Archive: February 4, 2006

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Saturday,  02/04/06  07:20 PM

So, tomorrow we have the Super Bowl.  An eating opportunity, as well as a football watching opportunity :)  I am looking forward to Shirley's tamales and chili as much as the game.  My pick - Seattle.  Hey, I don't know, Pittsburgh has won it before, Seattle hasn't.  Plus, I like Seattle.  Well actually I like Pittsburgh, too - it is much more friendly and beautiful than you'd think from the "steel city" moniker - but I feel a special connection to Seattle.  Should be a good game, I actually like that it hasn't been as hyped as other games in the past, I mean, it is only a game, right? 

Oh, yeah, and I did buy a new TV.  A Fujitsu 55" plasma.  Awesome, totally awesome.  It did take some futzing (technical term) to get ordinary composite video from my cable and my Tivo to look good, but now, it does.  And component video from my DVD player looks really good.  So good, I'm not sure I'm going to need a new DVD player which upsamples and supports HDMI.  I did buy a new DVD player - a Yamaha, to match my receiver - but haven't hooked it up yet, stay tuned for a report on that...

Still to be figured out, also; does the really expensive Monster HDMI cable matter?  I've bought one for $155 (ouch!) but verified it can be returned, and have also bought a plain vanilla one for $10.  I confidently expect, based on that fact that this is a digital interface, that there will not be a difference.

NYTimes on SpaceX: A bold plan to go where men have gone before.  (If the link is dead, here's a PDF of the article.)  "Through his company, Space Explorations Technology, or SpaceX, Mr. Musk wants to send things to space for one-third of the going rate or less — even bringing down the price to $7 million for small payloads to low Earth orbit — with a series of simple rockets of his own design."  Their third attempt at their first launch is this Wednesday - stay tuned! 

This is pretty cool: The Many Directions of Time.  Stanford Physicist Alex Mayer has proposed that time has multiple dimensions, just like space.  "Imagine that 'the arrow of time' in the Universe, like gravity on Earth, is pretty much the same everywhere, yet also different everywhere relative to everywhere else.  That means that the 'arrow of time' points in different directions in spacetime depending on where you are, so time has a geometry just like space has a geometry."  I barely follow the argument, but check out this PowerPoint presentation which illustrates the phenomenon pretty well (diagram at right).  Very cool. 

Perhaps this could explain why I'm always late?  Nah, I didn't think so :)

Scott Adams is a wise man.  Consider his WCM Method:  "WCM stands for Who Cares Most.  If you want your relationship to have a chance, defer all decisions and interpretations of fact to the person who cares the most.  In practice, this will mean that women will make 98% of all the decisions and be “right” 98% of the time.  Compared to men, women care more passionately about just about everything.  Men mostly scratch what itches and call it good."  This is so true.  I tried to explain it to Shirley, but she didn't get it.  I think that's because I cared more than she did :) 

For those of you who are Treonauts (you know who you are), here comes the Palm 700p:  "The new Treo 700p, which will supposedly be available from Sprint in April, will have a 312MHz processor, Palm OS 5.4.9, EV-DO, 1.3 megapixel digital camera, a 320 x 320 pixel display, and Bluetooth."  Of these, EV-DO is the cool new feature, I think. 

I meant to link this a while ago, but it seems particularly appropriate right now: Dave Winer explains How to make money on the Internet.  "The way to make money on the Internet is to send them away.  Google proved this, in the age of portals that were trying to suck the eyeballs in and not let them go, Google took over by sending you off more efficiently than anyone else...  Yahoo doubled their share of the online news market by adopting RSS and sending readers away as fast as they can.  People come back to places that send them away.  Memorize that one."  Got it. 

 
 

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