Another new (to me) blogger: Mark Suster, an LA-based VC. He blogs about startups and investors, with a lot of good stuff mixed in. Love it. There is so much value in blogging and reading blogs.
Anyway here's a good one: In defense of Uber: an objective opinion. I don't have any special insight but the whole "target journalists" thing seems way overblown.
Powerline wonders: Is there any hope for our civilization? "Understand that the morons who wrote this incoherent drivel, which wouldn't have passed muster at my public high school in South Dakota, are PhD candidates." I think there's plenty of hope, all over, including in academia, but certainly things in those environments have to change. The pendulum has swung way too far to the left.
Seth Godin: the jobs only you can do. "One of the milestones every entrepreneur passes is when she stops thinking of people she hires as expensive ('I could do that job for free') and starts thinking of them as cheap ('This frees me up to do something more profitable.;')." Yep.
Boo. Winamp is officially dead. Of course, it has been unofficially dead for fourteen years, ever since AOL bought them. So weird that big companies kill small companies by buying them.
Historical footnote. Winamp is the first software I can remember which featured "skins". I remember creating some myself, just because I could :)
Gentlemen, start your printers: Smithsonian releases 3D models of artifacts. "Some of the first 3D scans include the Wright brothers' first airplane, Amelia Earhart's flight suit, casts of President Abraham Lincoln's face during the Civil War and a Revolutionary War gunboat." How cool is that? You can learn more about the project on the Smithsonian X 3D website.
The fastest DNA sequencer, on USB. Excellent, I want one. And I'm sure someday soon I will probably have one....
FuturePundit: the transition to a DNA-data-rich environment. "“Once you make the transition from a data poor to data rich environment, everything changes.” We are living thru that transition." Yep, although the promise of Precision Medicine has yet to be realized, we're almost there.
And another: plan to live to be 100 years old? With the diagnostic capabilities enabled by genetic information, living to be 100 years old is no longer an unrealistic goal.
From Amsterdam-based Robert Embricq: Coolest table ever? Perhaps ... amid heavy competition. Looks like something which could be 3D-printed :)
Way cool: the secret life of a Manhattan doorman. (This site, narrative.ly, seems to have a lot of cool stuff... no RSS feed unfortunately so requires exploration.)
Steampunk on wheels: The Morgan Aero-Coupe. "It looks like a car designed in the 1930s to be built in 2013." Yes.
Not from the Onion: Vancouver bans doorknobs. Seriously, the role of government is completely out of control here.
Book note: in preparation for Hunger Games II (Catching Fire), I reread the book. Not as interesting as the first one (the concepts were all out of the bag already), but still a solid read... looking forward to the movie!
A quiet week, lots of people on vacation, lots of people shifting to "Holiday mode". Spending time on planning for next year, and reflecting on this year. It was a tough one for all of us, but could have been much worse.
Cyclelog: yet another Rockstore. Twelveth day in a row but who's counting :)
Where has the Obama thrill gone? "A righteous anger about an Obama trifecta - of serial apologies and bows abroad, massive borrowing and deficit spending, and government-take overs of private spheres of life - is swelling up in the electorate." I see it all around me, the disillusionment is palpable.
Xeni Jardin: Hope is fading. If President Obama's lost Xeni, then he's lost.
If only Barack Obama were more like Sarah Palin. "The animating spirit that electrified his political movement has sputtered out..." I agree with Glenn Reynolds' take: "Obama's 'charisma' was based on voter narcissism - people excited not just about electing a black President, but about themselves, voting for a black President."
Unbelievable watch of the day: the Concord C1 QuantumGravity. Just when you think you've seen it all, you realize "it all" is so much more than you thought. Despite the massive size I would love to wear this watch; it is so bizarre... the price isn't given, but I am sure if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Limited edition of *ten*.
Wow, this is excellent: Virgin Galactic's Space-Grazing Aircraft Is Ready for Liftoff. [Somewhat] the start of space tourism, right? (Although we must note, this spacecraft is not going into orbit or anything, just high enough to reach "space" and return. Trips to the Moon and Mars will be coming soon :)
User-interface design is not easy. I spent a good part of the day in conversation with a colleague as we tried to get rid of one checkbox. Every single question you ask a user makes things harder, and every control is a question.
