Horse Bits

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson

2012-01-28T14:03:00.000-06:00

I know what you're thinking. Robopocalypse? Really? I know. It sounds cheesy. I thought the same thing when I picked it out. But it was late and the library had already made their "last call" announcement and it looked new so I took it.

Author Daniel H. Wilson has a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon and an academic pedigree that allows him to write intelligently about his subject matter. Imagine a near future when all our computerized gadgets are turned against us by a computer that is not just super intelligent - it has become sentient. This, of course, is one of the commonly cited doomsday scenarios that will end human life on Earth. Wilson is able to turn this concept into a plot that doesn't sound too farfetched.

The novel follows the exploits of several widely dispersed (Oklahoma, Afghanistan, England, Japan) people or groups of people as they fight their own battles versus the machines. Wilson crafts several interesting scenarios as the robots begin to evolve into forms more well suited to killing humans than the simple household robots and automated cars that started the war.

But the scenarios are part of the problem. They're too widely dispersed in space and time (the war spans over 2 years) to maintain pacing and interest. It also leaves very little time for introspection and rich character development. Lots of characters die. I really didn't care. Several potentially interesting subplots are virtually untouched. What exactly makes a robot self-aware and alive? What is Archos, the leader of the robots, thinking? What's the rationale for the actions he takes? What's he gonna do when all the people are dead?

Where Wilson falls short is the dialog. I often thought to myself "No one talks like that." He also takes certain liberties to keep the novel moving that involve characters being able to figure out what's happening way too quickly. Like on the first day of the uprising when all the robotic things start attacking their former human masters, too many characters are able to surmise within 24 hours that this is a global coordinated event instead of just some local, and perhaps accidental, disaster.

One reviewer compared Wilson's Robopocalypse to Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain. Even accounting for my personal fondness for Andromeda, that's a bit of a stretch. Andromeda Strain is a great novel and a great movie (the original). Robopocalypse isn't quite there yet. On the other hand, Crichton's later work like Prey may be a more apt comparison because he doesn't write novels as much as he cranks out screenplays on an 8th grade level. Sorry - didn't mean for this to devolve into Crichton bashing.

Wilson's Robopocalypse was an enjoyable, albeit light, sci-fi experience.

If you judge a fish by its ability to fly...

2012-01-28T09:43:00.000-06:00

Here's a great 1-minute video animation that visualizes classical music as a roller-coaster.

Ellsworth Kelly, Red, Dark Blue, Dark Green, 1986. Is it painting, sculpture or installation? Perhaps it's better to think of it as Line, Shape, Color.

Beer mavens: the sky is falling! Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) endangers micro brewer. (You know, the natural gas isn't just gonna jump out of the ground.)

See if you can tell whether the painting is by artist or ape. I fear taking tests like this but got them all right (this time).

Do you lie awake at night wondering why e^πi = -1? Science to the rescue.

Lest you think science is all about flashy mathematical proofs, it's good to know that in these days of obsessive multi-tasking and short attention spans science is also taking a very long view of some fundamental issues. Just like the owl who determined that it takes 3 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop (young children - you should just Google that), an 80+ year experiment shows that it takes pitch (a tar-like substance) that long to produce 9 drops. The pitch drop experiment at the University of Queensland set out to demonstrate that things that act like solids in some circumstances act like liquids in others. This behavior is less esoteric than you think. Ever notice how Silly Putty will slowly drip like chewing gum but if you jerk on it with both hands it will snap? That's an example of strain rate behavior - when the strain is low the material acts like a liquid. When the strain is high it acts like a solid.

In addition to leering men, what exactly are the dangers of wearing high heels? Science to the rescue!

You've probably never seen Newton's laws of motion as delightfully animated as in this video.

This may be as close to a Monty Python reunion as we can expect. Terry Jones will direct Absolutely Anything, a "sci-fi farce," with former Python members voicing the characters.

B-17G Flying Fortress - just because

Are there fundamental laws of cooking? Yes, the first of which is that I shouldn't do it. The second law says that good food pairings share the same underlying molecular components. For example, shrimp and Parmesan cheese share 1-penten-3-ol.

While doing my regular reading at Allure's Daily Beauty Reporter blog, I came across this doozy: should perfume be banned in public? Of course, the answer is "no." But if this law survives New Hampshire's legislature I'm gonna lobby for a ban on saggy pants, tongue piercings, comb-overs, and coffee breath.

There's no need to ban exposed nose hairs now that we have CHOLOLI, an web-based service for anonymously policing those with exposed nostril follicles.

Does this look like multiplication to you? Me neither. But watch this video and prepare to think.

Find out who's using all teh interwebs with this real-time internet traffic monitor from Akamai.

Astronomy pr0n: NASA's latest high resolution satellite image of the earth: Blue Marble

Oral sex may cause more oral cancer in men than smoking. (Seems kinda obvious - oral sex, oral cancer, duh.)

A North Carolina inmate is believe to have smuggled a .38 caliber revolver into jail concealed in his rectum. Silent but deadly? Protection against prison rape? Fell on it after slipping in the shower? Gives new meaning to "stick up?" Explosive diarrhea?

...it will spend the rest of its life believing it's stupid. ~Albert Einstein (paraphrased)

Too Bad Tim Tebow Is White

2012-01-22T18:23:00.000-06:00

The hue and cry about Denver quarterback Tim Tebow's overt religiosity is simply due to the fact that he's a big, dorky, white, self-proclaimed virgin. He's also a quarterback with a throwing motion that's a cross between a Bulgarian shot putter and Sandy from accounting, the right fielder on the office's softball team.

Would so many dare criticize him so publicly if he were black? I don't think so. Imagine if Michael Vick had found Jesus while in prison and had become a vocal fan boy. Do you think he'd be mocked so vehemently? I don't. (That's not to say that he wouldn't still be haunted by the dog fighting business. However, it is interesting to me that folks are much less indignant about players' crimes against people. But I digress.)

Perhaps it's because we want our players in the National Felons League (the rapists, wife beaters, drug runners, anger management candidates) to have failed at least once so we fans can graciously grant them our forgiveness before permitting them to succeed on the field. But does anyone want Ben Roethlisberger dating their daughter?

Is Tim's post-TD Tebowing any more ludicrous than Ray Lewis' pregame dance? Hardly. But the prospect of mocking Lewis is much less palatable than mocking Tebow. After all, guys like Tebow have that whole "turn the other cheek" thing working against them so the perceived threat of reprisal is minimized. It's kinda like that scene from Fight Club where the homework is to pick a fight with a random person. When that person happens to be a priest the results are humorous at best.

It's a bit incongruous that while many want the No Fun League to back off touchdown celebrations involving choreography, Sharpies, popcorn and the like even more scorn a guy for taking a knee. Discount double check anyone? The NFL's war on extended fingers doesn't include those raised toward the heavens saluting a deity or a dearly departed relative.

Brett Favre's performance during the game following his father's passing was as transcendent as anything I'll ever see in football. It was magical, there's no other way to explain it. Being "in the zone" is a vast understatement. He was operating on another plane. But years later Brett was Weinering before Rep. Anthony Weiner gave it a name.

In an editorial, Sally Jenkins quotes theologian Michael J. Murray's position that we're all ill at ease with intrusions of personal faith. They can make us question whether we're backing the wrong team (and I don't mean the Broncos). If we're not currently a fan they can make us question if perhaps we ought to buy a team jersey. They make us defensive, especially when they appear out of context like during a sporting event. A lot of the needling also misses (perhaps purposefully for comedic purposes) the point. As Jesuit theologian James Martin writes, its not about individual prayers heard and the implication that other prayers are not, it's that with faith all may not go well but in the end everything will be alright.

Frankly, I don't care one way or the other. Preferably, everyone will get mocked equally. I'm not a religious person so I don't care if anyone thanks God for a touchdown. I'm not a fan of Tebow's so I don't care whether he succeeds or fails. But it does seem that Tebowing is fairly benign relative to other behaviors in the NFL.

Maybe Jesus doesn't care either.

source

Where Have All the Engineers Gone?

2012-01-22T11:36:00.000-06:00

Every few years we read about the lack of engineers and how the lack of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) graduates is a threat to our national economic security.

The article How Science Degrees Stack Up in the February 2012 issue of Scientific American points out that more STEM degrees are being awarded now than in the past 20 years. The workforce issue is a result of these STEM majors choosing to work in non-STEM fields like medicine and finance.

The article then goes on to say that these alternate fields provide the higher earning potential that graduates need to pay off ever increasing student loans.

I submit another explanation. The same companies that decry the lack of STEM graduates are also doing little to make STEM fields attractive to prospective employees and sustaining for current employees. To clarify, I don't see this as a generational issue to be solved by pandering to Gen-X, Gen-Y, Millenials, or whatever tag young people are wearing these days. It's an institutional issue about where employers see engineers fitting into their culture. All too often, in my opinion, engineers get the mushroom treatment. And that's been going on for quite some time.

Don't wait for the last judgement...

2012-01-21T09:45:00.000-06:00

Good morning, friends. Wake up to this bacon sunrise. source

What do you get when you combine Stephen Hawking, Philip Glass, and Errol Morris? A film adaptation of Hawking's book A Brief History of Time. (The video's over an hour long so plan ahead.)

I have no idea how I managed to find this list of strange facts. The longest 1-syllable word in the English language is "screeched." The word "therein" contains 10 other words that can be made without rearranging any of its letters. "Stewardesses" is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand. And more.

People looking at Rothko in 1961. "I got visually drunk."

The simplest employee appraisal method ever: ask yourself whether you'd hire them again. For the ones you would rehire, consider this idea for giving them unlimited vacation time. And for those of you who've actually taken a vacation, please verify for me that it really does take 21 hours and 31 minutes before you start enjoying it. Finally, offering unlimited vacation may get you on the list of the 100 best companies to work for which includes software notables Google (#1), SAS (#3), Intuit (#19), Salesforce.com (#27), Adobe (#41), Intel (#46), Autodesk (#52), Microsoft (#76), and Cisco (#90).

Ever wonder where the trees are?

Still trying to understand Cubify. It has aspects of GrabCAD (an online community for sharing 3D CAD models), social and mobile media, and a 3D printing bureau. Design and print your own toys?

The average age of a car in the U.S. is now 11.1 years making my 2001 wheels just about average.

I once won a prize (long since forgotten) at an amusement park by sinking a basketball shot at one of those games where the hoop is an impossibly odd height and distance away. How my son won a four foot tall stuffed Hulk doll remains a mystery. If your manliness is wrapped up in winning your date a prize at one of these state fair games here are some tips on success. Unfortunately, they don't provide advice on picking the correct rubber ducky from the hundreds floating by.

At CES, Qualcomm announced a new X Prize competition to build a Tricorder. You know, that thing that Dr. Bones McCoy on Star Trek used as a diagnostic aid. Build one and maybe win $10 million.

Science once again to the rescue. Small confined space, flammable gas, safety hazard. It's all about farting astronauts.

Would you use the e-Urinal, health monitoring/touch screen liquid waste device, in public? The real question is whether I can get it or any urinal for my home. (I do not recommend the "Look Ma, no hands!" technique as illustrated above. And thank you for the dashed line. I doubt I could've figured that out on my own. "How's my urine?" "On the floor!")

The best on this list of not boring coins is the 1943 steel cent and the fact that its unpopularity led to the 1944 and 1945 cents being made from recycled World War 2 shell casings.

Bacon soda, from the geniuses at Bacon Freak.

Ignore the infographic but use the calculator at the bottom to find your worth in gold. Here's where being portly pays off to the tune of $5,115,777.

Behold the iPoo. I expect the iPoo, like the e-Urinal, comes with a Siri-like health-monitoring assistant called Tipi. "How was that, Tipi?" "Lay off the hot wings, John."

Kaggle, making data science a sport. Companies, governments and organizations provide problems and folks compete to solve them with awards at the end. For example, measure the small distortion in images of galaxies caused by dark matter.

Airplane nerds: check out these airplane wallpapers.

To be in the top 1% your income has to be above around $340,000. Here's a graphic that shows the occupations that earn them so much money. (No big surprises - doctors, lawyers, and "managers.")

If I write "conjunction junction, what's your function?" and you immediately think Schoolhouse Rock you'll love this site with Schoolhouse Rock lyrics.

You might want to print this time travel cheat sheet and keep it in your wallet in case you ever get sent back in time. Otherwise, how will you remember how to pasteurize milk and make penicillin?

Check out Song Map, an imaginary streetmap populated with song titles and embedded streaming links to the music.

The penis fish looks like neither a penis nor a fish. Discuss.

...it happens every day. ~Albert Camus

The Affair by Lee Child

2012-01-14T14:37:00.000-06:00

The Affair, the latest of Lee Child's novels to feature Jack Reacher, may be one of my favorites because it tells the circumstances of how Reacher left the U.S. Army after a distinguished career as an MP.

The tale begins with Maj. Reacher being assigned as second string investigator on a civilian murder in a tiny Mississippi town outside an Army base. The first stringer is on the inside, working to ensure that no one from the Army was involved. Reacher's role is on the outside, where's he's to remain undercover and keep tuned to the local sentiment and any progress made by the local sheriff, an ex-Marine and stunning woman.

The rest of The Affair features Reacher at his best - keen instincts, attention to the tiniest detail, and his own personal brand of justice, right and wrong. Reacher needs them all because the sheriff has a history of her own and the Army has an agenda of its own. And in the end, it's Reacher who ends up a civilian.

There are a couple of things that don't work in The Affair. There are two romantic interludes that are a little over the top. Maybe I think that because listening to Dick Hill's precise baritone reading those passages during my commute home was a little unsettling. And there was a subplot involving Reacher's confrontations with the local toughs that never played out and I felt could easily have been dropped without influencing an iota of the story.

I can't emphasize enough that the main reason I'm hooked on Jack Reacher is because of Dick Hill's superb voice acting.

Through the fence...

2012-01-14T13:59:00.000-06:00

My nookie days are over,
my pilot light is out.
What used to be my sex appeal
is now my water spout.
Time was when, on its own,
from my trousers it would spring,
but now its just a full time job
to find the fucking thing!
It used to be embarrassing
the way it would behave
for every single morning
it would stand and watch me shave.
Now as old age approaches
it sure gives me the blues
to see it hang its little head
and watch me tie my shoes.
~source

What the hell. Give a listen to La Roux 'In For the Kill' by Skrillex.

Damien Hirst, Phe-Tyr, 2004-2011. The Complete Spot Paintings is on display at the Gagosian Gallery.

You should thrive in your job, not just be content. Or so says this article in HBR. Thriving employees have more satisfaction, less burnout, and perform better. So what makes for a thriving employee? Vitality, by knowing what you do makes a difference. And learning, developing skills, continued professional growth.

I infer from this article that a good way to get software developers to document their code is to have it done as part of the preparation for a code review. Program or be programmed makes the case that Americans need to learn reading, writing, and programming. Start learning now with these 30 free programming books, from Assembly to Ruby. Or shell scripting with Bash.

Time waster of the week. Gravitas is a deceptively simple game. Just rotate the black shapes until the red square falls out.

Both Sides of the Table is a blog I recently started following. It's written by a guy who was an entrepreneur (apparently a successful one) who's now a venture capitalist. He shares a post from yet another VC blog with 10 hypotheses for technology investing. (I think that really means 10 guesses I make when deciding where to spend my money.) Here they are cuz they're kinda interesting once you get past the VC-speak.

"Next" Web Architecture = Hypernet + Hyperweb (no idea)
Enterprises Adopting Consumer Technology (I think this means companies buying iPads and stuff like that instead of customized enterprise solutions.)
Index Search is Peaking (no idea)
Apple's App Model Has Undermined Economics of HTML4 Web (I think he's saying that mobile is dominant, that purchases are small, that the cloud is important.)
HTML5 is a Game Changer for Publishers (This means that the web can be richer and more interactive.)
Tablets are Hugely Disruptive (This is about the 3rd or 4th time this has come up the last week or so. Tablets have/will become the computing device of choice for a good portion of the population. The economics of who needs a laptop/desktop versus a tablet and how many more people can use a tablet than a laptop will change pricing and access models and force changes to the mobile infrastructure.)
First Wave of Social Web is Over. (Look out Facebook and Twitter.)
Smart Phone in U.S. = Apple + 7 Dwarfs (While I get their point, the first thing that popped into my head was the role of the apple in Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs. Have we been put to sleep by a poisoned apple?)
Wireless Infrastructure is a Competitive Threat to the U.S. (See #6)
Integration of TV and Internet Could be Disruptive (But it also could be like 3D TV.)

Certainly by now you've all read the news stories about the K-MAX unmanned cargo helicopter from Lockheed Martin and Kaman Aerospace.

A pub in the U.K. has a canine-friendly menu including a beer for dogs. (All my beer friends can insert their standard Bud/Miller jokes here.) Or I'll do it for them: Coors Light is the second highest selling beer in the U.S. behind Bud Light. From the same story, 4 of the top 5 U.S. beers are "light" (Bud, Coors, Miller, Natural) combining two American obsessions: alcoholism and weight loss.

Also for the drinkers, this list of 20 unique drinks to sample on your world travels includes Hirezake (crisped Fugu fin in hot sake). I know someone who had Hirezake in Tokyo and lived to tell the tale.

Authorities in Madison, Wisconsin earlier this month arrested Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop for having an incredibly stupid name. (Or for carrying a loaded handgun while on probation. Either way, it was deserved.)

What's the second most important element in writing after the title? The first sentence. (I guess I blew that this week.)

Bacon - wait for it - Jam.


When is a penny worth more than 1 cent? When it's a 1793 "chain cent" that sells at auction for $1.38 million.

NASA has setup a webb cam (see what they did there?) in the cleanroom where the James Webb Telescope is being assembled.

How many atoms does it take to store 1 bit of information? Currently about a million. But IBM has shown it can be done with as few as 12.

Not only do I like it when I find B. Kliban's cartoons online, but it's nice to also find someone else who thinks "Kliban = GENIUS."

Yawn. The American Dialect Society declares "occupy" as Word of the Year for 2011.

NME's 50 greatest guitar solos includes #49 Kansas, Carry On My Wayward Son, #47 Rage Against the Machine, Bulls on Parade, #10 Pink Floyd, Shine on You Crazy Diamond, and enough other unusual picks that there's something for everyone to hate.

The Restart Page emulates restarting many different operating systems.

You'll never guess how the 4 minute animated video Operation White Widow ends.

