Saturday, July 16, 2011

It is so much simpler to bury reality...

How's everybody feeling?  Find out with Feeling of the World.

Let's call this the Twitter of art: a painting reduced to 140 circles.  Guess before you click through.
If you're faced with documenting your work, these tips for technical papers might come in handy.  This may be common sense but: "Do not use etc. unless the remaining items are completely obvious."  Or maybe you have to organize a meeting.  In that case, the conference organizer's handbook may be useful.  I liked this nugget: "The purpose of a keynote is to draw attendees to the conference early, especially on day 2, when they’re hung over and would prefer to stay in bed a little longer."

I'm now on Google+ but I'm struggling to figure out how and why to use it.  Addressing the "how", here's a cheat sheet for Google+ with 11 handy tips.   As for the "why", I'm not sure why I'd use Google+ versus Facebook and Twitter.

This photo of 4 moons transiting Jupiter's face is #47 on the list of the top 100 Hubble images.
For those of you interested in Malcom Gladwell (I am not - I thought Blink was horrific) here's his website: www.gladwell.com.

Visual.ly, a website dedicated to the promotion of infographics and data visualizations, launched this week.   I'm an enabler: here's a family tree of the Emacs editor.  Creo Sketch is PTC's 2D sketching tool - and it's free.  This video makes it look pretty easy to use.

I will not link to the crazy nastyass honey badger video.  (That does not mean I haven't favorited it on YouTube.)

Just wash that fallout down the drain with Flobar.  source
Tru du cul du jour: Dude and wife get $12,000 because of a "malicious, repressive, and reprehensible" incident on Air Canada in which he was spoken to in English.  Judge: "the violation of their rights caused them a moral prejudice, pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of their vacation."

Just a little eye candy: video of a brief abstract animation: Divide.  Aviation pr0n of the week: video of the F-35C during a jet blast deflector test (a plane never looked so good going nowhere).  For my quilting friends: improvisational quilts.  Haven't had one of these in a while: the periodic table of search engine optimization.

Get a God's-eye view of any location on the planet with Earth View.
In this list of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century, SIAM's editors include the development of the optimizing Fortran compiler in 1957.  "The creation of Fortran may rank as the single most important event in the history of computer programming..."  I learned Fortran during a summer internship at NASA in 1983 which was fortuitous because the next year we were required to do a senior design project in Fortran even though we hadn't been taught it at school.

So much to read, so little time.  Here's a list of the top 50 entrepreneurs ranked by their tweets and blog traffic.  I follow 3 of the top 5 but my readership drops off dramatically after that.

Thank you for reading.

...than it is to dispose of dreams. ~Don DeLillo (Americana)

4 comments:

Jim said...

Wow, I wouldn't have guessed I'd be able to spot-identify the painting in 140 dots.

As for Google+ - I've been wondering the same thing. The best theories I've come up with, in no particular order:
a) It gives me the opportunity to fill out Yet Another Personal Profile while copying all of my existing work from Flickr to Picasa, for example;
b) It's for the folks who were on/liked Orkut before Google lost interest in that project and let it become taken over by spammers;
c) A temporary safe-haven from CastleYouMafiaFarm WarsVille.

Things I see it has going for it include being able to define (imaging the strike tag being here for cleverness)groups(close strike tag) circles of people (my favorite circle name: OHSHITBEES) and filter out that way. Facebook used to have a similar thing, but in their bimonthly watering-down of security, removed the feature. And certain people I'm obligated to friend on Facebook are not there. Plus, the deletion of a circle is worth doing at least twice.

I continue to despise Blink.

John said...

The Mona Lisa was pretty easy. It's one of those things that looks deceptively easy to do. I was tempted to try it myself but then started thinking about how to do it and gave up when it got too complicated.

I think you hit the nail on the head with respect to Google+. Do I really want to repost all the stuff I already post on Twitter and Facebook? Or, how do I know what to post where? Do I use FB only for friends and family, Twitter for work? And Google+ for what? "In case you didn't see my Tweet..."

Also, it gives me a list of people I might want to add to a circle, but there's just 400 names and faces and absolutely no description of who they are. Kinda like an out-of-the-blue LinkedIn request. If I don't recognize the name and they don't remind me, it goes in the bin.

Francis Shivone said...

John --I've been reading but not commenting because I have been too damn busy to do anything and I'm hot and old and just finished restoring a rental property.

I'll be back soon. Thanks.

(And I need more time on the Einstein graphic explanation of time relative to light.)

John said...

Old. check

Hot. check

Bulging Disk. check

We can compare maladies when you've recovered from your renovations.