Quick update on turning Five-O: It's not going too well. I have ten days to go, and introspection and fear are the order of my days. Shirley said it was worse before she turned 50, and afterward it was no big deal. I hope that's true.
It's really unfortunate that this is such a time of change for the world, it exacerbates the feeling that it is a time of change for me. Ever since my Midway experience, I've thought of turning 50 as an inflection point. Naturally I'd like to think it will be upward, but all the external evidence suggests otherwise. Fifty is just a number, so clearly any effect turning fifty would have is pschological, but it is definitely having an effect.
If you have not turned fifty, I recommend you put it off as long as possible :)
Sunday morning, and it's all happening... (including an invasion of 11-year-olds here, as my daughter Megan hosts a surprise Birthday party for a friend; I plan to escape on my bike :)
Eric Raymond celebrates Victory in Iraq day. (Really, it was yesterday) "The good guys - Western Civilization, the Coalition of the Willing, the United States, and the people of Iraq - won this war. The bad guys - Saddam Hussein’s regime, al-Qaeda’s jihadis, all their allies and enablers - lost it. The entire world will be a better place because of this victory. And that is a proper thing to celebrate." Indeed.
Google has added a new feature called SearchWiki to their search results; it allows you to vote up results, or delete them. This customizes your results, for you; whether the input is incorporated into everyone's results isn't clear. Michael Arrington doesn't like this feature, but I guess you can always ignore it and no harm done [Update: and Robert Scoble likes it]. To me it adds clutter without adding value. I wouldn't be surprised if they conclude it doesn't help, and get rid of it... this is the classic "me me look at me" new feature symptom; they should have made this a non-default option, but they didn't.
CNN with a beautiful feature: a look out windows all across the United States. I didn't look at all of them, but the one at right caught my eye, from Dayton, Ohio. I have friends who are spending Thanksgiving with their families back in Ohio, the weather there sure is different to the weather here... I'm planning a ride later and don't know whether I'll even need long sleeves. One thing that's the same; my cat Reggie is looking out my window right now :)
Space Shuttle Endeavor approaches the International Space Station with its cargo bay open, wow, what an amazing picture. In fact the whole sequence of pictures is amazing, please click through and check 'em out! (Is it just me, or has the press increasingly ignored our adventures in space? Perhaps people feel there are more important things going on in the world, but this stuff is still "wow" to me...)
UT Austin creates the world's largest video display, 75 displays in an array comprising 307M pixels. Very cool, it will be perfect for viewing digital slides :)
From eFluxMedia: Research: Exercise May Diminish Cancer Risk. "Regular exercise can help sufferers in the fight against cancer, according to new research. Researchers believe that exercise equivalent to a 30-minute walk five times a week can help prevent cancer, slow the disease’s progress, enhance recovery and prevent its recurrence." This doesn't seems like a breakthrough revelation - exercise is good for all of us, anyway - but it is another reason to take a break from watching football and go for a bike ride :)
The Horse's Mouth asks (and answers) the question: What is Crazy? (Here we have two guys kayaking down a dam spillway; click for a larger pic and more of them...)
Halley Suitt links the definitive Bond... James Bond video sequence... for me Sean Connery will always be the James Bond. I haven't seen Quantom of Solace - I plan to, of course - but good as Daniel Craig might be, he'll still be a stand-in for the original. One key difference, Craig's 007 never seems to be smiling, while Connery's always did... a sign of the times?
Finally - and this is cute - Obama daughters bond with Bush girls... apparently the key learning was how to bounce on the White House beds. I love it.
Good news: Space tourism legislation makes comeback. "After weathering the ups and downs of the lame-duck legislative process, legislation that would open the way for suborbital space tourism was cleared by the House and sent on to the Senate for final congressional approval." Good news; the prospect of revenue from space tourists would drive a lot of private spaceflight development.