The movie Act of Valor (due for release on 24 Feb) is about Navy SEALs and stars real active-duty SEALs.

Gamers: play your vintage games on the Retrode, a retro gaming adapter that plugs into your computer's USB port.

SciFi geeks: how'd you like to have a 12-foot long detailed model of the Serenity spacecraft?

A Tumblr blog about optical illusions. (According to the one from 11 January, I'm color blind.)

Best of the visualization web for December 2011, Part 1 and Part 2.

Clyfford Still, 1957-D No. 1, 1957. Buffalo News reports on Denver's Still museum. image source. more images.

Try to click on this guy's nose.

...between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. ~William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 1929.

What is the main reason dogs pant?

2012-01-07T14:30:00.001-06:00

Here's a nice soundtrack for today: the Miles Davis Quintet Live in Europe 1967. Or you could make your own music on this Flash Guitar.

A frame from the innovative animated film Early Abstractions.

Just a couple days ago I was talking with a friend about how much we both liked the film Blade Runner. Now here's a online version of the rare Blade Runner Sketchbook featuring drawings and designs for many elements of the film, including some drawings by Ridley Scott himself.

Speaking of films, HuffPo gives us this list of the 20 most innovative animated films. It has what you'd expect (Fantasia, Gertie the Dinosaur), a good dose of anime, but other films that may surprise you. Of course, Disney and Chuck Jones get their due. Heavy Metal, which I recall seeing as a teenager for the titillation, also made the list which surprised me. Something new to me but also very good was Harry Smith's Early Abstractions (1946-1957). Works of that period that straddle the post WWII and early Cold War periods interest me. To me it transitioned from bits that were aboriginal to the atomic science and back again.

I have bandages that look like bacon (Thank you, Riane). So these Underpants Bandages would be a nice addition.

This one is for the wife. Someone had fun doing a CFD calculation around Mary Poppins and her umbrella.

With the end of the world coming up later in 2012 I'm not certain it's worth going out of your way to survive disasters, but this checklist from Popular Mechanics may come in handy. (Do you have enough bottled water at home? One gallon per person per day for three days.)

Back in 1923 when the "mechanical Demon" had practically abolished the horse and buggy, people were already trying to come to grips with Einstein's Theory of Relativity. This 20 minute video is one early attempt.

In 2009 author William Deresiewicz addressed the incoming class of students at West Point. His topic was Solitude and Leadership. It is reproduced in print form in The American Scholar and is one of the best essays I've ever read online.

2012 is a leap year meaning that we add February 29th to keep the calendar year and the astronomical year synchronized. What if we didn't have to do that? What if we had a calendar that not only eliminated leap years but also made every year identical in terms of dates and days of the week? Two academics from Johns Hopkins have done exactly that. Introducing the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar.

A German designer is publishing Geometry Daily on Tumblr. Every day he'll post a minimalist geometric composition.

Why do we compensate sales people with commissions? Good question. Here's one company's story about why they stopped.

This makes our idea for Breath of the Stars (clear pouches blown up by celebrities) seem almost viable: a restaurant saves and displays the crumbs left behind by public figures, Celebrity Leftovers.

Clyfford Still, 1956-J No. 1 Untitled, 1956 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

I have seen in person precisely one painting by Clyfford Still, 1956-J No. 1 Untitled at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. It's beautiful, arresting, angry, nuanced. More and more I've come to respect his work. (For background on Still, see this 3-part series on Modern Art Notes.) Denver's recently opened Clyfford Still Museum is on my short list of museums to visit (along with Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery and, of course, New York's Museum of Modern Art.) Still is quoted on his museum's website as saying "These are not paintings in the usual sense. They are life and death merging in a fearful union." So it was with particular interest that I read this week's news that an apparently intoxicated woman punched, scratched and (depending on which account you read) rubbed her bare buttocks on 1957-J No. 2 before falling to the floor and peeing herself. (Here's the museum's official statement.) Perhaps I can make a deal with the museum to take this damaged work off their hands for the cost of repairs (estimated to be $10,000). After all, the painting is valued in excess of $30 million (but that's pre-butt).

Know yer Lockheed Martin F-35B via this interactive rollover-animated schematic of its lift fan propulsion system.

What do you get when you mix pure mathematics and filmmaker David Lynch? You get the exhibit Mathematics: A Beautiful Elsewhere at the Foundation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris. "Mathematicians are bright and shiny" he says in the interview linked to above. (I just wish those damn Europeans would stop calling it "maths." It's just math - singular.)

Dan Flavin's Four Red Horizontals (to Sonja) recently sold at auction for $1.7 million.

I never really thought of Stan Winston as underappreciated. After all, he's the man behind the creatures in Alien, Terminator, Edward Scissorhands, The Thing, the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, and more.

Do you need an online alarm clock?

Science answers the most vexing question of our time: what good is nose hair? (People with less hairy nostrils were found to be three times more likely to develop asthma.)

This photograph, A Splash of Rose, definitely falls into the cool category. It's a composite of 17 shots of colored water poured over a glass rose. Fortunately, the photographer is better at photography than writing which you'll understand if you read the write-up, hahaha.

There are blogs and then there are blogs. Like this one: the same picture of Dave Coulier every day. (Debate amongst yourselves whether Mr. Coulier is the subject of Alanis Morissette's You Oughta Know. While you're at it, discuss whether Carly Simon's You're So Vain is about Warren Beatty.)

They can't talk dirty. ~Paul Lynde

Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars by Patrick Lencioni

2012-01-02T10:25:00.001-06:00

Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars must be the sixth management fable of Patrick Lencioni's that I've read. His books are all relatively easy reads, each centered around a fictional tale of a business problem and how it can be solved. In this case he addresses the issue of departments within an organization looking out for their own well-being instead of the health of the organization. These silos, like Sales or Engineering or Legal, focus narrowly on their own vertical function at the expense of the company.

The crux of this Lencioni fable is that teams usually pull together in the face of a crisis - like when the company is on the verge of going out of business. In the book, the protagonist's ah-ha moment comes during a visit to the hospital emergency room and he observed doctors, nurses, orderlies, and administration working well together.

The moral of this fable is that tearing down silos involves four things: a thematic goal, a set of defining objectives, a set of ongoing standard operating objectives, and metrics.

The thematic goal for the organization is a qualitative objective shared by all departments that applies for a specified time period. For example, a thematic goal might be completing a merger within six months, releasing a new product within a year, or rebranding existing products this quarter. The thematic goal is not a vision statement (because that exists outside a particular time frame) nor is it a number (like a sales target).

The defining objectives, while still qualitative, help define exactly what is meant by the goal. For example, if your goal is to complete the merger of two companies you might have objectives like eliminate redundancy, align products and marketing, and retrain employees.

Standard operating objectives are the normal things that departments within a company do in the normal course of business: income goals, product development, cost containment etc. They are included to acknowledge that they must continue to be addressed regardless of the current thematic goal but also to identify that they are not directly tied to achieving the thematic goal like the defining objectives are. Therefore, priority can be maintained on the defining objectives.

Finally, metrics are defined for the objectives (target numbers or dates) as a tool for monitoring progress on achieving the thematic goal. These metrics may also simply be rankings like red-yellow-green status, or a scale of 1-5. This prevents the use of overly detailed metrics.

So rather than wait for a crisis to pull your departments together, why not create one in the form of a time-limited thematic goal? Get your management team to commit to that goal and use it to guide the organization's progress.

Again, Lencioni echoes something advocated by another management guru, Verne Harnish - the setting of quarterly themes. Whereas Harnish presents this as more of a how-to guide, Lencioni's fables are a bit more digestible in one sitting.

For last year's words belong to last year's language...

2011-12-31T15:35:00.000-06:00

Hooray! The last post.*

If you listen to only one mashup each year let it be DJ Earworm's annual United State of Pop 2011 (World Go Boom). No one else can blend 25 songs into four minutes like Earworm can. Stream it from the site, watch the video, or download the mp3.

What's more fun that watching a video of Katy Perry getting a cast made of her boobs to auction for breast cancer research?

Readers' Choice General award winner from Aviation Week's annual photo and art issue, my favorite of the year.

The same people who think the internet is a series of tubes are considering two bills, Protect IP and SOPA. Debating their constitutionality is fun and scary but without doubt they are technical disasters. As one commenter wrote, it's like Congress saying "We have no idea how airplanes can fly so we're going to limit them to 40 mph." Read Stanford Law Review's Don't Break the Internet and then contact your congresspersons and senators and urge them to vote against them. I did. Let's hope these go down in history like the attempt in Indiana to legislate the value of pi. (Hmm. Political.)

Now you can print your own graph paper instead of buying it, especially that really expensive engineering kind.

I am so unproductive that I'm on a good productivity tool like Snooki on spray tan. I've bastardized David Allen's Getting Things Done for everyday use but this 1-page vision approach to productivity by the author of Out Think the Competition caught my eye. Now all I have to do is dream up about 6 goals for 2012.

Who has the time to read 101 resources for first time entrepreneurs? I hate long lists like that because they're virtually unusable. But, I suppose if you're thinking about quitting your day job, devoting evenings and weekends to this list might help you prepare for taking the plunge.

On the other hand, these 10 harsh realities of founding a company are more digestible but hardly actionable.

Your first iteration of an idea will be wrong. Not in my experience at least. Maybe we're just lucky.
Your friends and family won't understand what you do. They never did, so another strike against. Or maybe you're not explaining it well enough.
You will make less than normal wages for a while. This should be obvious. I think my W-2 from our first year in business was less than half of my previous job.
Everything takes twice as long... if it ever happens. While I know what they mean by that, it's a mixed bag. When you're doing everything yourself you need to account for all the overhead because you're doing 100 things at once which takes getting used to. But you can also make changes and decisions on the spot. On the other hand, in our software business I've stopped trying to pick release dates because its virtually impossible due to myriad variables. (Soon I'll write that work blog post "Addicted to Release Dates."). What's the old joke? Take any completion estimate, double the number, and increment the units for the actual completion date. So an estimate of 1 week becomes 2 months.
Title means nothing. You will be a janitor. Absolutely true. Take out the trash. Fix the bathroom. Move boxes and furniture. Come early, stay late. Try to squeeze in some work related to the product.
There is no silver bullet. True again and very similar to Fred Brooke's classic essay on software development, The Mythical Man-Month. There's no magic. Everything's a trade-off.
Customers will frustrate you. This is a two-way street. You will be annoyed by their wacky expectations as much as they'll be annoyed by your product or service.
You can't do it all yourself. Or as Dirty Harry said, a man's got to know his limitations. The article has a quote worth repeating: "Anyone can delegate stuff they don't like doing. What's hard is delegating things you like doing." Which is about where I am right now.
Building a team is hard. True.
You will LOSE all of your money that you ever earned, and then a bunch that you still haven't earned. This may be a bit of hyperbole based on a nugget of fact. You will spend a lot of money.

See the B-25 Pacific Prowler at Fort Worth's Meacham Airport.

For my sales-oriented friends, Inc. magazine tells us why sales forecasts are a joke.

A blogger must wear six hats corresponding to the distinct states in which the brain can be sensitized. For example, the yellow hat is for optimism, value, and benefit.

Here's an idea, say, for a beer maven who's perhaps already been featured once in a news article. A gent in Fort Worth blogged about A Year of Beer, drinking and reviewing a different beer each day for an entire year, from malt liquor to Rochefort Trappistes 8, and it got him some nice local news coverage. I suppose the trick would be limiting one's intake to only one brew per day.

Protégion is a great stop-motion animation about folding paper into shapes.

I have no idea why these houses are inside this stadium in Osaka.

Attention getting opening line: "Even when things seem to be chugging along smoothly, most business owners always have a dark cloud looming over their heads." This post about lead generation talks about how to get found, how to convert traffic into leads, and how to analyze the effectiveness of that process.

Writing the next great novel need not be a life-long endeavor but sometimes speedy prose has unintended consequences. Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in only 9 days.

For MINI owners, a cool campaign of some pretty wild paint jobs.

Design News' 2011 engineering salary survey leaves more questions unanswered than it answers. 65% of respondents reported higher salaries than 2010 (up an average 5%) while only 4% reported a decline. Average salary was $93,465 but there's no correlation of that with age making the number virtually worthless.

The canopy of the top secret and cancelled A-12 Avenger II can be yours for only $620,000 plus change. Some guy bought it surplus from the U.S. government and is now auctioning it on eBay.

Philips Norelco REALLY wants dudes to be hair-free. They've got a a website called ShaveEverywhere.com with a) a campaign to "help Willy deforest himself," (Willy? Really? Sounds sophomoric like I'd write.) b) a game where a Tarzan-like Willy runs through the jungle (Jungle. Bush. Get it?), c) a product called the Body Groom Pro that works on your head, face, chest, and "bonsai," and d) a poll about whether butt hair should be shaved or not. Either someone is running a really convincing parody or Norelco has some manliness issues. And how come the butt is the butt but Big Jim and The Twins are reduced to the bonsai, a diminutive Asian tree like the one I just gave my mother for Xmas? Damn, that's creepy.

Here's an interesting chart from the Economist about "employee holiday entitlement" by country showing who gets the most holidays and vacation. Of course, the USA is near the bottom and Greek and Spain are near the top. Draw your own conclusions. It's interesting that for the USA there's no mandatory holiday entitlement but pegs the average at 15 days. Because I realize the Brits use "holiday" for vacations too, I'm trying to figure out whether the dark blue portion of the bar is what we call holidays and the light blue is vacation.

How does your beard measure up? Get a t-shirt and find out where it stands from manly to beardly (kinda like who's in charge, you or the hair).

There's a lot of junk in here, but this list of obscure Disney gems includes a collaboration with Salvador Dali. Yes, that's right, Dali and Disney together produced Destino.

Abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler died this past week at the age of 83. Shown above is Tutti Fruitti 1966. You might think of her as a cross between Georgia O'Keefe and Jackson Pollock. (I didn't know she was married to artist Robert Motherwell.) image credit

Giving fair play to the other side, check out the blog post Butt-Ugly Artworks That Are Super Expensive featuring Pollock's #5 1948, De Kooning's Woman III 1953, and Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust 1932. I wasn't a huge fan of Pollock until I saw Lavender Mist up close and personal at the National Gallery of Art. Wow.

White Castle is testing beer and wine sales which is kinda odd cuz I thought you went to White Castle after, not during, a night of drinking.

I don't know which made me laugh harder, the fact that Robert Reich has a blog on Tumblr or the fact that he predicts a winning Democratic ticket in 2012 of Obama-Clinton. Wait - that's not funny. (Hmm, two political comments in one post.)

Can I get a rim shot?

Do you live in one of the 100 most dangerous cities in the U.S? Houston (#91) is the only Texas city on the list.

Gamers: Infamous NES game Takeshi's Challenge has been translated to English. (This caught my attention because of the name. Takeshi's Castle was the Japanese TV game show whose video became the basis for MXC, Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. MXC is to ABC's Wipeout as Brooke Burke is to Roseanne Barr.)

G-string. Vending. Machine. Can I borrow some quarters?

...And next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning. ~T.S. Eliot

*of the year.

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories by Dr. Seuss

2011-12-26T15:24:00.000-06:00

When I was much younger, two decades or more,
my oldest would beg "Read Daddy, more."
Down from his shelf the books I would pile,
and some more than others would get a big smile.
Books with eggs of unusual color,
a rainbow of fish, an unlucky feller.
Each one I'd read but he never called stop
but I sure did when it was Hop on Pop.
With Seuss and his creatures we had a grand time
because his art was joyous, his rhymes were sublime.
We had all the books and knew them by heart
but on went life and we and Seuss did part.

Until one day not too long ago
I read that our collection just wasn't so.
All Seuss's books weren't found in a store.
There were, as it turns out, a few stories more.
A fan named Charles had sussed them all out
from magazine articles in Redbook no doubt.
He put them together with artwork, indeed,
and published a book called The Bippolo Seed.

In this new book we find tales like his others
about Tadd and Todd, identical twin brothers,
and Gustav a fish, and Henry a dreamer,
Zinniga-Zanniga and red meat for dinner.

They took me back to the time on the floor
a little one pleading "Read Daddy, more."
But the thing about Seuss, and it doubles the fun,
he's as good for the dad as he is for the son.

Favorite Words and Tunes of 2011

2011-12-25T20:51:00.000-06:00

All the cool kids are doing it so I will too. Here are my favorite books and albums from this year's reading and listening.

Books

Conspiracy theories appeal to me for the same reason that NASCAR wrecks appeal to others - there's just something about the lengths to which some people will go to shape an event to fit their own ability to comprehend. JFK's assassination is one of those events around which a cult of conspiracy exists and I've read about a lot of them. This is why former Secret Service agent Gerald Blaine's The Kennedy Detail appealed to me - it cleared the conspiratorial fog and set the record straight. (my review)

And then there was Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. I am so glad for having read it but still completely baffled by what the author meant. I just re-read my review of the book and realized just how full of shit I am. Fortunately, lack of understanding was never a barrier to enjoyment. (my review)

While recently listening to the audiobook production of Nelson DeMille's Cathedral I couldn't help but be reminded of how much I've read about church architecture this year. Of course, the standout is Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. Follett created characters that were so real and so contemporary that upon completing the book I had to remind myself that Friar Philip died (fictionally) over 800 years ago. When will I invest the time on the sequel, World Without End? (my review)

Unquestionably, Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitzwas my favorite book of the year. Yes, I've got this thing for post-apocalyptic fiction but this is such a unique take on the subject that Canticle is something I imagine I'll be reading again and again. Mankind is portrayed as resilient which is great because we are tragically doomed to repeat our mistakes. (my review)

Music

I really ought to do a better job of tracking my music or at least as good a job as tracking my books. I think part of the reason for the difference is that I listen to music virtually continuously while reading books is a bit more discrete and easier to track. The other difference is that I get a lot of my reading from the public library whereas I buy all my music (and because I'm cheap I don't buy as much by comparison).

Forever by the trio of Corea, Clarke, and White is excellent. These three founding members of fusion supergroup Return to Forever reunite for a 2 CD set with their takes on jazz standards and remakes of RTF tunes.

Steve Reich's WTC 9/11 is a masterful display of composition in which recorded voices from that fateful day are woven into Reich's signature minimalism. Solemn, not exploitative.

