovered and reported a similar vulnerability in December of 2014, which was reported to me as fixed in May of 2015. I haven’t publicly documented that process until now.

Here’s a supercut of all the mentions of the word “data” in last week’s Supreme Court Oral Arguments in Evenwel v. Abbott, a case addressing the question of whether the “one-person, one-vote” principle of the Equal Protection Clause allows states to use total population data instead of voter population data in apportioning legislative districts.

Sometimes I wish I could use Twitter as a different account, and read all the conversations and references that result from the unique list of accounts a person has chosen to follow (sometimes over the course of years!) There’s no “use Twitter as @x” mode yet, so the next best thing is to create a list of all the accounts somebody follows. The public view of that list is, roughly, that person’s main timeline. This came in handy recently as I was trying to follow a basketball game, because I don’t yet follow the kinds of people who make insightful comments about basketball games.¹