Ray Bradbury writes it is Time to Explore Again. "In this time when our freeways are frozen in place, space travel suffers the same terrible winter. How can we thaw this deep-freeze to unlock our vision so that we see the stars once more with the same fever that we knew that fabulous night we took the first Giant Step?"
Bill Whittle of EjectEjectEject has a new book out: Silent America, essays from a democracy at war. Ordered! I've always enjoyed his essays; they have that "I say that, but I don't say it that well" quality.
There's a petition out on the 'net to support the U.S.Marine caught on video killing an insurgent in Fallujah. I signed it, and when I checked a few seconds later about fifty other people had after I did. Took my breath away. I was #127281, amazingly as of right now there are 176,973 signatures. Semper fidelis!
Rathergate non-update: Glenn Reynolds notes it is now two months since CBS President Andrew Heyward promised that the investigation would be over and public in "weeks, not months." Ha. More lies from a network which has lost all credibility already.
Yesterday I noted how much I enjoyed The Incredibles. Anita Sharp did too, and notes "The Incredibles is not only a huge box-office hit, it's also reigniting the debate on how society should treat gifted kids: does 'No Child Left Behind' really mean, 'No Child Should Get Too Far Ahead?'" You have to love it that the villian in the movie was named Syndrome :) And the NYTimes editorializes When Every Child is Good Enough. This is a real sore point with me, I can't wait for the political correctness pendulum to swing back a bit.
Clive Thompson ponders How running made us human. "Did humanity's ability to run long distances turn us into the world's dominant species? That's what a couple of scientists - Dennis Bramble of the University of Utah and Daniel Lieberman of Harvard - argued last week in Nature." Cool.
More from Clive; a killer idea for advertisers concerned with Tivo customers fast-forwarding, "why don't they simply embed an advertisment within the normal ad that becomes visible only when you're speeding through the TV spot at high speed." That would be so cool, I might not use my 30-second skip just so I could see them :)
You probably saw or heard about the brawl between the Pistons, the Pacers, and Detroit fans? Yesterday the NBA sent a Stern Message; commissioner David Stern announced nine suspensions including Ron Artest for the entire season. I have to say after seeing the video, this seems warranted. Someone could have been seriously hurt.
OFX consortium develops new approach to financial data aggregation. This XML-based spec is used by home banking systems and financial software like Quicken and Money to communciate with banks. OFX has somewhat of the same function as RSS, for financial data, and predates it considerably. It also incorporates some refinements which would be useful in RSS, including authentication, encryption, high-water marketing, and multipoint distribution....
Interesting thread on ipodder.org: How to encode Bittorrent in podcast feeds? Seems like the feed should contain a pointer to the torrent; they aren't the same kind of thing.
I found a great site from Harry Foundalis about his Research on the Bongard problems. What's a Bongard problem? Well, here's one:
These problems were devised by the Russian scientist M.M. Bongard in 1967, as a test for automated pattern recognition systems. Each of the 100 problems consists of two groups of six patterns. The boxes on the left each conform to some rule, while the boxes on the right are counter-examples to the rule. The problem for the automated pattern recognizer is to determine the rule for each problem. Can you find the rule for the problem above? Click here for the answer.
Okay so that one was pretty easy - for a human - what about this one?
Do you see the rule? I've worked with these quite a bit so I see it right off, but it might not be obvious. Click here for the answer.
Okay, now for a pretty hard one. What's the defining rule for this one:
Pretty tough, eh? Just when you think you have it, you find one of the patterns on the left doesn't match, or one of the patterns on the right does. Anyway click here for the answer.
I finally, some of these are maniacal, consider this one:
It would be pretty tough for an automated pattern recognizer to figure this one out! If you give up, click here for the answer.
Harry Foundalis actually developed software to parse and analyze these figures. It is a tough problem; first you have to get from pixels to lines, shapes, etc.; just the representation is tough. Then figuring out the set of all possible rules is really hard - the set is almost infinite - and winnowing down the list to the rules that match on the left and don't on the right is pretty tough. To date his program can solve about 20 of the hundred, including the top two above. Pretty impressive.