Saving the best for last, Winter Garden by Harold Budd, Robin Guthrie, and Eraldo Bernocchi is an absolutely magnificent ambient soundscape. Winter Garden would have been a perfect soundtrack to this past February's record snowfall in DFW when I was at home on vacation watching from the window of my home office as the flakes accumulated.

I was not compensated by anyone in anyway for these reviews.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (A Kindle Experiment)

2011-12-25T15:49:00.000-06:00

Despite having never read an e-book I have been quite vocal in my preference for the dead tree variety. As luck would have it, I won a Kindle Keyboard 3G from Lexus in a random drawing. (Thanks Lexus!) So now I can challenge my untested preference.

Dickens is a favorite author and A Tale of Two Cities is one of my favorite books. And with it being Christmas, what better choice for a first e-book than A Christmas Carol.

A Christmas Carol also has the advantage of being free (along with many other classics) from Amazon's Kindle store. This appealed to my sense of frugality.

Although I've seen many movie versions of Carol, I had no idea the book was as short as it is. I was able to finish it in only a few hours spread over a couple days. Prior to starting Carol I was surprised to see it referred to as an essay on mortality. But if you think about it, death is central to many of Carol's characters. You may never look at Tiny Tim the same way again.

As for the Kindle itself, setup and linking to my Amazon account were easy. Downloading Carol (and several other free classics) was easy although I'll need more experience to easily search for and find specific books. Once I got the font size bumped up a notch, reading was not a problem. However, the reverse video flashing that occurs every time you change a page is annoying. My biggest problem with the Kindle was its form factor - it's heavier than a paperback, very thin, and very smooth and gripping it was an issue. As sad as it sounds, my thumbs got tired. There's no really good place to hold the Kindle on the front.

Overall, the experience wasn't that bad. I'll have to try a few more books to decide whether the Kindle can be a regular part of my reading arsenal (along with books and audio books). The real sign of victory will be when I start paying for e-books.

Oh, and A Christmas Carol was just as enjoyable as I expected.

I received no compensation for this review.

Too many have dispensed with generosity...

2011-12-24T11:27:00.000-06:00

Is it Christmas yet?

Who hasn't typed "let it snow" into Google search?

Bill Gross is the founder of over 100 companies including his most recent, the technology incubator idealab. So when he offers his list of entrepreneurial lessons learned, they are probably worth hearing.

Enter a rapidly growing market and it's like running a race with the wind at your back. [I'd call this jumping on the bandwagon.]
Master how to demo, teach, explain, pitch.
Work at something you love because without passion you won't be able to overcome all the obstacles you face. [It's hard to imagine founding 100 companies and each of them being something you love. Unless you love founding companies.]
Focus, focus, focus. Doing fewer things extraordinarily well will excite the customer. [I agree with this which should be no surprise considering that our product is a niche within a niche.]
Build around your strengths and hire where you are weak.
Don't overbuild. [Slow and steady wins the race?]
If you're ahead of the market cut back immediately and aggressively so you can survive until the market is ready.
Test, test, test and adapt to what you learn.
Stick with a good idea regardless of what the critics say. [In my case it was "I gotta tell you, I think you're crazy."]
Find essential partners. [Especially those with deep pockets.]
Harness your customers' passion. Help them bring you customers.
Be willing to face ridicule and opposition.

Isn't the idea of Viagra in a condom kinda like a chicken and the egg thing?

Watch this video and they'll be hanging on your every word at next weekend's New Year's Eve parties: What's a Tensor? "Facts of the universe." (Actually, because I never took Linear Algebra in college this is remedial for me. Haters gonna hate but I thought it was a pretty good explanation.)

I bet Rick's Custom Squirrels have been flying off the shelves this holiday season.

Hey, I know this guy! Joel brews his own craft beer, Honey Badger IPA. (Although I suspect that Joel does give a shit.) And this next article tells me something I already know: beer deserves a sommelier. (I kinda consider Joel to be my personal beer sommelier.)

This is a nice lens through which to view friends and employees. When you call them at 2:00 a.m. and as for their help, if their first reply is "Do you know what time it is?" your answer should be "Yes, time to get a new friend/employee."

Callin' Oates. 719-26-OATES. Your choice of Hall and Oates tune on demand.

Astronomy geeks, check out this video zooming in on the center of the Milky Way.

I don't get the whole zombie thing but, what the hell: Zombie Font

Composer Jean Sibelius' 30-year self-imposed exile is examined in this article. Because I've already decided this his Swan of Tuonela will be played at my funeral, Sibelius' quote about swans caught my attention.

"The swans are always on my mind, and they lend magnificence to life. It is strange to note that nothing in the whole world, not in art, literature or music, has such an effect on me as these swans and cranes and bean geese. Their calls and their appearance."

I didn't like Freakonomics (or any of Gladwell's stuff either) and this review is cautionary: "Easy read" should not mean "easy write."

I am ambivalent about Merriam-Webster's citation of pragmatic as the 2011 Word of the Year. Also in the top 10 are vitriol, capitalism, socialism, and some French gibberish with too many diacriticals to bother typing it here.

Othello a comedy? Data mining Shakespeare seems to indicate so (or at least that Bill used comedic elements to heighten the tragedy.)

Book seller The Book Depository has a map-based page on their site that shows in real-time what books people bought and where those buyers are. (Someone in Spain just bought Oliver Twist.)


The last of 195 F-22 Raptors (tail number 10-4195) rolled off the assembly line this month. I remember when it was called the ATF (advanced tactical fighter).

An alternate viewpoint: the STEM (science technology engineering math) labor shortage is false. The problem is companies who don't want to train new hires or pay market rates.

The team All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S. won $50,000 in DARPA's shredder challenge for assembling shredded documents. (The easy game for me is here.)

How to fool the masses when describing your GPU results.

Top visualization resources of 2011.

This guy abuses the English language about as badly as I do. Evidence: "I don’t know why attempting to move your model by jabbing a dead mole into your screen doesn’t work, but you’ll be interested to know about Maide control while you work out the details." The Maide control is an iPad app that you can use to interact with your CAE applications like Rhino.

This checklist used by Jim Lovell on the Apollo 13 mission recently sold at auction for over $388,000.

First came Pajama Jeans. Now there's Suitjamas.

Civil War Tokens is one of the more narrow branches of numismatics that I've come across.

At the risk of doing something I mock when others do it, artist Jonas Lund does a lot of web-based stuff that seem like things I could do. Like an installation of a shredder, connected to a website, shredding a photo of a camera.

Comedian Louis CK (who is absolutely hilarious) earned $1,000,000 in 12 days buy putting his latest standup routine up for sale on his website for $5 and without any DRM other restrictions.

Science can be pretty mind boggling. Neodymium magnet + copper tube = eddy currents.

If my butt is my password I guarantee that no one will want to steal my identity.

The trailer for Prometheus, Ridley Scott's Alien prequel, is available for viewing.

I can't imagine a more fitting end to a Christmas Eve post than Terry Gilliam's Christmas Card from 1968. Happy holidays everyone (and here's why that's OK).

...in order to practice charity. ~Albert Camus

the sound of falling leaves

2011-12-18T10:22:00.000-06:00

At first I only heard it. A soft pattering, like a low cool urgent stream tumbling over scattered gray slate stones, reflecting random flashes of the rare sunlight, wetting but not refreshing the earth beneath. Looking up, the blue-gray sky mirrored this imagined stream, low crenulated clouds, more cottony than smooth, slipping northeastward, foamy, with jagged white rents only hinting at the light but not the warmth of the mid-morning sun above. A single tree, one among dozens, randomly spaced, mature but not yet grand, all more alike than not, but all around rather than over me, stood trembling, its remaining small oval amber leaves vibrating, twisting to something unsensed while its green, rust, and barren neighbors stood perfectly and absolutely still. It was a sound like old ladies’ hands clapping. A slow yellow waterfall began as the trembling leaves dropped vertically to the dormant earth in a diminishing rustle. Yet nothing else moved, nothing except the shearing clouds. The tree’s shiver stopped, or perhaps paused, and an autumn stillness unlike any I had known since my midwestern childhood settled upon the morning. A poorly executed flock of tiny black birds silently darted overhead opposite the direction of the clouds. A squirrel expertly traced the top of the fenceline. The day came back to life.

P.S. Please forgive this self-indulgence.

Cathedral by Nelson DeMille

2011-12-17T15:37:00.001-06:00

This is about the 3rd or 4th book of Nelson DeMille's that I've read. A repeat customer must be a happy customer, right? Yep, it's true. Cathedral is a good story.

Published in 1990, Cathedral is an interesting tale of pre-9/11 terrorism in NYC when a notorious IRA man and his crew take hostages and hole-up in St. Patrick's Cathedral on St. Patrick's day. They get everyone's attention when they announce plans to execute the hostages and blow-up the cathedral at dawn unless their demands are met.

There are so many subplots, backstabbing, dirty dealing, mixed allegiances, and other skulduggery that it had me guessing right up until the end. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has their own personal agenda. It's no surprise that issues of religion, or more accurately faith, are woven throughout. Taken together, all the characters are shades of gray. Well, all except one. But this grayness is a bit of a problem because I couldn't develop an emotional connection with anybody. For example, I've just started listening to another Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child and I really like Reacher.

A friend says DeMille's The Charm School is even better so that will probably go on my list next.

Nothing so needs reforming as...

2011-12-17T14:43:00.000-06:00

Normally I put stuff like this at the end of a post but this one is so bizarre that it deserves top billing. Please meet Chatty Vag, the fortune-telling vagina. (It's a cartoon in case you're worried about seeing a real hoo-hah if you click the link.) Just ask her any yes/no question. "Will the Cowboys win tonight?" "My bush is making things cloudy. Ask again."

Since mentioning it last weekend I've been unable to get Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings out of my head. Here's the piece's 1938 premiere as conducted by Toscanini. And here's a more recent version by DJ Tiësto.

Author Richard Rhodes makes it painfully obvious why this blog's writing sucks: I need to stop listening to that voice (those voices?) in my head. Writing isn't simply copying down your self-talk.

When Star Wars vs. Star Trek gets all personal, George Takei steps in with this campy détente. Truly for the hardcore Star Trek geek only: 24 hours of the Enterprise's engines at idle.

And now it has a name: Prometheus. Ridley Scott's Alien prequel is set to hit theaters this summer.

Poussière is a beautiful little animation of what it's like to be a dust mote. Being French, there's romance built in to this 6 minute video. Check it out.

Hey all you booze bloggers - here's a cautionary tale about why drinking and blogging don't mix. Do you still lack a present for your favorite beer maven? Try the Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club. This month the Rare Beer Club's members are receiving Mikkeller's Happy Lovin' Christmas IPA.

The long wait is over - you can now add non-stop Nyan Cat to any website with NYAN-IT. For example, yours truly.

This article about the crash of Air France 447 echoes two separate engineering sound bytes from my past. When I was a wee intern at NASA my boss told me that failures in engineering systems are never the result of a single event - they are the result of a chain of related events. This makes finger-pointing a big more difficult. The second is a quote from a flight test engineer at NASA Dryden: "Insisting on perfect safety is for people who lack the balls to live in the real world." We cannot practically make crash-proof airliners, we cannot practically make skyscrapers that can withstand the direct impact of a jumbo jet, and if that bothers you be reminded that you're probably more likely to die in a traffic accident on the way to work than anything else. The article also jives with something I've observed in automated systems (software systems specifically): automated systems work great in very well-defined environments. But get outside that environment even slightly and all bets are off. The article, which builds largely upon an article in Popular Mechanics, quotes this odd bit: does "the inclusion of the human element will always entail the possibility of a catastrophic outcome." This seems backwards - inclusion of the human element should ensure that technology never leads us astray.

Science brings us this awesome - almost sexy - video of colliding liquid droplets shot at 5,000 frames per second.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not so fast there science guy. These dudes can shoot video at a trillion frames per second so they can take pictures of light. WTF?

I don't get what it is with cats and teh interwebs. But if you're looking to kill some time try procatinator where you get a random cat video paired with music.

Can it be true? The last F-22 Raptor rolled off Lockheed Martin's assembly line in Marietta, Georgia this past Tuesday. I remember when the F-22 was the ATF (advanced tactical fighter) and all it did was fly around in a computer behind locked doors.

I realize Prank Packs are "genuine fake gift boxes" (available at Bed, Bath & Beyond just in time for your Xmas wrapping) but I'm wishing the Family Blankeez was real.

It looks like Twitter was redesigned (Fly?). But I'm not certain why I'd use this new update rather than Tweetdeck, especially since Twitter owns Tweetdeck. And to be fair, Facebook now has this Timeline thing.

Now that I have this Kindle (first experiment ongoing) I'll have to find some free books from Project Gutenberg and Google Books.

Audio, video, haptics, blah, blah, blah. What teh interwebs really needs is smell. Enter Olly. Just plug into your computer and get a whiff of this blog.

Did you register your .XXX domain yet? What would you think of horsebits.xxx?

With all due respect to my friends who sell things for a living, the Cranky Product Manager's sketch of Inside the SalesDroid's Brain is quite funny.

WikiDumper is where articles rejected from Wikipedia go to die. (Why they rejected "Instant Rice" I'll never understand.)

I'm trying to decide whether the Grid-It organizer is a good idea for my laptop bag or not. I might need to so I wouldn't lose this: 16 GB in 1 cm. Kingston's DataTraveler Micro is pretty dang small.

You too can be nerdy if you learn how to use your computer's command line interface instead the GUI. Control your computer by typing instead of pointing and clicking. (powershell on Windows 7? Where'd that come from?)

Nvidia will share its CUDA compiler source code with academics and tool developers. I suppose that's good for folks who want to program GPUs.

Here's a video infographic of satellite launches since 1957.

Drumroll, please. The top 24 deep space photos of 2011. My favorite is the brown dwarf.

Did you miss it too? Yesterday was National Chocolate-Covered Anything Day.

World Toilet Day (coincidence) was back on 19 November. It's notable because the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced $47.5 million in grants for innovations in sanitation science.

At first I thought this article about reading on the loo would be great as it combines two of my interests (#2 and books). But, in the end I was disappointed.

Doing anything on the throne other than concentrating on the matter at hand it wrong, wrong, wrong.
I don't care what they say, poo gets on books and magazines and newspapers. Yuck.
Henry Miller claimed that Joyce's Ulysses couldn't be fully appreciated anywhere but on the toilet. (I wonder if that's a cheap shot?)
Which is probably why 16% of mobile phones in Britain have poo on them. (Please no, Pippa.)
The conclusion that reading on the loo "alleviates boredom" is a symptom of other problems. I mean, my god why is it taking you so long that you get bored?
And finally and most disturbingly, look at the photograph at the top of the article. I swear you can see that dude's junk.

Make it snow at your house because everyone deserves a white Christmas.

After all of the above, you're probably looking forward to some devastating explosions.

...other people's habits. ~Mark Twain

Sandwiches for Dinner

2011-12-16T19:35:00.000-06:00

This cartoon made me laugh out loud.

source

To keep a long story short, my Dad once told my Mom to never serve him soup and sandwiches for dinner again. Apparently, it's a bullshit dinner too.

Self respect is like...

2011-12-10T07:46:00.001-06:00

I'm gonna try a little real-time music critiquing. Here's Era Una Mañana Gris and other tunes on SoundCloud by Nicholas Szczepanik. Play them while reading and we'll compare notes at the end of this post.

This isn't the best produced concert video, but it is interesting to see Steve Winwood play Pretzel Logic with Steely Dan live in Melbourne this past October.

Another friend's tip for good music: Nuclear Free City.

Just something to fiddle with.

I must be smarter than I thought. Science proves that poo-throwing is a sign of intelligence. Or, phrased differently, the ability to throw accurately was a precursor to speech development in early humans.

Smart is usually good. But sometimes smart people can be bad employees. Do you recognize any of the following types?

Sometimes really smart people have agendas that don't lead the company down a path of improvement. The employee may be disempowered, a rebel, or just immature.
Smart people, like the rest of us, can be unreliable for any of a number of reasons.
Then there's the smart person who's just a jerk in a way that simply stifles communication when they're involved.

It's nearing year's end and that means plenty of "Best of 2011" lists. ReadWriteWeb weighs in with their top web developer tools of 2011. Included on the list are the nearly ubiquitous jQuery JavaScript library and Chrome developer tools (because apparently Firefox is on its way out). For better or worse (probably the latter) I use none of these tools other than their sideways reference to using Vim as your web development IDE.

Ben Fry's zipdecode is an oldie but a goody. This interactive map illustrates how zip codes work in the U.S.

Frank's Compulsive Guide to Postal Addresses is a valuable resource for anyone sending mail (does anyone still do that?) internationally. For example, Ireland is unique among European countries for not having postal codes.

If you need to send someone a secret, try One Time Secret, a site that provides a single one-time-use link.

Creative people are more likely to be cheaters. I've observed this in practice. But a study from Duke University seems to back up this observation. The issue is stated thusly: ethics requires you to balance self interest with self respect. Creative people balance that arrangement in creative ways that are actually unethical.

Naked people are more likely to be deemed more experiential than mental. In other words, observers tend to treat agency (the ability to think and plan) and sensuality like a zero sum game: less flesh, more thinking - more flesh, more feeling. A damning statement in the article says that women applying for jobs are punished for having breasts, because they are perceived as having less agency and more feeling. (The same is true for men, however, when perceived by women.)

Sudsy beer stuff. The folks at Stella have a holiday gift for you: a free, downloadable jazz album of holiday music. I know that when my beer mavens read that Natty Light is the first beer in space, they'll say they wish it stayed there.

We all probably did that elementary school science experiment where yelling at plants makes them grow less than if you said nice things to them. But did you know the same thing is true for disk drives? Yelling at them increases latency. Performance loss due to microvibrations is a business opportunity. This is all very similar to the speakers for my home audio system. Celestion's speakers were designed to minimize the audible distortion produced by vibrations of the cabinet.

Levitated is chock full of interactive thingies like this one called Seeds.

How much easier would playing classic video games be with these game maps, including Super Mario Bros. and Doom? Someone made a stop-motion video of Super Mario using beads. Not to be outdone, here's a stop-motion video done in Minecraft of Super Mario Land for Gameboy.

This survey almost sounds like a "Duh" moment: teenagers aren't interested in engineering as a career choice because they know very little about it. Once they learn more about the profession including how much money engineers make, 61% of teens are more likely to consider engineering.

The Rap Board is a website full of your favorite rapper's signature sounds. I could click on Lil John saying "What" and Flavor Flav saying "Yeah boy" all day.

What does 3D tessellation have to with Xmas? An art class led a student to develop Reptangles, truncated octahedron turtle-like shapes that snap together in hundreds of ways.

Vintage film about the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The U.S. Navy maintains a historical archive including special photographs of the 7 Dec 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

This almost unnecessary review of the 1961 Chuck Jones animated holiday classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas is notable only for its commentary on the 2000 remake starring Jim Carrey which I'll quote in its entirety. "this... refers to the ORIGINAL animated version of The Grinch, and not the Ron Howard film version that ruined Christmas forever a few years back. If you want to know if that movie is okay to show your kids, the answer is NO. NEVER. If you catch them watching it, burn your TV in front of them to let them know you mean business." Amen.

Dispensing toilet paper doesn't have to be dull.

Learning: classical mechanics (not the automotive variety).

The Sales Engineer Guy shares his list of free sales engineering resources on the web.

Apparently November was a good month for visualization as the Visualising Data blog's "best of the web" is a two-parter: Part1 and Part 2.

This banana color guide and much more can be found at Spaces of Banana Control.

Lots of banana stuff this week. For example, how do you open a banana? The flip of the wrist method? The pinch the bottom like a monkey method? Or do you need a tool like the banana opener? They say the pinch method eliminates all those messy strings (aka phloem bundles).

They say the puzzle at Can you crack it? is a recruiting tool from a British spy agency (their equivalent of our NSA). Regardless, can you? Might be good for students interested in cryptography.

Here's an interesting and historical look at symbolism in literature. I know a lot of people don't like the search for meaning in art (sometimes a banana is just a banana). But symbolism is there. And a lot of what makes art art is the search for higher meaning. I like Ray Bradbury's response: "I never consciously place symbolism in my writing. That would be a self-conscious exercise and self-consciousness is defeating to any creative act."

But maybe you are a person who needs an analytical approach to art such as neuroaesthetics. Here's one man's opinion that this may be a red herring and that art is more philosophical than scientific.

Therefore, judge 4Monkeys by yourself.

Holy Shit. The giant weta, the world's largest insect, may be the single most disgusting thing I've ever seen on teh interwebs. First, no bug should ever be this big. Second, this is a perfect example of why nature needs to be kept outside. Third, why the hell would you hold it in your hand and feed it a carrot? Do you think it's smart enough to tell the difference between a carrot and a finger? I'm going to go barf now.

It's that time again. Get Santastic Six, this year's collection of holiday-themed mashups from djBC.

CNBC brings us these 5 undefeated eating challenges including Fort Worth's own 64-ounce chicken fried steak, the Full-o-Bull challenge at the Cowtown Diner.

The Museum of Obsolete Objects predicts the demise of the computer mouse in 2015.

Shakespeare was apparently ahead of his time with respect to psychological causes of physical ailments, or so says a gastroenterologist and 16th century literature expert. "Romeo, come forth; come forth, thou fearful man: Affliction is enamour'd of thy parts."

On this list of the 37 best sci-fi books, I've only read 5: Ender's Game, Starship Troopers (nothing like the movie), A Canticle for Liebowitz, Fahrenheit 451, and Old Man's War. I'd get 3 more if you could count movies: 2011, Contact, and I Robot.

This isn't a business blog, but if it was we could track these 5 critical blog metrics: visitors, leads, subscribers, inbound links, and shares.

GoMo is a Google initiative to make your website mobile-ready.

Read at your own risk: signs you may be a bad programmer.

So what did you think of Szczepanik's music? Forgotten Dreams seemed to be hiding Barber's Adagio for Strings (as heard in Platoon), The Short-lived seemed to me to be way too distorted, and Her Last Breath was kinda nervy like a skipping LP. Era Una Mañana Gris, the tune originally recommended, was the strongest of all but I almost got the impression the top layer of droning distortion was intentionally hiding a melody line that was a movie soundtrack. And it was a bit too long.

You look like you need a hug. Get one at The Nicest Place on the Internet.

...a prison for the soul. ~Dilbert

Adults are just obsolete children...

2011-12-03T07:29:00.001-06:00

Two tracks from Winter Garden, the new album from Bernocchi, Budd, and Guthrie, are available for your listening pleasure.

As documented here previously, I love it when there's a juxtaposition, an intersection, a crossover, a synergy of two or more things that I like. First I find a new CFD-related blog about plasma simulation, Particle in Cell. But with just a little digging around on that site, I find that its author also writes a Slovak Cooking site. Jackpot! My advice is to rush immediately to the recipe for stuffed cabbage. The only question is whether it will be as good as my grandmother's.

Aviation pr0n of the week: a video of the first F-35C launch using the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) as opposed to the old hydraulic catapults.

Waterfox is the 64-bit version of Firefox.

Beer pr0n of the week: Wine Enthusiast named their Top 25 Beers of 2011 with Canada's Unibroue Don de Dieu triple wheat ale leading the way. One new brew that's certain to make next year's list is the recently announced MMMhop IPA from boy-band sensation Hanson. I shit you not.

Give us more B-17s. Damn right. source

Of all of Murphy's Laws, the one that rules them all is "Murphy was an optimist." The computer-related laws of are special importance to me but one not included on their list is "Of quick and dirty, dirty is remembered long after quick is forgotten."

Impress your friends or imagine you're a Hollywood actor playing the role of computer hacker with Hacker Typer. (Just start typing.)

Git yer patriotism on with this Armed Forces Salute from the West Virginia University marching band.

Psychologists have proven what has been known for a while - the fact that form is liberating. From TV sitcoms to pop songs to poetry, the constraints of form actually promote the creative process. "The larger lesson is that the brain is a neural tangle of near-infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice."

Speaking of mentally navigating those near-infinite possibilities, a doctoral student at Indiana University hypothesizes that humor is the brain's reward for identifying faulty assumptions and choices in that tangle of possibilities - a reward that keeps the brain thinking along the practical path. A conclusion is that a sense of humor makes you a better thinker.

Here's an idea for your next trade show giveaway or party gift: private label condoms.

Music pr0n of the week. Tristan Shone performs as the solo act Author & Punisher. He's a mechanical engineer by day who makes his own musical instruments and performs "industrial drone and doom metal."

Find out what the 1st edition covers of classic novels looked like.

James Joyce didn't just write novels. He got a number sequence named after him, based on a passage in Ulysses. The Joyce sequence represents the number of digits in solutions to n raised to the n raised to the n for n=1,2,3...

A video compilation of famous improvisation in movies. "Take the cannolis." I feel obliged to advise NSFW due to language.

Art.sy is like Pandora for artwork by suggesting similar or related works based on your preferences.

Downfall pr0n of the week: Hitler finds out about the final U.T. vs. Texas A&M game.

I feel validated now that the Modern Art Notes blog has named the catalogs for de Kooning's and Dieberkorn's exhibitions as some of the best art books of 2011. (Check out my posts tagged "art.")

Exactly how hot was it in Texas this summer? The daily temperature average from June through August was 86.7 degrees, the highest such average recorded for any state.

Do you give a shit that I think Gary Oldman is a great actor? Probably not. But he is starring in the film adaptation of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

...so the hell with them. ~Dr. Seuss

de Kooning: a Retrospective

2011-11-27T09:45:00.001-06:00

at Amazon.com

Remember when I wrote that the Diebenkorn book was perhaps the best exhibit catalog I'd ever seen? Well, de Kooning: a Retrospective, the catalog accompanying the MoMA's exhibit of de Kooning's work, might have topped it.

It should come as no surprise that a retrospective would be encyclopedic and this volume is. It starts with a great essay on de Kooning's life and work that my art pea-brain could appreciate but not fully comprehend. That's followed by a chronological progression through the various periods of de Kooning's work including timelines and, of course, plates of the artwork.

What I found most intriguing were brief Methods and Materials articles about how particular paintings were made including cross sections of paint layers, x-rays, and forensic analysis of how paint was applied.

I won't bore you with the details. For my friends who think abstract art is simply a spontaneous eruption of paint, there is an interesting pencil study of a particular painting that demonstrates the forethought that de Kooning put into his work.

I will share two works from the book that really caught my attention. The first isn't even a work on canvas. Woman 1951 is charcoal and pastel on paper. I just found it arresting. In case you're interested, it seems this 21.5 in. x 16 in. drawing sold for about $4 million in 2008.

de Kooning, Woman, 1951

The second was the black and white Painting 1948 which reminded me of Callum Innes' work in the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. (The similarities are more in technique and palette than composition.) Painting is the subject of one of the book's Methods and Materials sections that describes the limits of de Kooning's budget at the time limiting him to a bucket of black enamel and a bucket of white. The painterly description of Painting delves more into the "sum of resistances" and how the paint was applied and removed.

de Kooning, Painting, 1948

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea...

2011-11-26T07:13:00.001-06:00

The Job Creators Alliance is a way for CEOs to tell their side of the story about how to get people back to work. It was created partly in response to the belief that the "occupy" folks are monopolizing the message and belief that government isn't the answer. Read a little back story here.

Sweet mother of god - Bacon Egg Pancake Cup

How do you poach programming talent in Seattle? With a bacon cart.

Color Thief, a script for getting the dominant color and color palette from an image looks cool but I wish it was a web-based tool. (I suppose What's Its Color will have to do.)

Speaking of thieves, if someone's stealing your internet service you could cut them off or mess with them - as in invert all the images. I thought Upside-Down-Ternet was urban legend but it looks real.

I could play this game all day. paper toilet .com

I could've sworn I shared Bruce Connor's 1981 video MEA CULPA before but perhaps not. It's a great video comprised of found images backed by the track Mea Culpa from David Byrne and Brian Eno's album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, made from found sounds.

If you're going to use social media to find a job, Facebook seems to be the way to go followed by Twitter and the LinkedIn. There's something odd about professional networking site LinkedIn being half as effective as Facebook for finding a job.

CF-18 Hornet with a tiger stripe paint scheme.

Someone's trying to make a movie out of Ender's Game and the kid from Hugo has been cast to play the role of Ender.

A huge animation art auction is coming up next month. The Icons of Animation Auction features some fantastic stuff, from a $300 drawing of Roger Ramjet to a $20,000 production cel and background of Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty to a $120,000 production cel and pan background of the Hag from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. The catalog is worth browsing even if you don't plan on bidding.

Here's an interesting social media idea that melds the digital and analog, the electronic and the tangible: have your event Live Sketched.

Like ketchup and a banana split, there are some good things that shouldn't be combined. Like Jackson Pollock and a jigsaw puzzle.

Why do some people spill their coffee while others don't? Science comes to the rescue. It depends on the natural oscillation frequency of the coffee and whether the person's walking motion excites that frequency.

Maybe you're more into swirling wine. That depends on "the ratio of the level of wine poured in to the diameter of the glass; the ratio of the diameter of the glass to the width of the circular shaking; and the ratio of the forces acting on the wine."

The Memphis Belle, the famous B-17F that completed 25 missions over Europe during WWII, is undergoing restoration at the National Museum of the Air Force in Dayton and this 3-minute video gives a nice overview of the project. At the 15 second mark of the video there's a photo of the crew. I have this photo hanging in my office signed by the pilot, Robert Morgan.

I know people who'd die if their work made it onto the Tangled Cable Appreciation page.

With today's launch of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission with the rover Curiosity (you watched it this morning, right?) what better time to check out this infographic of all the missions to Mars.

I could watch this all day: slow motion video (1 million fps) of bullet impacts.

My philosophy guru is Epicurus (key promise: peace and tranquility, key peril: boredom). Find your own guru at My Philosophy Guru.

One man's approach to debugging. I like the "All engineers are fucking idiots" stage.

Will your next desk be an EXOdesk? The desk is the computer, the computer is the desk.

More proof that science is answering the key questions of our time: flies like beer because of glycerol.

Artists like beer because they can collaborate on this huge sound sculpture made out of recycled Red Stripe beer cans.

They folks at xkcd put together a nice infographic about money, from single dollars to trillions.

Yet another way to see music: circular music spectrum analysis. Be sure to watch the video.

I'm still a sucker for those Downfall parodies. This time Hitler finds out he's been out-memed by the pepper spraying campus cop.

Rolling Stone listed the 100 greatest guitarists. Notables for me are #62 Robert Fripp, #14 David Gilmour, and #5 Jeff Beck.

The Alien series of movies is a personal favorite. So you can imagine my excitement when I heard about Aliens on Ice. Unfortunately, this production gives Aliens, ice skating, and theater a chest-burster. Honestly, I shouldn't be surprised.

Another simply done yet wonderful animation - dream (drem) n.

"Look at Shakespeare. Poor bloke. Wrote thirty-seven plays, none of them his." Hilarious article by Eric Idle (of Monty Python fame) in The New Yorker.

Orgasms. Who fakes 'em? Women are about twice as likely to fake them and are most likely to do so if they think their partner is cheating. Coincidentally, this article is from Yahoo! which is what I shout every time I have an orgasm.

A delightful photo essay of strange toilets and urinals, Part 1 and Part 2. I'm partial to the commode with the fish tank tank.

An E/A-6B and an E/A-18G painted in vintage WWII colors.

Ouka: after a while chasing down that little flower starts to drive you nuts.

Cats celebrating Hanukkah.

...when it's the only one you have. ~Emile Chartier (paraphrased)

Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat

2011-11-25T10:15:00.001-06:00

at Amazon.com

After a brief discussion of Faulkner's prose, a friend recommended that I give Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf a try as an example of straightforward storytelling. So on a post-Thanksgiving Black Friday morning outside under a cool gray sky I did just that.

Not bad. It's a nice tale of a Canadian government biologist in the early 60s who's sent into the arctic to study wolves, at the time thought to be a scourge needing eradication. The book opens with a chapter or two of his experiences as a new government employee that left me with impressions of Catch-22 and then transitioned to a Dave Barry like humor as his expedition got started.

After that, and with all due respect, it impressed me as a good story for school kids. It has the (if you'll pardon the pun) lone wolf lead character who's distancing himself from authority as he finds that man, not the wolves, are the true problem. It's got the adventure aspect of being alone in the wilderness and confronting these beasts. And it's got enough scat and sex references to keep a student satisfied. Contributing to my impression is the fact that it reminds me of some of my childhood fiction like Paddle to the Sea and some movie about a lone guy who builds his own cabin in the middle of the woods somewhere.

After finishing the book, I learned two interesting things. The book was made into an Oscar-nominated film in 1983. And there's apparently a bit of controversy about how much of the book is true versus a work of fiction. Imagining the movie version of Never Cry Wolf inevitably made me think of the documentary Grizzly Man - which I recommend despite the fact that it's a sad and disturbing look at a flawed main character who whose naivete is ultimately and finally shattered.

Jour de Dinde Heureuse

2011-11-24T11:19:00.001-06:00

That's "Happy Turkey Day" to all my French-reading readers (French-reading speakers? French-speaking readers?).

Proving yet again that all good humor is based on a kernel of reality...

source

Ready for Anything by David Allen

2011-11-20T09:43:00.001-06:00

at Amazon.com

I'm a fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done approach to personal productivity and while I haven't drunk all the bathwater I have implemented (to my benefit) many of the ideas his two books, GTD and Making it All Work. Therefore, I figured Ready for Anything would be a nice addition to my bookshelf.

I was wrong.

Each of the 52 principles referred to in the subtitle are a 2-4 page micro essay that's more motivational than instructional or reinforcing. I get the impression that it be a good introduction to Allen's principles for reading on an airplane or somewhere else where your time may be limited. It took me a long, long time to get as far into the book as I did.

I couldn't finish the book.

So even though I'm still a fan of the GTD approach to productivity, I can't really recommend Ready for Anything.

Everyone talks about leaving a better planet for their children...

2011-11-19T13:54:00.001-06:00

The Fort is a nice 4-minute time-lapse video shot in Fort Worth this past summer.

ROSA, a 10-minute sci-fi film, deserves as many awards as they have to give. Watch it on Vimeo or checkout the film's website.

Moby's giving away some of his music for free for use in films.

This news story from Phoenix's KPHO features word combinations that I had never seen before: tampon and vodka, beer bong and anus, butt and chugging. You should infer that tomorrow's leaders are experimenting today with new ways to get drunk. Soak a tampon in vodka and stick it in your hoo-hah. Stick a beer bong hose up your butt and chug-a-lug. I always find it odd that when young boys make manly displays it involves some sort of homo-erotica: butt chugging, hazing other athletes with a broom handle, spanking fraternity pledges on their bare bottoms. Makes you wonder. Kids: you're doing it wrong.

Kids: Back in the day we fell on things in the shower and didn't need any other excuses like getting drunk. The book Stuck Up! reveals things where they shouldn't be. Another page about rectal foreign bodies.

Unrelated to the previous paragraph, Boeing delivered the first 30,000 pound massive ordnance penetrator (aka GBU-57) to the Air Force.

I hereby declare Occupy Whatever to have jumped the shark. Everyone should go back to their mother's basement and take a shower, especially the drum circles.

Aviation pr0n du jour #1 - F-22 with an F-15

Know yer lists: 9 equations you gots to know (I got 6 of 9), 11 sounds my kids will never hear, 25 optical illusions.

Science once again comes to the rescue. Watch this short video of Ross Nanotechnology demonstrating a superhydrophobic spray-on coating. It's basically a super water repellant. The name of the product is NeverWet which reminds me of most of my dates in high school.

Learning things online: Painless Python Tutorial, flying the SR-71 Blackbird, Bertrand Russell's The Analysis of Mind.

Anyone else remember Chuckles? See them and other vintage candy ads.

In the most disturbing news item of the week (which sounds weird considering what you've already read if you've gotten this far), record labels are planning to abandon the CD by the end of 2012, replacing it with downloading as the main distribution stream. Where to begin? First, I hope they're going to be using a format other than the sucky mp3 which makes everything sound like my first stereophonic turntable that my parents bought at Gold Circle in 1976. Second, during 2012 I either have to stock up on CDs or figure out how to make my home stereo system compatible with electronic formats. Third, what are the implications for album covers and liner notes?

And in other news of things going away, this blog post alludes to the pending demise of trade paperback books (the bigger ones) and the subsequent demise of mass market paperbacks. So sad. And when did paperback books change size the new so-called "premium" that's a bit taller? Now books don't fit my nice leather sleeve anymore. And all the while my week-old Kindle sits.

A friend writes poetry good enough to win GOOD's poetry contest, making her work actually better than So-So Poems.