Can a cube be sectioned in such a way as to create a regular pentagon?
It appears the regular hexagonal section has the greatest area of all possible sections. Can you prove it?
I know you've been breathlessly waiting for the answers, so here you go.
First, no, a cube cannot be sectioned to create a regular pentagon. The closest you can do is this:
This is a "full house" pentagon; three of the sides are the same length, and the other two sides are the same length as each other, but longer than the other three.
Note: it is not necessary that one of the pentagon's vertices be coincident with a vertex of the cube.
Second, the regular hexagon is not the section with the greatest area. I didn't mean for this to be a trick question, but I guess it was. The section with the greatest area is this one:
The diagonal of each face is √2
Area: √2 = 1.41
Here's the regular hexagon again:
The diagonal of each face is √2
Each side of the hexagon is √2/2
Triangles are equilateral with area √3/8
Area: ¾√3 = 1.30
There are some other candidates as well. In the two figures above, consider rotating the section about the dashed line as an axis. That yields the following section (a diamond, not a square):
Each side is √5/2
One chord is √2, the other is √3
Area: ½√2√3 = 1.22
And continuing the rotation, this section, a square with the minimum area of any section which passes through the center of the cube:
Section same as cube face
Area: 1
Another interesting section is this one, the largest triangular section:
The diagonal of each face is √2
Triangles are equilateral with area √3/8
Area: ½√3 = 0.87
Finally, here's today's bonus question:
What is the area of the "full house" pentagonal section?
Citizen Smash summarizes Arnold's first week in office:
In his first official action as governor, he issued an executive order rolling back the tripling of California’s automobile registration tax shortly after taking office. Next, he called the state legislature into special session to work on reforming the state’s workers’ compensation system; to draft a bond issue that would restructure the state’s debts (that would be placed on the March ballot); to draft a Constitutional amendment capping government spending (also for the March ballot); and to cut state spending to counter the lost revenue from vehicle licensing fees. He also suspended all pending regulations for a 90-day executive review.
When Arnold ran into some friction from the Democrat-dominated legislature, he took to the radio airwaves across the state and warned of “severe casualties” in next year’s elections if lawmakers fight his efforts.
There’s a new sheriff in town.
Excellent! So far, so good.
So, where were you? Of all the things that have that "I remember when I heard the news" quality, President Kennedy's assassination is at the top of most people's list. I was five, and I can remember sitting next to my Mom, listening to the radio. I didn't know what was going on, but I could tell from her reaction that it wasn't good. The only other thing that has that quality for me was the Challenger exploding. I'm sure someday 9/11 will be on the list, too, but right now it still seems too recent.
I don't often link James Lileks (although I love his blog), but check this out, as he flips off Salam Pax. In the same post he disses Michael Moore and bemoans the network's emphasis on the sordid Michael Jackson affair. I cheer him on from the sidelines.
Scoble does some introspecting about Microsoft's brand image. "Come on, admit it. Microsoft doesn't have the best brand in the business." Robert, you got me. I admit it.
Diego Doval takes a walk down memory lane. Longhorn is either the fourth or fifth time Microsoft has tried for an object-oriented file system, depending on who's counting.
If you haven't tried X1, you should. It provides fast file and email searching today. It does not use metadata of any kind, rather, it does full-text pre-indexing of file contents. And man does it scream.
Amid the debate about Longhorn, Microsoft's upcoming new version of Windows, it is worth noting that MS Office 2003 seems to have issues. I haven't loaded it myself; there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason to upgrade...
Hey, here's something cool; n-generate. "Graphic Design the easy way. If you can press a button, you can n-generate." [ via Ottmar Liebert, who goes a little crazy n-generating album covers 1, 2, 3, 4 ]
Another new (to me) blogger: 
Quick update on turning Five-O: It's not going too well. I have ten days to go, and introspection and fear are the order of my days. Shirley said it was worse before she turned 50, and afterward it was no big deal. I hope that's true.