I don't know "hone" means in this context, but I call it telling time with mimes.

Know yer beer: The Oxford Companion to beer, Bowser Beer for your dog (pigs like it too!).

The fact that you can print things in 3D is freaky enough. But you can also build your own 3D printer.

As this guy shows, it makes sense to keep an eye on what's in your pocket change.

What's the volume of a ball in N dimensions? It's even less straightforward than it sounds.

Modern takes on classic paintings.

Aviation pr0n du jour #2: Two F-35Bs on deck.

Seth Godin shares his 9 steps to PowerPoint magic. (Dang, 2 weeks too late.) #8 Make it too breathtaking to take notes. Dang, missed again.

Consider mind officially blown: the wave function in quantum mechanics may be physical. Repeating: the wave function may be real, not just a statistical crutch.

Excellent talk by Brian Eno about the nature of composition and composer as gardener versus architect. Take 15 minutes to watch the video or read the transcript. To paraphrase, it's not about order versus disorder, it's understanding how order comes into being.

Paripatetic rocks in Death Valley. What's up with these rocks that seemingly move on their own across the desert floor?

Meanwhile in China. More here.

I love things that let you see music. Baroque.me is a visualization of the prelude to Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 that visualizes the music as strings (that you can interact with). If you'd prefer to see and hear the piece all the way through, watch the video on Vimeo.

From Oprah to Ulman, the top 50 motivational web personalities. (I checked. The answer is no.)

Know yer colors: 93% of consumers rank color and appearance above other factors, 85% rank color as a primary reason for buying, 80% say color increases brand recognition.

Tweeted this a week ago but will repeat: Canada is the top source of U.S. crude oil imports. This and other factoids are available on an infographic from Technology Review.

Know yer LEGOS: Cube Dudes, extreme organization methods.

Xmas is just around the corner - consider artisanally sharpened pencils.

Know yer astronomy: a topographic map of the moon from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Back in the 50s they really knew how to market to kids. For the plus-sized school girl: "Your chubby lass can be the bell of her class with Chubbettes."

There's bad luck and then there's my kind of luck.

Some people worry when they find blood in their stool. I have stool in my blood.
When I dig a hole to hide a body, I usually find another body.
I live on a 1-way street. It's also a dead-end.

Time for an instant dance party.

Now pull my finger.

...yet few talk about leaving better children for our planet. ~anon

Communications of the ACM Scores Big in Nov 2011

2011-11-13T09:37:00.001-06:00

This month's issue of Communications of the ACM hits a home run with several notable articles that I thought I'd share.

Hexagonal grid with 480 km resolution.
Goal is 4 km.

Modeling Chaotic Storms starts things off with a look at simulations of global weather patterns up to and including the potential for 60-minute advance predictions of extreme weather. In fact, the authors write that future advances will come from simulation rather than increased scope of observation (i.e. satellites and radar). One of the challenges faced by modeling is the rather sparse set of data on which any computation is based - so-called initial conditions. Like most simulations of fluids like air or water, the nature of turbulence, the chaotic motion of a fluid, is also poorly understood. The computations required for weather modeling are far from trivial and researchers are turning to new technologies like GPUs (graphical processing units) that ran run 25 times faster than traditional hardware. The challenge here is that GPU programming requires a non-trivial up-front investment to modify the software.

Whether or not software engineering is truly engineering is addressed by Will Software Engineering Ever Be Engineering? The author makes a strong argument for the fact that it isn't now and likely never will be. The arguments for the latter are:

Engineering is ultimately about physical systems. Software is not.
Software is a large profession - on the order of law or medicine - and is therefore more likely to split with engineering than join up with a profession twice its size.
MIS or IT might be a better home for software as its more likely to be practiced in those areas than engineering.

In an article that's one of the most explicit treatments that I've ever read, Teaching-Oriented Faculty at Research Universities lays bare a truth that many people, including students, ignore. If you think that faculty at universities are hired and promoted for their teaching, you're wrong. They are hired for their research and their ability to bring in funded research. You'd also think that despite that they can teach. Alas, no. "Active research is not a predictor of effective teaching." Therefore, teaching-oriented faculty (TOF) provide a valuable service, not only by the act of teaching courses (especially undergraduates) but they also undertake critical functions like curriculum development, advising, and course development. And yes, they do some research too. The fact that TOF at a university is almost seen as a novel idea is quite disturbing. Or I'm just naive.

Other interesting articles touch on diverse topics such as the rejection of the Google Book Search settlement (centered around whether scanning books for the purpose of indexing search results was fair use or copyright infringement), a call for software liability laws (most if not all software licenses include limits on liability including "merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose"), and why high performance Fortran hasn't had any staying power.

This issue alone was well worth the cost of my annual ACM membership.

Business of Software 2011

2011-11-12T15:02:00.001-06:00

It already seems like months since I attended the Business of Software Conference (www.businessofsoftware.org) this past October 24th through 26th in Boston. But in reality it's only been a couple of weeks. This is my second BoS experience having first attended in 2009 in San Francisco. I challenged myself to return from BoS2011 with actionable items which I didn't do in 2009. Let's see how that worked out.

Clayton Christensen (@claychristensen), Harvard Business School - How to Create New Growth Businesses in a Risk-Minimizing Environment

The conference kicked off with Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen who's probably best known for authoring The Innovator's Dilemma, supposedly the only business book to influence Steve Jobs.

The gist of Christensen's talk was that successful businesses are hard to maintain over the long term because conventional thinking about management is insufficient. It does not teach us to be disruptive, it does not provide us with guideposts, and the structure of large corporations denies them the inability to evolve.

Traditional product development begins to outstrip the ability of customers to use the product. The path forward is to be disruptive and considering emerging markets for which a different standard of performance applies. In this space the simpler product represents the bigger market, especially if you choose to compete where any bigger players are motivated to flee rather than fight.

One of Christensen's main points was to develop an understanding of how customers experience life - not the customer but their job. Understanding the customer's job is key. He cited Peter Drucker's famous quote, "The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it is selling him." He states that jobs are stable while products are not.

He closed by listing the three categories that all business models fit: solutions shop (specialists providing a fee for service), value adding process business (manufacturing or education with a fee for outcome), and facilitated network business (insurance, which is fee for transaction).

Action Items: Ensure that we have an understanding of the customer's job.

Jason Cohen (@smartbear), Smart Bear Software - Naked Business: How I Made More Money Through Honesty Than Typical Business Behavior

Jason spoke about how honesty makes more money than deceit. Jason is the founder of Smart Bear Software and has authored a book on code reviews.

After decrying the fact that lying is almost expected and accepted he cited various examples including comparison charts and 100% positive product reviews. As counter examples, when Canon showed mixed reviews of their products, sales of both high and low rated products increased but sales of low-rated products became more profitable.

He quoted something similar to the line from Ries and Trout's 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: truth in limitations earns believability in advantage. In the end, the benefits of lying are small but the downsides of being found out are huge.

Jason ended with one interesting quote about open source: "Open source is free like a puppy is free."

Action Item: Considering changing website copy on the product tour to list what the product doesn't do.

Alex Osterwilder (@business_design) - Building Competitive Advantage Through Business Model Thinking

Alex's book Business Model Generation was named by Fast Company magazine as a best book for business owners in 2010 and has gone on to sell more than 120,000 copies. The book's website is businessmodelgeneration.com.

His book is an attempt to create a common language and definitions for what a business model is. The components of his business model canvas are:

Customer segments
Value proposition
Channels
Customer relationships
Revenue streams
Key resources
Key activities
Key partners
Cost Structure

Alex encouraged everyone to approach creation of a business plan like an engineer. Use a "design thinking attitude" and a "test before build" philosophy.

Action Items: none

Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh), HubSpot - Insights and Musings on the Business of Software

Dharmesh Shah is a co-founder of HubSpot, the inbound marketing company. He's a perennial favorite of BoS and is open about BoS being his favorite conference. His talk covered a variety of topics.

The purpose of your business is to create delighted customers. This is at the core of why he created CHI, the customer happiness index, which was originally used to predict churn (when a customer would leave) but has evolved into predicting customer success. Because Hubspot is a software as a service (SaaS) company, it's not surprising that churn is a killer and that's exactly what CHI is meant to help avoid.

On the topic of setting a price for your product it was very simple. "Pricing is hard. It's very very hard. And changing a price is even harder." He shot some holes in the freemium pricing model, replacing it with the self-explanatory cheapium. The main thing is to assume that customers are connected and united so your pricing needs to be transparent.

You'll need sales people in three instances: the product is complex, the market is new, and/or the price is high.

Action Items: none

Rob Walling (@robwalling), Software by Rob - Writing Game Changing Copy for Websites and Landing Pages

Rob did not present at BoS2011 but lead a workshop on writing compelling website copy. His website is SoftwareByRob.com. During the workshop he led us through several exercises related to writing or re-writing our own website copy.

Your writing should focus on the prospect and speaking directly to them because people love to feel understood. This is why most professional sales copywriters are psychology majors not English majors. It's about persuasion. How do you maintain that focus on the prospect?

Use "you" or "your."
Include a verb.
Make a promise.

Do not write things like:

We are pleased to announce...
Founded in 1978, we...
We... (anything)
The best...
(describe the product)

Writing copy goes wrong from the start if we begin with a list of features and then start writing. Instead, start with our prospects concerns and motivations and directly address the most urgent one.

Rob recommended a couple of tools.

Survey.io as a tool for collecting information about customers
HitTail.com to find good keywords

After writing your headline, rules for writing the rest of the copy are simple.

Think in bullets
Progress from the vague to the specific
Then include the features

Action items: Apply these rules to our website.

Jeff Lawson (@jeffiel), Twilio

Jeff Lawson, founder of Twilio (for building voice and text apps) and CTO at StubHub (ticket sales) spoke about pricing. He said it was important to know your customer - the person, not the enterprise. One method for pricing is simply to quantify the value created and then apply some discount. Or you can set price as the cost divided by 1 minus your margin that you want to earn. (Margin = profit / price). Value pricing lets you charge either by the money the customer will save by replacing one solution with yours or by their savings because of the increased efficiency you'll provide. As for competitive pricing, Jeff says don't do it.

Ideally, pricing should be based on customer feedback during a private beta and then overprice a feature and drop the price later.

If you are unsure about how to set price you should resist the temptation to make many price options and limit yourself to 3 or 4 and put the sweet spot in the middle. Also, you need to segment your audience and use that to drive pricing - quantity based, feature based, support based, or industry based.

Action Items: none

Tobias Lutke (@tobi), Shopify – Building Great Companies

Tobias is the founder of Shopify and spoke about how to build companies that we won't be embarrased by in 100 years. He pointed out that critical success is a combintation of a great product and good timing but warned that success doesn't make you right.

Shopify puts 1% of all revenue into a bonus pool that is awarded based on the internal exchange of "unicorns" - little badges that one employee can award to each other. These awards are made monthly.

One interesting product support technique they use is to assign new customers a single "guru" for their first couple of months.

Action Items: none

Patrick McKenzie (@patio11), Kalzumeus Software - Engineering Your Marketing Outcomes

Patrick was the winner of the Lightning Talk competition from 2010 and returned to speak on marketing, especially for SaaS. While we know that math and science are always right marketing is simply witchcraft that is designed to change peoples' behavior.

Your sales funnel is your most important tool and conversely poor sales funnels kill. Therefore it pays to describe, measure, optimize and profit from your funnel. He mentioned KISSmetrics, Mixpanel, and HubSpot as tools for doing this.

In general, shorter funnels are better. Any changes you make to a portion of your funnel make multiplicative improvements. If your funnel is sick, A/B testing is medicine. Check out Visual Website Optimzer and Optimizely. You should be testing your home page, landing pages, headlines, offers, calls to action, graphical elements, and microcopy.

Keep in mind that everyone runs your software the first time. Only 40% on average will run it a second time. Therefore you must nail the first impression. For this he recommends never starting with a blank screen and customize the trial experience in a way that guides the prospect to greatness. The fun bits of your software should not be hidden - reveal them ASAP.

Action Item: Consider the out-of-the-box experience for evaluators of our software.

Laura Fitton (@Pistachio), oneforty/HubSpot – Business of Social

Laura is the "Queen of Twitter", founder of social media consultancy oneforty.com (recently acquired by HubSpot) and the woman who influenced Guy Kawasaki's use of Twitter.

Would anyone pay money for your marketing? If the answer is no (and it likely is) you should consider thinking socially by using your marketing efforts to provide attention and value to others. Social media allows you to do that in an "any to many" way. The keywords are listen, learn, care, serve.

The steps to success with social media (or inbound marketing as HubSpot calls it) are get found, convert, and measure what matters. In order to get found you need to have a website and blog, use social media, and understand SEO. To convert you need to have a strong landing page, good lead nurturing, good email, and lead maintenance. Measurement consists of analytics, A/B testing, mobile applications, and your other sales and intel activities.

Recommendations:

HubSpot's tools at Grader.com
Dan Martell
Look on Slideshare for Pistachio.

Action items: Consider our use of social media in light of her advice.

Josh Linkner (@joshlinkner), JoshLinkner.com - Unleashing Creativity

Josh Linkner is a VC at Detroit Venture Partners and spoke about unleashing creativity based on his book called Disciplined Dreaming. He spoke about techinques for ensuring that you remain creative such as:

describing what's happening in a random picture
Asking the 5 whys. Or What if? Or Why not?
Have a "Where's Waldo?" level of awareness.
Learn from failure.
"Role storming" = brain storming in character

He promotes the idea of having a Failure of the Year award inside your company and giving all employees a Get Out of Jail Free card or two each year - and being disappointed if they don't use them.

Action Items: none

Rory Sutherland (@rorysutherland), Ogilve Group - Praxeology, Lessons from a Lost Science

Rory gave a hilarious presentation on what you would think was a rather stiff topic - praxeology, the science of human behavior and decision making as it pertains to economics. Rory has spoken at TED before and you can find examples of his talks at TED.org.

Rory points out that there exists a double standard whereby creativity is policed by rationality but not vice versa. What's needed is to find the sweet spot between technology, psychology and economics. The problems with marketing are that it lacks influence, our models have not kept pace with the media (i.e. internet), and no first principles. Enter Ludwig von Mises whose idea of praxeology points out difference between subjective and objective value. Whereby the that the value produced by the main product is indistinguishable from other deliverables.

Praxeology defines a new vocabulary: availability, signaling, framing, comparison and context, immediacy. Information assysmetric leads to commitment. Satisfying versus maximizing shows that being a little better isn't good enough and the "rule of 3" facilitates choice. The concept of choice architecture lets you frame choices so that the prospect makes one. How price is used as a substitute for quality.

Action items: none

Mike McDerment (@MikeMcDerment), Freshbooks - A Litany of Product Management Mistakes

Mike is the cofounder of Freshbooks talked about a litany of product management mistakes. In a company's infancy it's a question of what to build. In survival mode when you've grown it's a matter of deciding who gets to decide. And when the company scales up how to ensure that everyone can contribute.

Freshbooks is another example of a SaaS company with a lot of issues about A/B testing.

Action items: none

Paul Kenny (@paulkennyOL), Ocean Learning - The Art of Asking

Paul has spoken at each of the past three BoS conferences and always on the topic of sales. Sales is essential to a business. You don't have a sales person - everyone in your organization has a sales function. Paul quoted Peter Drucker, "No business results exist inside an enterprise. The result of a business is a satisfied customer."

At a certain point you have to close a deal or ask for some other commitement. We usually don't ask out of a fear of rejection. Closing is simply asking for a commitment to move the conversation forward. You can commit to a concept, an action, or a purchase. Not asking means waiting which is paralyzing. Asking actually aids the decision making process. Even if the answer is no, it's better than an unqualified yes.

All of these little commitments by the prospect lead to bigger commitments as you go forward. Plus, closing demonstrates commitment to your own proposition.

What kinds of mistakes do people make when closing? Asking in the wrong way at the wrong time or failing to ask in the right way at the right time.

Secrets to closing including priming the pump (ensuring you've properly built up to the question), asking like you mean it, using different approaches so you're not a 1-trick pony, expecting a yes but be ready for a no, taking advantage of every no, and waiting for an answer and shut up.

How to close:

Direct: Are you ready to buy?
Indirect: The product meets all your requirements, right?
Assumptive: We'll schedule the install for next week, OK?
Alternatives: Can I put you down for A, B, or C?

Extroverts speak in order to work out what they think. Introverts think in order to work out what to say. Both are OK.

Action items: none

Dave Cancel (@dcancel), Performable/HubSpot - Creating a Data Driven Business

Dave is the founder of Performable, also recently acquired by HubSpot. His mantra is JFDI - just fucking do it. You can read, dream, talk and think but you better act too. Your business needs to be optimized for learning because data validates your assumptions and can be used to ensure that everyone in your organization knows how they impact the business.

The average conversion rate for a website is 2% so having a good dashboard, monitoring customers, website visits, evals, purchases, email subscribers, and your sales funnel is critical.

They poll their customers to see who's likely to recommend their company. The poll rates that question on a 1-10 scale. Scores of 1-6 are considered detractors, 7-8 are passive, and 9-10 are promoters.

Action item: Consider polling our own customers about who'll recommend.

Alex Ohanian (@kn0thing), Reddit - Making the World Suck Less with Software

Alex is the founder of Reddit and Hipmunk (which obviously is about making hotel and flight reservations) among other things and talked about how traditional business sets the bar too low. Businesses exist to solve problems and make money but people do all the rest. His disjointed talk was about a hippy-fest of giving away stuff.

Action items: no way

John Nese, Soda Pop Stop

John Nese, a guy who rarely uses email, was one of the highlights of BoS. During an onstage interview, John talked about his business, Soda Pop Stop, that specializes in rare, independently, glass-bottled soda. It should be no surprise that many of his business principles were similar to those in the software business.

Action item: order some soda (by phone)

Summary

I came away with a handful of action items as listed above. We'll see if I actually do them. As for BoS, the 2012 event is scheduled for 1-3 October in Boston. I'm not sure I'll attend or whether BoS is an every-other-year event for me. I felt a definite skew this year toward SaaS which isn't 100% applicable to our business. Plus, I get the feeling that BoS runs the risk of being a static group of people who get together each year to renew friendships - lots of motivation and not so much teaching.

Also, I had the displeasure of participating in perhaps the worst workshop of my professional career (instructor to remain unnamed). I knew more about the subject than he did but that's not what made it bad. If I knew nothing I would've come away knowing less.

You can see what you missed at the BoS2011 Flickr pool. The BoS website also has links to videos of many of the presentations from previous years with promises to post this year's talks in the future.

Disclaimer: These are just my opinions. I could be wrong.

Note: This post may look funny because it was a cut and paste job from Word and I didn't want to spend all day cleaning up every little thing.

Happiness in intelligent people...

2011-11-12T07:55:00.001-06:00

Trey Gunn's new album Invisible Rays is now available. Because the album's guitarist is also a research diver, you can watch a cool video of Antarctic diving with a track from the album.

Nature wants to eat you and from the looks of this tumblr it's well equipped to do so.

Sarah Morris, Black Beetle [Origami], 2008, more

I think perhaps a back-to-the-basics approach is warranted which is why I've bookmarked Google Code University's course on HTML, CSS, and Javascript from the Ground Up.

Trying to make a single website implementation work well on both traditional and mobile devices is futile in the same way that you can't just show TV on a screen in the theater.

Using just 25 ml of pee, a new fuel cell can generate 1/4 mA of electrical current for 3 days. Soon Toyota may announce the Peeus.

The Japanese people continue to make remarkable progress on recovering from the earthquake and tsunami as this "time lapse" photo essay shows.

Check out the animated version of this image and others at Sensual Objects.

The NY Times article on Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It's Just so Darn Hard) really frustrated me because it gets many things right but an equal number wrong.

Assuming the title was written specifically to be an attention getter, it succeeded. In fact, it pissed me off. Of course it's hard. Anything worth learning is going to be difficult to master. If I took a course in wood-working it would be difficult for me because that's not my strength. If you think your engineering classes are hard, maybe a career in engineering isn't for you.
They say 40% of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) students change majors or fail in college. The implication is that after getting high school students all pumped up with erector set and Lego projects, they get turned off by actually having to - wait for it - learn the math and science behind all that stuff. I don't suppose grammar and spelling are optional sub-topics for English majors - and so it is with calculus and engineering.
One former engineering student is quoted as saying “I was trying to memorize equations, and engineering’s all about the application, which they really didn’t teach too well." I hope all of you see the logic problem here: "application" is an application of engineering knowledge to a particular problem. Knowledge comes before application. As one of my undergrad professors told me about his course, "Of course it's boring - it's propulsion." That's not to say it wasn't necessary or valuable.
The article's author further opines that students find engineering education "too narrow and lacking the passion of other fields." One might turn that around and say that students lack the passion to learn engineering.
Here's an ugly truth: "top professors are focused on bringing in research grants, not teaching undergraduates." This is absolutely 100% true. Being a professor (especially in engineering) is all about bringing in funded research. Teaching undergrads, despite them being the university's cash cow, is a distant second place. This is exacerbated by the tenure system (and I won't argue its relative merits here).
Another ugly truth: "Other bright students may have breezed through high school without developing disciplined habits." Let's just say I know this to be true from personal experience.
Bottom line: Engineering is "darn hard" - get over it.

If learning is still so hard as to stymy you, maybe you should get your facts from pictures.

Astronomy pr0n: A quasar accretion disk (aka matter being sucked into a galaxy's central black hole) as view by the Hubble Space Telescope.

What do you get when you cross a great text editor with a software development platform? Eclim; a combination of vim and Eclipse.

The story behind the deleted pie fight scene from Dr. Strangelove and other pop culture artifacts.

If you're a woman with a sexy name you're much more likely to get hired by a man. Sexy name? Christine. Unsexy name? Ethel.

What do emotions look like?

After this, I can stop counting proof that innovation isn't dead. source

Do not read any further if a lady's "down there" offends you. Why wake up with a standard alarm clock when the Little Rooster can wake you up by tickling your hoo-hah?

HBR delves into social strategies to determine which ones work. The ones that don't work simply involve broadcasting messages. They don't work because people do social to meet new people and strengthen existing relationships. Not surprisingly, strategies what work are those that help people make and maintain relationships.

Must-watch video of the week. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog visits Occupy Wall Street. Absolutely hilarious.

Parts 1 and 2 of a beginner's guide to developing for iOS.

Point and counterpoint. First, Koyaanisquatsi, an "art-house" treehugger video. Second, an alternative way to consider man's relationship with the environment.

...is the rarest thing I know. ~Ernest Hemingway

Corea, Levin, Budd and More - Backlog of New Music

2011-11-06T10:24:00.000-06:00

I listen to music a lot: in my offices at work and at home, in the car (except when listening to audiobooks), and on my computer right now as I type this (Pandora & Google Music). Oddly, when I need to focus on something at work, turning up the volume helps. (Borrowing a Marillion lyric, "a halo of distortion aborting pregnant conversation.") Lately I've been fortunate to get some really good new tunes. In no particular order they are:

Forever by Corea, Clarke & White - at Amazon.com

Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, and Lenny White are 3 of the original members of Return to Forever, the awesome fusion group. They've reunited to tour and release this recording of some jazz standards and their own tunes. Forever starts off great with the jazz classic On Green Dolphin Street and gets better from there. The trio's sound on the live numbers is wonderfully warm and open and whereas Clarke's bass as captured on the recent RTF Anthology collection is pretty severe here it is much more refined (for example, the new take on Senor Mouse). I wonder why guitarist Al DiMeola wasn't included in this revival.

Live in Russia by TU - at Amazon.com

Live in Russia by TU (pronounced "two"), a duo of drummer Pat Mastelotto and touch guitarist Trey Gunn (both King Crimson alums) was nothing like I expected. Instead of progressive bombast from this rhythm section (perhaps I was expecting something like Tony Levin's Liquid Tension Experiment) I got an almost ambient improvisational experience that was so richly detailed I had to keep reminding myself it was only two guys playing live. My Father He Is The Factory stands out as a favorite.

WTC 9/11 by Steve Reich (composer) and Kronos Quartet (performer) - at Amazon.com

Upon hearing of the pending release Steve Reich's WTC 9/11 I knew I was going to buy it. Reich's minimalist compositions are always awesome exercises of rhythm and tonality and therefore his treatment of 9/11, my generation's Pearl Harbor, was certain to be excellent. I was not disappointed. Reich's work combines recorded voices from that day's events with the Kronos Quartet's performance. The voices don't just sit on top of the tracks, they are fully integrated musically with a result that's solemnly haunting.

In the Mist by Harold Budd - at Amazon.com

Ambient music is an acquired taste ("squeaks and rattles" as a friend described it). But I've grown very fond of Harold Budd's piano work and In the Mist is no exception. I often think that Budd's work is best listened to outdoors. A breeziness and alternating patches of sunlight and shadow are the effects of the first two tracks, Haru Spring and The Whispers.

Mutopia by Exo 4 - at CD Baby

Think of Exo 4 as a jam band from outer space and Mutopia as trippy and experiential. The track Doctor K rockets along with a pulsing beat. Sometimes Floydish, sometimes ambient. I'm told they have to been seen live to be truly experienced.

In the Court of the Crimson King (remastered) by King Crimson - at Amazon.com

Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree) and Robert Fripp's 2009 remastering of King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King is exactly what the doctored ordered. This classic work, often cited as the genesis of the progressive rock genre, has been uncompressed, cleaned up, and given room to breath. The original recording was often muffled and muddy with so much dynamic range that the pianissimo was rendered virtually unhearable. Now the ring of every cymbal, the breathiness of the flute passages, the full thump of every tom strike is awoken. If you like the original, you'll love this remix.

The Look of Love by Diana Krall - at Amazon.com

Diana Krall has been a guilty pleasure ever since I saw her perform Cry Me a River in her Paris concert on Ovation TV.

Disclaimer: I received no compensation for these reviews. No one in their right mind would want my endorsement.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

2011-11-06T08:48:00.000-06:00

Dracula at Amazon.com

After passing over the audiobook version of Bram Stoker's Dracula at the library for years I finally decided to give it a listen. The timing (near Halloween) was coincidental. I figured it was just time to experience this novel if for no other reason than gaining the background of this pop culture phenomenon. (No, that is not a Twilight reference.)

Written around 1900, the novel features the flowery or long-winded prose of the day which isn't hard to digest. However, it was a bit of a stretch to handle Prof. Van Helsing's pidgin English (he's Dutch) - it was almost comical and distracting.

Not much more to say than that. Dracula was well worth the time and anyone who's a fan of modern vampire fiction (the Underworld movies are a guilty pleasure of mine mostly because of Kate Beckinsale) owes it to themselves to read the original. I suppose I should now watch the 1992 film starring Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins.

There are always three speeches...

2011-11-05T12:17:00.000-06:00

What is a lexadecimal? It's a color whose hexidecimal number forms an English word. For example, this background color is feeble (#feeb1e).

I sometimes think this detached beer belly is how my wife sees me.

Forbes' article Leadership Is Not An Entitlement Program has one interesting quote: "When leadership is perceived as little more than a title granting access to a platform for personal gain, rather than a privilege resulting in an opportunity to serve, we'll continue to find ourselves in a crisis of leadership."

Happy 20th birthday Vim! If you need a text editor (not a word processor) you should be using Vim. (You Emacs freaks know who you are.) Why Vim? Multi-doc interface, modal editing, multiple clipboards, macros, search, extensible, portable.

For all my programming friends, especially recent or soon-to-be graduates, READ THIS: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer and Other Career Advice. "Hopefully it will provide value over what your career center isn't telling you."

Scratch - a programming language for kids.

There are so many reasons to love this story. First, what's not to love about beef jerky? Second, add a little buzz by creating caffeinated beef jerky. Third, develop it in Natick, MA for the army. Fourth, zapplesauce?

Must-watch video of the week: Pythagasaurus - "He knows all 8 numbers."

We apparently have only scratched the surface of the true value of Twitter, at least according to this blog post. The more I use Twitter (2,074 tweets and counting), the more I like it. The article's points are:

Identity: Twitter's asymmetric follower model (I can follow you but you don't have to follow me) makes your Twitter handle a more convenient identity than your email or Facebook or LinkedIn.
Object Communications: "When machines can talk to other machines you will have a truly powerful internet."
Predictive Data: Twitter streams should be monitored to gain real-time competitive advantage.
Augmented Data: Combining the Twitter stream (see #3) with meta data to draw further conclusions.

I just added the upcoming (29 Nov release date) album Winter Garden by Eraldo Bernocchi, Harold Budd, and Robin Guthrie to my Amazon wish list.

Are you really into typography? Do you know what kern means? Then by all means play the kerning game, Kern Type, where you earn points for properly adjusting the spacing between letters in a word.

Know yer punctuation: the percontation point and other obscure marks.

Cupcake ipsum dolor. Sit amet icing jelly beans cotton candy chupa chups tiramisu donut. Caramels croissant bear claw lemon drops jujubes cheesecake. Danish candy candy toffee sugar plum cheesecake. Jelly-o danish icing biscuit fruitcake lemon drops tiramisu caramels brownie. Biscuit marshmallow danish danish tart donut lollipop. Lollipop oat cake bonbon icing jelly beans gummies. Toffee biscuit tiramisu sugar plum tootsie roll chocolate bar jelly beans. This paragraph brought to you by Cupcake Ipsum.

Beer. In. Space. Vostok 4 Pines Stout. Brewed by an aeronautical engineer nonetheless. Good thing someone's already invented a zero-g drinking cup, as reported here on 22 Oct 2011. Now some beer maven is going to start asking about what kind of head your beer will have in zero-g.

I overuse the term "aviation pr0n" but if anything qualifies it's this photo of shock waves around a Blue Angels' F-18 doing a low high-speed pass over water. Absolutely kick ass.

A two-part article (part 1, part 2) on the Ares defense technology blog describes a reunion of former employees from Area 51 and their work on the A-12 and other classified projects. A 1-hour video of a presentation on Archangel: The CIA's Supersonic A-12 Reconnaissance Aircraft is now on my short-list of videos to watch.

Google has everything, it seems, including easter eggs.

Leave it to the professionals: monkeys. source

Vaccinate your children. From Scientific American, "one quarter [of parents] held the mistaken belief that vaccines can cause autism in healthy children, and more than one in 10 had refused at least one recommended vaccine. This sad state of affairs exists because parents have been persistently and insidiously misled by information in the press and on the Internet and because the health care system has not effectively communicated the counterarguments, which are powerful."

How many ways are there to hear your IP address read to you? You can have Glenn, an apparent Village People wannabe, groan your IP. And as reported here a while back, you can have a sexy girl moan your IP.

Science shares her secrets: fingernails on a chalkboard (do kids even know what a chalkboard is?) sound horrible because of components in the 2-4 kHz range, the same range as a human voice, which for obvious reasons, our ear amplifies.

asapiophobe: a person who hates or fears the lack of intelligence in others. You know who you are.

Alphabetimals - for kids and immature bloggers

Play with the solar system. But Sticky Thing is better.

...the one your practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave. ~Dale Carnegie

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

2011-10-29T19:33:00.001-05:00

Get it at Amazon.com

Daniel Suarez' Daemon had me going right up until the very end. But the last 20 or so pages unraveled the entire novel in a completely unsatisfying way.

Suppose you're a computer genius who starts a computer gaming company that becomes incredibly successful and you become incredibly rich. Things are pretty good. Until you die from cancer. But why should the afterlife stop you from exercising your will here on earth?

You can think of Daemon as the Matrix turned inside out. Augmented reality is the key here and it makes for an interesting tale as a police detective, a hacker with a mysterious background, and the government's own geek genius chase the daemon that the gamer left behind. I've read enough that something new in terms of plot is refreshing every once in a while.

And it was, up until the end. I don't always need the loose ends tied up. But this ending came out of left field, left behind about as many dangling story lines as there were characters, and practically screamed sequel. It was like having the literary rug pulled out from under me. And it was a stupid ending too.

Daemon was a good read for an airplane ride and I appreciated the fresh story line. Suarez's writing was enjoyable, too. There were several instances of unique phrasings and well-written passages. But the ending was enough to make me reluctant to try his next book, Freedom.

The errors of a man...

2011-10-29T11:21:00.001-05:00

When you watch this video you'll never be able to look at a toddler the same way again - babies are just little drunks.

Forbes magazine (Forbes?) proposes three TV shows to revive the Star Trek franchise. I'll admit to watching TNG, Voyager, and DS9 but I don't think I ever watched a single episode of Enterprise. The last scifi TV series I watched was Babylon 5 which itself got a little lost in the final episodes. Forbes' idea for Section 31 does sound interesting.

If you've ever wondered whether an email address was legit or a hoax, now you can test this with VerifyEmailAddress.org.

Presentation tips: First, Dan Pink advocates three qualities of every presentation: brevity, levity, and repetition. From the Cooper Journal, your presentation needs to be new, true, useful, and beautiful. OK, now the question is how.

I just bought a 100 foot extension cord so this video about how to roll it up will come in handy.

An interesting application of isarithmic maps to visualize county electoral data. This map shows distribution of family income including the effects of population density.

X-Wing is a HMTL-5/WebGL game where you pilot an X-Wing fighter around the surface of the Death Star. Works best in Chrome.

What influences your grades most? Intelligence? Personality? Prior performance? Nope. Hope. From the Journal of Research in Personality: Hope uniquely predicts academic achievement above intelligence, personality, and previous academic achievement.

Infographics giveth and taketh away. In this one we see the perks you get for working at Google, Facebook, Twitter and others. At Google you get 15 days of PTO, unlimited sick leave, and 12 paid holidays. Facebook provides photo processing and laundry service. Twitter has catered breakfasts and lunches. But all this information is presented in a way that makes comparison very very difficult.

Aviation pr0n of the week: X-47B cruise flight test with gear up. It'll be something to see this thing land on a carrier, at night, in a storm.

At last week's Business of Software (#BoS2011) the rhetorical question was asked "Would anyone pay for your sales collateral?" The answer was a resounding "No." The answer should be "Yes" as evidenced by this HBR study that cites the sales experience as the overwhelming business differentiator even over price, product, and brand. Stated another way, your sales team should be teaching customers in a way that leads them to your unique benefits, rather than just leading with your benefits.

This is a historical gem: a series of three autobiographical videos about artist and animator Eyvind Earle. You may not know his name but he was the background artist for Sleeping Beauty. I was not aware that a painting of his was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its permanent collection long before his commercial success at Disney.

What time should you go to bed? Did you know teh interwebs can help answer that question? At least the sleepyti.me bedtime calculator can. For example, I get up at 5:00 a.m. and sleepyti.me says I should go to bed at 8:00, 9:30, 11:00, or 12:30. OK, so 9:30 it is.

Add to your collection of webcams: the Statue of Liberty TorchCam.

I am human number 76,885,261,952.

Is It Old? lets you determine whether a link is fresh or some dusty old junk that everyone's bound to have seen before.

baby drunks: ridiculously old
Star Trek: kinda OK
verify email addresses: ridiculously old
Dan Pink: no opinion
Cooper Journal: old
extension cord: really old
isarithmic maps: kinda OK
X-wing: old
hope: kinda OK
perks: really old
X-47B: kinda OK
business differentiator: ridiculously old
Eyvind Earle: OK
sleepyti.me: dead
human number: old
Is It Old: mad fresh (of course)

...are what make him really lovable. ~Goethe

I'll Take "Things You Hear at a Conference" for $500, Alex.

2011-10-27T21:04:00.000-05:00

I spent three days this week with about 350 other people at the Business of Software Conference. Great event. If you're in the software business you should really attend at least once. But one hears many things at conferences.

Speakers dropping f-bombs. Yes, the speakers. During their talks. On their slides. Honestly, it doesn't bother me unless it's overdone. Which of course, one speaker did. I get it - you're hip and edgy and compensating for your weak-ass content. Please get off the stage.
Ringing cell phones. Jeezuz kee-rist people, turn off your fucking ringer. I swear, 4-5 times each day I'd get to hear someone's poorly chosen ring tone. And don't get me started on ring tones. Vi-ba-rate.
People talking. In the audience. During the presentations. Is this junior high? Can you spell d-o-u-c-h-e b-a-g?

Today's post was sponsored by the hyphen.

Some cause happiness wherever they go...

2011-10-22T11:53:00.000-05:00

Eating and Drinking

Let's begin with a good breakfast and by that I mean a look at the 50 best breakfasts of the world. If you throw out the tomatoes and beans, I guess I'm a fan of the English breakfast. The American breakfast is pancakes and bacon which, while delicious, doesn't come close to bacon and eggs and hash browns (and let's not get started on what good hash browns are about).

For my beer drinking friends: Design a label for your homebrew using Labeley. How many of America's most alcoholic beers have you had? (Precisely 1: Stone's Double Bastard.)

Form and Content

The Eyes Have It. How well do you know your cartoon characters from their eyes alone? Interactive site and poster.

Painters: Website for the project to create Richard Diebenkorn's catalogue raisonne. Mark Bradford has had an apparent meteoric rise to fame including his current exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art. The work of Tomory Dodge and John Zurier.

Dev Harlan, Parmenides I, 2011. Sculpture and video installation.

Part 7 of the series of visualization resources lists essential visualization books which is continued in part 8.

Structure and Behavior

Back in 1883 an astronomer observed what he thought were hundreds of comets. His contemporaries disagreed, calling the observation birds or insects passing in front of the telescope. Later, the UFO loonies latched onto this. Now we have a more sinister explanation: a billion or so tons of comet fragments passing within 600 to 8,000 kilometers of earth. Can you say extinction event?

Scale of Universe is a flash-based, poorly drawn ripoff of the classic film Powers of Ten.

On the role of technology in music Brian Eno wrote "Technology in music is a little bit like numbers in mathematics. You can't really imagine music without technology."

Proof #1124 that innovation was still alive in 2008: a zero-g coffee cup.

Lacking Common Sense

Proof #36D that science remains keenly focused on tackling the grand challenges of our time: why there are bumps on your nipples. (There are bumps on my nipples?)

You would think this would be ripe for jokes but I'm having trouble finding a single one. Miss France models a bikini made from 300 pieces of chocolate. Your turn.

100. Pound. Scrotum. Why isn't science working on this?

Ooh LaLa indeed. source

Shoemania is an auction of autographed celebrity's shoes. Who wouldn't want David Hasselhoff's hiking shoes?

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

Especially mammals. source

Conflict

If you ever think you're having a bad day or deserve a pat on the back, read the story of Medal of Honor recipient Roy Benavidez.

A soldier is inspired by the movie Predator, created a belt-fed ammo backpack for his machine gun, sends it to the Army lab in Natick, MA, and gets back the Ironman (which I'm certain has some convoluted acronym).

Sure. Nazi soldiers last week, Hitler this week. I'm a sucker for those Downfall overdubs where Hitler reacts to current news. This time he finds out that Gaddafi has been killed.

Challenge Conventional Wisdom

Steve Jobs, "role model": A demanding perfectionist who ran Apple like adictatorship. Who cheated his “friend”,Steve Wozniak, out of thousands of dollars early in their friendship. Who fathered an illegitimate daughter andrefused to acknowledge her as his child until years after the fact. Who typed angry emails to his critics. Who regularly lost his temper when hisemployees screwed up so much as one line of code. Who feels is beyond his own rules. Who only donated to charity once.

Bill Gates, "aggressive businessman": One of the richest, yet humble, men on the planet who nevertook for granted what he accomplished. Who took responsibility when it came to family matters. Who wrote code for years along with hisemployees even despite the fact that he was of higher authority than theywere. Who was strict with his employeeswhile still being respectful to them. Who constantly donated to charitablecauses during and after his time as chairman at Microsoft.

source

Denouement

Finally, it's time for a deep, cleansing breath. But why breath by yourself when you can breath synchronously with people around the world courtesy of the Universal Breathing Room. In... out... in... out...

...others whenever they go. ~Oscar Wilde

Attempt What Is Not Certain

2011-10-16T15:10:00.000-05:00

Richard Dienbenkorn: The Ocean Park Series is perhaps the finest art exhibition catalog that I've ever read. The book begins with three very insightful essays on Diebenkorn's life and work but the beautifully reproduced and encyclopedic plates of his paintings, prints, and works on paper steal the show.

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #79, 1975. source

Diebenkorn claimed never to be consciously painting windows, architecture, landscapes, or the wonderful oceanic Californian light that suffused his Ocean Park studio. He, almost like us, discovered these parallels after the fact or at least toward the end of his work on a painting. Regardless of the source or inspiration, Diebenkorn has produced a group of paintings that are unique in their palette, their balance of color and form, and their depth and weight.

On 27 Sep 2011, Diebenkorn's daughter, Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant, lectured at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. She, like her father, feared being trapped by the formality and permanence of words and didn't want to try to address Diebenkorn's work from a critical or historical perspective and instead spoke from the viewpoint of a daughter.

Gretchen said her father had a real "sense of place" in that his paintings truly reflected his environment. Consistent with the character of his paintings, he had a special way of seeing variations of color. He appreciated "well-made useful objects." Gretchen said that he liked "things with a history" which I think correlates with his paintings, not from the sense that they're historical, but rather they have a depth in which layers of work and visible work-overs reveal the process of creation.

In his studio, normally dominated by diffuse northern light, he was an "aggressive, active painter." At first I found this insight surprising because Diebenkorn's palette and forms are so breezy, for lack of a better term. But upon closely inspecting the plates in the book, instead of uniform washes of color the brushwork is quite clear.

Despite being a relatively quiet person (he hated talking on the phone), Diebenkorn was apparently opinionated with a strong sense of right and wrong and was not a fan of compromise. This too was reflected in his painting. Gretchen told the story of a painting that hung in the family house for years because Diebenkorn didn't like something about it. Finally, on a Christmas eve, he pulled it off the wall, pasted a new section of canvas over a relatively small region, painted over it, and declared the piece complete. All while everyone waited so the Christmas eve meal could begin. Exactly what he was trying to achieve, no one else knew.

Diebenkorn despised labels and categorization as it pertained to his work. He strove to always develop a new vocabulary for his work. Gretchen used phrases like "intimate spaces," "order" and "calming" to describe his work, a lot of which utilized the Golden Section in its layout. She specifically denied any "angst" in his content. I would agree wholeheartedly with those labels.

Diebenkorn never expected to be recognized and was overwhelmed by his critical success. He especially didn't value any of his periods over any others (he had previously done abstraction and figuration).

Artists that Dienbenkorn loved include Cezanne, Munch, Matisse, and de Kooning. He listened to Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and lots of classical quartets but not while working which he most often did alone or rarely in the company of his dog.

By way of self mockery, I will admit that I have not yet toured Diebenkorn's same-named exhibit at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth but I promise (to myself more than others) to do so by the end of November. If only to be able to find the time.

I'll close with a link to Diebenkorn's "Notes to myself on beginning a painting."

Robert Ryman, untitled, 1965. source

On a related note, I had the pleasure of enjoying another of The Modern's lectures on 11 Oct 2011, this one by TCU's Francis Colpitt on problems and optimism for abstract painting in the age of postmodernism.

Critics would have you believe that abstraction is dead. They say abstraction is the emblem of modernism and therefore has no place in postmodernism. Because abstraction is so closely related to painting and because painting is considered dead, abstraction must be dead too.

When one thinks of modernism one thinks of balance, harmony, gravity, unity, the elimination of the unnecessary, and a faith in progress. On the other hand postmodernism brings forth the lack of balance and gravity, an informalism, irresolution, and a rejection of advancement.

Abstraction can be considered a pictorial language that is the purest form of painting. As for the death of painting, it has been declared multiple times including 1939 (photography), 1950 (Pollock, who was said to have taken painting as far as it could go), 1960 (Judd, whose installations were said to be the death of sculpture which was the death of painting), and 1975. Obviously people are still painting so the art form isn't literally dead.

So what is meant by the death of painting? It's the loss of painting's mythical status as the epitome of artistic expression. And a lot of postmodernism since the 1980s has been about getting beyond myths. When one thinks of art today you're perhaps more likely to think of mixed media, computer graphics, installations, performance art, or sculpture. Until about the 1960s-1970s painting was virtually synonymous with art.

Dr. Colpitt characterized postmodernists as having lost faith in transcendence, as rejecting the sublime, and as having lost belief in self-expression. For example, the brush stroke, the gestural mark in painting is rejected. The example she provided was crying in front of a Rothko. Rothko himself is quoted as saying that people who are that moved by viewing his paintings are sharing the experience he had while making them. On the other hand, postmodernists would be incredulous that such a reaction would even be possible.

Fortunately, Dr. Colpitt sees an optmistic future for abstract painting in the postmodern age. She defined abstraction as the "atomization of the core of experience," "the language of the 21st century" and an "allusion to the non-demonstrable."

The Art Thief by Noah Charney

2011-10-16T07:30:00.000-05:00

Noah Charney's The Art Thief was a good enough novel, one that I'd give a solid B. I had been doing a lot of other art-related reading and decided it would be a nice audiobook tie-in.

The plot starts out interesting enough - how can the same painting be stolen twice? Not twice in its lifetime. Twice at the same time. The search for the answer to this paradox brings in a host of characters from Scotland Yard, the French police, art museums, art societies, and art fans of all sorts.

Somewhere in the middle of the novel I realized that virtually every character should've been a suspsect. And in a quirk I didn't really like, the revelations and settling of accounts comes in the epilogue, an overly dry recitation by one of the characters about how it all came about. An unlikely group of characters comes out on top and an even more unlikely group ends up with nothing.

P.S. I wish I could figure out why the Amazon Associates widget in Blogger stopped working.

The most difficult thing to achieve in painting is...

2011-10-15T10:12:00.000-05:00

Meet the Mona Lisa. Wait. What? Oh, Meat Mona Lisa. Then clean up with a visit to the online moist towelette museum.

Clyfford Still, Untitled, 1947

The Modern Art Notes blog presented a 3-part series on American abstract expressionist painter (and general pain in the ass) Clyfford Still. It's my favorite post on that blog in years. It's a nice preamble to the opening of Still's museum in Denver next month. I love his paintings.

Gumbasia is Art Clokey's Fantasia-inspired film that spawned Gumby.

I don't usually play online games but WonderPutt is very cool, especially the graphics during the transitions from one hole to the next.

The thoughts of Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman have been compiled into three short videos on the subjects of Beauty, Honours, and Curiosity. "I don't feel frightened by being lost in the universe without having any purpose."

I must get a bubble tank for my fish, Roy.

If it's true that city-states are replacing nations in our global economy, how do certain U.S. cities compare to countries around the world? The DFW Metroplex's economy exceeds that of Argentina, $376.8 billion to $368.9 billion.

There's yoga and then there's antigravity yoga.

Would you rather eject from an F-8 Crusader over a combat zone or a thunderstorm? Choose carefully, then read this account from someone who's done both.

We call can't eject from an F-8, but one of us can have an ejector seat office chair. (They're in the UK otherwise I'd give this some serious thought.)

I've been doing it wrong. source

Here are 4 awesome examples of computer graphic animation. These videos are worth watching.

Certainly you know that 10⁴⁸ is a quindecillion. In case you've forgotten the other names of really large numbers, here's a list. Or if you prefer your numbers less general and more specific, here are the 13 most important numbers in the universe. #9 The Schwarzschild Radius, the radius of a sphere for a given amount of matter that creates a black hole.

From cream to rice to caramel, it's the kaleidoscope of candy bars.

Share the Star Warsphabet with your favorite geek.

Who might be interested in the source code for the NES game Metroid? Cube is an open-source system for visualizing time series data. Need sounds? Want them for free? Check out Freesound.org.

...creating a space where absolutely nothing has been painted. ~Ike No Taiga (1723-1776)

Some people are like slinkys...

2011-10-08T09:01:00.000-05:00

Aviation pr0n of the web: video of the F-35B landing on the USS Wasp at sea.

If you want a keyboard that looks like an iPad the Cool Leaf Keyboard is for you. But I just don't see it happening unless you're a 2-finger typist. See affordance.

Mt. Everest webcam. Because it's there.

Peter Gabriel's New Blood album is out. In it he "re-imagines" his most famous songs by re-recording them with an orchestra. All too often when aging rockers try this the result is sappy crap. Don't get me wrong - I like Peter Gabriel.

Even David Lynch (yes, Eraserhead, Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet David Lynch) has an album, Crazy Clown Time.

I also like lasagne. I really like my wife's lasagne. So can this recipe really be the perfect lasagne? I don't see any pepperoni in the ingredients.

When you combine movie titles with video game-inspired 8-bit graphics you get Title Scream.

The Supreme Court passed on hearing an appeal in Vernor v. Autodesk thereby implicitly upholding the ruling that software sales are licenses (i.e. rentals) and not purchases (i.e. owned). Why is this a big deal? It negates the principle of "first sale" and means you can't resell software you buy.

I saw Michael Moore in film footage from the Occupy Wall Street hipster fest. Then I saw this.

When brown is green: a motorcycle that runs on poo. (A brief intro in English - the poo link is mostly Japanese.)

Speaking of laying cable, here's a Google maps app showing undersea cables.

From the Lost But Not Found department, here's a list of the top 10 books lost to history. Homer a comedian?

Great Expectations was voted as the favorite of Dickens' novels. I'm partial to A Tale of Two Cities.

I am imagining the hate mail already.

This list of 667 sins from the bible reads like a "to do" list: #2 Not abstaining from all appearance of evil. #224 Being a Glutton. #305 Greediness. And because I always criticize lists for being too long, don't you think their point would have been better made if the list had ended at 666?

Standby for learning in 3... 2... 1... Mathematical Methods for Physics Students, Basic Probability Theory, Dijkstra's Introduction to Programming from 1971 (a classic), and Electrostatics.

Math continues to amaze: a formula for pi involving only the number 2.

It seems every number has its fans including 47, "the quintessential random number."

Just plain odd: Guy on a Buffalo.

...not good for much but bring a smile to your face when you push them down stairs.

Quotes are nothing but...

2011-10-02T17:23:00.000-05:00

What are fascination triggers and why do I have 7 of them?

Power - we focus on the people who control us.
Lust - we crave pleasure. Duh.
Mystique - we're intrigued by unanswered questions.
Alarm - negative consequences threaten us
Prestige - we fixate on respect
Vice - the forbidden fruit lures us.
Trust - we're loyal to predictability

You might like this video. It's a promo for the band Exo 4 which includes a high school friend. The video was produced by another high school friend. The high school bit is irrelevant. The video is just really well done and the band sounds great.

Ten percent of the bombs dropped during WWII failed to detonate. Until now, that is, when people go digging. So here are some handy maps of unexploded bomb risk for the UK.

I did not know that the Fightin' Texas Aggie Band performed at halftime of the Houston Texan's game on 9/11. I've also never seen them do a show this elaborate.

Pasta by Design serves up delicious treats with mathematical descriptions. Here we see Galletti which is served well with either tomato or mushroom sauce.

Remember back in the day when an email signature of over 2 lines was uncouth? These days you're more likely to get an entire resume at the bottom of every email. Modern etiquette suggests 3 lines as the optimum signature length. You can read about this and more in The Art and Science of The Email Signature.

PottyMouth is a maped-based visualization of swearing.

I've developed a preference for the number 8 but this guy loves him some 0.999.

Science replicates sloth by teaching computers how to watch football. Lemme know when they can do that while consuming two bags of chili-lime chiccarones.

Tune news: Bassist Tony Levin talks about his career and his latest album, Levin Torn White, and reveals insights into his creative process which often involves laying down a variety of bass tracks to the melody and having the producer put the final piece together. Steven Wilson is working on a new album, Grace for Drowning.

Sounds of a different kind. First, there's UVB-76, a mysterious Russian radio transmitter. And even NASA has made freely available iconic space sounds like those from the Space Shuttle or Apollo.

From the Movies I've Watched More Than Once department, I sure hope the prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing doesn't make a mess of things.

Apparently, I have 26 slaves working for me. I wish one of them would've done this survey cuz it went on for-ev-er.

I don't think Smell of Books, sprays with the scent of literature, would help the e-reader experience. Makes me wonder what the Dead Sea Scrolls smell like and whether the experience of reading them online would be diminished without a scent.

Like watching airports? Here's LAX's runway 25 right on webcam.

Vim should be the last text editor you learn. And you can learn about it at Open Vim.

If even the Cliff's Notes are too long, you need Book a Minute. For example, Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is summarized: "You think you're reading a condensation of If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, but you're not."

Supposedly, a million virtual monkeys are rewriting all of Shakespeare's works. But there's a caveat: each monkey only contributes portions of a sentence.

...inspiration for the uninspired. ~Richard Kemph

P.S. My weekends through early November are looking pretty full so you may be seeing a lot of uninspired stuff here. Consider this an advance apology.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

2011-09-24T16:12:00.000-05:00

After a brief "debate" at work about the relative merits of William Faulkner's versus Earnest Hemingway's writing styles, I decided to put Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms at the top of my reading list.

I was surprised by how little I enjoyed it.

Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea was really good and more recently I enjoyed For Whom the Bell Tolls. But A Farewell to Arms was so stiff that I couldn't give a shit about any of the characters because they were unbelievable. Lt. Frederic Henry (the novel is set during WWI) was a drunken womanizer who deserted when times got tough (even though he was only an ambulance driver) but still took time to execute a soldier whose conduct he found lacking. His love for nurse Catherine Barkley was equally shallow as demonstrated by emotional detachment at the novel's conclusion.

So I watched the 1932 movie starring Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper on YouTube hoping that their performances would show me what I missed. With due respect to those two actors, sorry, nothing.

Farewell left me with impressions of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H but not in any significant way other than theme. I was left more strongly with an impression of Michael Crichton - and not in a good way. One of the first works that formed the basis of my love of reading was Crichton's 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain. (The other was Always on the Run, the story of the Miami Dolphins' backfield tandem of Larry Czonka and Jim Kiick. Really.) But I digress. At some point Crichton started writing screenplays, not novels. Farewell was similarly thin.

Certainly, Hemingway's spare style is replete with rich imagery (which is, of course, a reason for his greatness as a writer). One quote that stood out for me involves a soldier bleeding to death in an ambulance. Describing his blood, Hemingway wrote "The drops fell very slowly, as they fall from an icicle after the sun has gone."

So, let's put on the smarty-pants hat and do the literary criticism thing. Noting that the title is A Farewell to Arms and not A Farewell to War or A Farewell to Death one might be tempted to say that Hemingway realizes that although one may give up war making (i.e. "arms"), attempting to put death behind you is futile. The novel's title is taken from a George Peele poem of the same name, but I can't find any common sentiment between the two works. Peele wrote "Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen; Duty, faith, love are roots, and ever green." A lovely sentiment, but not demonstrated by Hemingway's characters.

As with any audiobook, the voice actor can influence the experience. Because the book is already back at the library I can't cite the actor's name, but his inflectionless, staccato delivery mimicked how you'd parody a film of that vintage. Certainly, he didn't help convey whatever Hemingway was trying to say. Maybe the actor didn't get it either.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little...

2011-09-24T15:02:00.000-05:00

Let's begin with this very funny and very interesting article about five everyday addictions.

Pop music. "No matter how carefully hipster you are, your brain is secretly into Bieber."
Eating salty and spicy snacks. "Combining [salt] with fat and other elements in junk food is actually thought to be about as addictive as heroin."
Using lip balm. "When you throw some oral fixation into the mix, it all adds up to a pretty legitimate, if extremely stupid, psychological addiction."
Tanning. "Suntans are cool and all, but who in their right mind could be addicted to intentionally exposing the largest organ in the entire human body to damaging, cancer-causing radiation?"
Chewing ice. "Ice chewing, or pagophagia, is a subset of a larger disorder known as pica, which causes people to crave things with no nutritional value."

"Hello, my name is John and I'm addicted to ChapStick." It's true and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Good thing there are self-help groups on-line such as Chapstick Addiction Cure and Lip Balm Anonymous.

Take that, Lady Gaga. You got a meat dress, we got some meat guns.

Bacon + Egg = Cupcake

Make friends all over the world with this illustrated guide to the world's rudest hand gestures. You'll be surprised to learn what thumb's up means.

"This is so bizarre it reads like a Monty Python skit." Get bigger boobs by slapping them. (While I haven't been formally trained, I'm willing to provide this service gratis.)

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know My name is the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon thee. I now officially need a bookmark folder just for Lorem Ipsum generators. This one is the Samuel L. Ipsum generator.

OK, so last week I linked to an animated video about NASA's proposed Space Launch System (right) for future travel to the moon, Mars and beyond. Then I saw Countdown by Desrumaux Celine (left). Wow, what a contrast. Countdown is beautifully fantastic. NASA's video looks like... an animated video made by a government agency. And in my opinion, there's no reason NASA couldn't have achieved something similar.

MigrationsMap.net shows you where people are coming from and where they're going to. For example, when people leave the U.S.A, more of them go to the occupied Palestinian territory than France. Draw your own conclusions.

Kids today, doing things, like making a version of Super Mario World using 64 pixels - Super Pixel World.

Brian Eno extends his collaboration with poet Rick Holland on the new EP, Panic of Looking. The title track is available for your listening pleasure.

Are you a man? A manly man? Does doing manly things leave no time for life's basics? While you're bow-hunting for elk, cheering ringside at Vegas with the boys, and arm-in-arm with two glamazons (i.e. surfing the web for pr0n, half asleep on the couch in your boxers watching football and digging Cheetos out from between the cushions, and surfing the web for pr0n) you can get your manly essentials from Manpacks, an online subscription service for life's essentials like socks, underwear, and condoms.

Do the words non-Newtonian fluid arouse you? No? Maybe this video will.

Why does an enterprise software company like SAP feel gamification is the future? They're striving for "visible joy in 7 minutes" (among other things) just like EA Games. SAP thinks gamification will help them reach their goal of 1 billion users by 2015.

Fortran, the COBOL of scientific programming languages. But, at 54 years of age it's still extremely relevant. It continues to be updated (e.g. polymorphism) and has great parallel capabilities for HPC.

Like it or not, the smiley (aka emoticon) was born this week in 1982 - 19 Sep 1982 to be exact. ;-)

If you are on the verge of joining the software industry (hell, even if you're already in the industry), this list of 33 lessons for software industry novices should be required reading. #4 Know what you know and what you don't know. #6 Software's primary function is to earn profits. #22 Learn to write well. (As always, these tips really apply to any industry, not just software.)


Yet another music discovery tool. Musicovery charts music by genre and popularity over time.

It's easy to avoid these seven common sales mistakes if you just keep one thing in mind: you have to think of sales like dating. (Which is why I'm not in sales.)

National Boss' Day is 16 October. Just sayin'.

This is not the VAX I used to program on. Eddie Jobson demos his VAX77 keyboard setup at the National Association of Music Merchandisers trade show back in 2010. It's more than a demo, he plays many of his tunes and U.K. tunes you'll recognize.

Only a programming geek will find these bit twiddling hacks interesting.

Science proves that students are just as stupid when studying using computers as when using pen and paper. They mindlessly over-copy long passages, take incomplete notes, etc.

No idea what particles is about other than play.

If particles was too unstructured for you, checkout Draw a Stickman where your stick figure becomes the main character in a cartoon.

Gotta go when you're out and about? Never fear, the Peepoo is here. (This is a legitimate product for people in developing nations who lack sanitary facilities. Shame on me for finding humor but they're the ones who gave it a funny name.)

My new favorite song: Rainbow Poo San.

˙uı˙dıןɟpןɹoʍ ɟo ʎsǝʇɹnoɔ noʎ oʇ ʇɥƃnoɹq ǝɔuǝʇuǝs sıɥʇ

Where was How to Land a 747 when Kurt Russell needed it in 1996's Executive Decision?

A CAD (computer aided design) blogger provides the best explanation of which vs. that I've ever read in his blog post A few things to keep in mind when writing in English. Which is for singular, that is for plural. I had basically been told never to use which.

A Waterman Polyhedron of Root 12345. Be sure to check out root 10,000,000.

Another bit of the curtain over the Cold War was pulled back when the NRO revealed details about the Key Hole KH-7, KH-8, and KH-9 spy satellites.

Learn what's special about certain numbers. For example, 8 is the largest cube in the Fibonacci sequence.

Fort Worth's Modern is hosting a Richard Diebenkorn exhibit (will see it next week) which reminded me that the MoMA is hosting a De Kooning retrospective at the MoMA (which the NY Times' art critic seems to like).

Make art with your Roomba.

If this next video is real (and you can never be certain) you can consider my mind official blown. Imagine this: have someone watch a video, scan their brain using an MRI, and reconstruct what they saw from the brain scan. Gives me the heebee jeebees.

...falls into lazy habits of thinking. ~Albert Einstein.

Damn you, Al. Who you callin' lazy?

Only a mediocre person...

2011-09-17T14:38:00.001-05:00

Ten technologies + ten years = world changed.

Everything (not everyone) on teh interwebs.
We're creating 1 zettabyte of data per year now - imagine the future. (91% of internet data will be video by 2015.)
One third of all data will pass through the cloud.
Home networks that are faster by a factor of 3 million.
Smaller world. (Hum the Disney tune now.)
Must have more (electrical) power.
3D printing. For realz.
By 2020, robots will be physically superior to humans.
Grow your own replacement organs and other spooky medical stuff.
Borg = you.

I have a few invitations for Google Music Beta. Post a comment if you'd like one. (This is not necessarily an endorsement - I haven't had much time to do anything with it.)

Don't tell me you've never wondered how the electromagnetic spectrum was allocated in the USA. For example, maritime navigation beacons are at 300-325 kHz.

OK, maybe radiation doesn't blow your dress up. What about photos of dinosaur feathers found in amber?

You gotta see this video of an animated water fountain in Osaka Station in Japan that tells time, draws graphics, and sends messages. It's been a while since I've had the pleasure of visiting Osaka and I don't recall seeing this during those visits.

Proof #38 that innovation is not dead. Burn calories and keep the pounds off with MXP Calorie Shaper Underpants as demonstrated by a dancing effeminate Asian Lando Calrissian look-alike.

My Buckyballs drive me nuts but these new Buckycubes aren't probably any easier.

The gallery at SpaceCollective.org is pretty trippy. You could get lost in there.

<programming>

The three pillars of object oriented programming are:

Encapsulation - each type or class should be discrete and self-contained.
Specialization - new classes are derived from existing classes.
Polymorphism - the ability for a single type or class to take many forms.

One man's list of the ten technical papers every programmer should read twice. Included in the list is one paper that ties to the previous paragraph: On Understanding Types, Data Abstraction, and Polymorphism.

Programming isn't just for programmers anymore. Engineers will need to become programmers. Not in the sense that they'll need to be writing software all the time. Rather, it needs to be part of an undergraduate curriculum like solid mechanics, fluids, thermal, labs, etc. to give engineers some basic skills and more importantly and appreciation for the process and its limitations.

Although it may be taking the "...without borders" moniker a bit too far, Mouse without Borders is a project from Microsoft that lets a single mouse and keyboard control multiple computers including drag and drop.

Bubble Boys talks about kids at Stanford, programming for fun and profit.

Everyone and their brother-in-law wants to write an iPad app (and become rich overnight). Perhaps they should start with this template for app development, iOS Boilerplate.

</programming>

A Vim cheat sheet for programmers, available in many sizes, resolutions, and color schemes.

Wanna try editing with vi online? Web vi is a browser-based implementation in Javascript. (Unfortunately, the first thing I tried ("O" to open a new line above the current position) didn't work.)

While reading this (rather long) article on best practices for Outlook, I couldn't help but be reminded of David Allen's Getting Things Done.

STAR.ME is the latest experiment from Ze Frank, the man who brought you The Show and How to Dance Properly. (The Show was his 1-year, daily video blog that is absolutely brilliant.)

NASA's proposed Space Launch System (SLS) is designed to explore beyond earth orbit with first flight targeted for 2017.

Here are some cool custom wingtips/winglets for a small jet. They were designed using T-Splines and tested at the Reno Air Races.

I've been wondering why I've been feeling so calm lately and leave it to science to know why: men who embrace their receding hairline are less stressed.

Once more to the rescue, science shows us how watching SpongeBob (who lives in a pineapple under the sea) is bad for kids (in terms of their attention, memory, and problem solving). Thank god I grew up with solid intellectual viewing like Banana Splits and Lancelot Link. Damn kids today.

BFF, where the "B" doesn't stand for Best. source

Everyone jokes about a beer for breakfast (hair of the dog, filling, carbs, etc.) but seriously? Rogue's Chipotle Ale with bacon and eggs?

Introducing the most complicated infographic I've ever seen. But it is illustrating the big bang.

Am I as fit as a WWII GI? I'm not as fit as a 5th grader.

Photos of cigar feet. (I should've known there were names for the ends of a cigar.)

The article forty sounds that built pop music identifies the source of characteristic sounds that define popular music. #12 is the Fender Rhodes piano as exemplified by a favorite of mine, Babylon Sisters by Steely Dan (who my wife can't stand). For #23 the authors cite the vocoder with Kraftwerk as an example. However, when I think of vocoders the first thing that comes to mind is Peter Frampton's Do You Feel Like We Do? The article also mentions Phil Collins' work with Brand X in the context of another sound and every time someone mentions that portion of his catalog I feel good despite the fact that his later work is often vilified.

Check out artist Todd McLellan's photo series Disassembly. (It's under New Work.) It's nothing more complicated that taking things apart and then photographing the pieces.

Since 1965, artist Roman Opalka has been painting the numbers from 1 to infinity. I shit you not. In July 2004 he reached 5,500,000.

You've always wanted to play with a cubic Bezier curve, right?

Browser fun - make waves with sliders. (Chrome only, otherwise you just watch a video of the effect.)

Don't ask me what wocu1 is.

falling falling represents the feeling you have after reading this blog. (And it's one of the coolest things I saw this week.)

...is always at his best. ~W. Somerset Maugham

Black Ops by W.E.B Griffin

2011-09-10T15:07:00.000-05:00

Talk, talk, talk.

That's all that happens in W.E.B. Griffin's Black Ops - people talking about what they did, what they're doing, and what they will do. This book doesn't even have the faint after-scent of action.

Should I be surprised? I read one of Griffin's books years ago and don't recall the experience fondly. It wasn't as bad as Clive Cussler's Hardy Boys versions of thriller novels but still not great.

But honestly, I figured a book titled Black Ops authored by a former military man would be a nice bit of escapist fiction.

But instead all I got was characters talking about stuff. Talking about what they did (escape from Europe with Russian defectors), what they're doing (trying to prevent a terrorist incident), and what they'll do (blow something up). But the main characters are always sitting around a dinner table, sitting in an airplane, sitting in an office and talking, talking, talking.

The cast of characters is huge, so huge that I had a hard time keeping everyone straight. This was complicated by the fact that several characters had two or even three names - really. Plus it was clear that the characters had adventures in previous stories that impacted the current tale and these references, while not overt "buy the previous book" pleas of Cussler, were distracting. And the characters had a cliquey feel, not in the sense of a group of people you're compelled to join but as though you're the odd man out at a cocktail party.

There's a romantic subplot that goes something like this. She was gorgeous. He loved her. They had sex. The entire subplot was so thinly structured that I found it unbelievable and figured that she was gonna double cross him any second.

Even Dick Hill, one of my favorite voice actors, couldn't save this dull, lifeless book.

Imagination was given to man to compensate for what he is not...

2011-09-10T14:11:00.000-05:00

Creepy Things

One in 25 business leaders may be a psychopath. 'nuff said.

Women's busts have increased in size by two cup sizes in New Zealand over the last decade. (American has a flight leaving in about 2.5 hours from DFW to Christchurch. Boobyah!)

Know yer screws

Things to Listen To

This post on the King Crimson blog is a goldmine of music news.

Levin Torn White. I am very familiar with Tony Levin's work and of course Alan White's work with Yes is well known. I don't know much about David Torn's guitar work. But the tunes on their upcoming album sound great. I mean, what can you say bad about Prom Night of the Centipedes?
Funky: Shizaro is band that features King Crimson drum Pat Mastelotto. Their album Naked Truth is funky.
Pat Mastelotto sure gets around. He's also featured on Michael Bernier's leviathan.

My obligatory 9/11 post will be to point you to the new album WTC 9/11 by composer Steve Reich and performers Kronos Quartet. Setting aside the brief controversy over the album's original cover design (a photo of the second jet heading for the towers), I have faith that Reich's treatment will be poignant and musically compelling. The album is due for release on 9/20.

Let's say you prefer your music to be more computer generated. How about this tune made entirely from Windows 98 and XP sounds?

I'm not certain whether we need another service for finding music of a certain type, genre, mood, or artist but here's Musicovery anyway.

Pie chart glory: 30 years of music sales in 60 seconds shows the popularity of various media from 8-track to internet. What surprised me the most was the high percentage of cassette tape sales.

Examples of how music education is paying off big time: the main theme from Legend of Zelda on marimba and the Super Mario Bros. theme acapella. And while I'm on the video game music topic, here's an oldie bug goodie - the XOC version of all the music from Super Mario World played buy one guy using real instruments.

Things to Watch

Computer graphics pioneer and current Pixar president Ed Catmull mentions in this interview with ACM Queue magazine that the distinctions between computer scientists and artists aren't that clear. "The distribution of creative and organization skills is the same in both groups. People might think that artists are less organized. It turns out it's all nonsense."

An example of Ed's work from 1972, possibly the first computer animated film, can be seen in this video of a hand.

The #1 documentary to watch before you die is Hoop Dreams according to this list of the top 50 documentaries. Every time I say that I don't watch a lot of movies, I end up talking about a lot of movies. So to put an end to this let me state that I've only seen two documentaries on this list: March of the Penguins and Grizzly Man. The latter was strangely tragic and haunting even though I'm tempted to say that if you take all the liberties with grizzly bears that the protagonist did, your luck will run out eventually.

The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum is currently hosting an exhibit on Texas High School Football: More Than The Game. If you want to see how I spent last night (and most Friday nights during the autumn) watch the 1-minute teaser video as it features several shots of Grapevine H.S. (I'm told that the longer version of the video shown at the museum has a shot that includes yours truly.)

Things to Look At

Henri Matisse, The Red Studio, 1911. I include this because of its supposed strong influence on Mark Rothko - the red color field, the islands of color for the art objects in the room, and the negative space that defines the furniture.

You might want to check out Philographics, a book by Genis Carreras that illustrates philosophical ideas with minimalist graphics.

If art museums had a garage sale it might look like Artspace Marketplace which features founds items from museums' backrooms. For example, you can get a limited edition, signed and numbered print by Sol LeWitt for only $2,500.

Things to Think About

Proof #96 that innovation is not dead: fried bubblegum takes top honors for most creative food at the Texas State Fair. It's actually not really bubblegum, but a bubblegum flavored marshmallow that's been battered, fried, and then sprinkled with icing and sugar.

A relatively famous psychology experiment offered children 1 marshmallow now or 2 in 15 minutes. Decades later the kids who exercised willpower to wait 15 minutes to double their reward were found to be much better off: better educated, made more money, stronger relationships, etc. In this review of Baumeister and Tierney's Willpower, we learn that those hippies from the 1960s were wrong and that instead of letting it all hang out we should have been learning to develop our sense of willpower.

On the other hand, this article from the The Sunday Times on literature and psychology is virtually unreadable. Part of me thinks it was machine generated in a foreign language then translated into English. Yikes.

Things That Fly

This is what I call good clean living. Flying over Texas A&M's Kyle field in a B-17 (or is it a B-24) on opening day.

Since finishing Gene Kranz's book I seem to find space-related stuff everywhere. NASA provides these photos of artifacts from Apollo 12, 14, and 17 on the lunar surface.

Aircraft pr0n of the week: video of the F-35 roll-out ceremony at Eglin AFB, photos from the abandoned Russian Vozdvizhenka air base.

If You've Read This Far, What Comes Next Is Your Own Fault

From the Why Would You Want To Do That department, Google Correlate lets you draw any curve and then find a search topic that matches it (search activity versus time). For example, I drew the blue curve and Google tells me that matches searches for "verizon promotion code", the red line.

Beer: it's not just for drinking anymore. But architecture? And the world as mapped by a beer drinker.

Pens have gone the way of the 50-cent milkshake, human kindness, and the Dodo? Hyperbole aside, a good pen is essential. I'm partial to Rotrings - if only I could find a reliable source of ink (blue, of course). Anyway, check out Baltz Fine Writing Instruments.

This computer science stuff is very interesting: real-time large-deformation substructuring. Slightly less gee-wiz is this paper on software practices for dealing with multiple cores. Curious about the vim text editor? Learn vim progressively. Joli OS is a free, cloud-based operating system that turns an old PC into an internet device. Should I?

Social media gizmo of the week: Shuush modifies your Twitter stream to amplify infrequent tweeters.

I'm certain you'll agree that $2,468 for Horse Bits is stretching credulity. (But I'll take it.) How much is your website worth? Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote "No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it." I bet the valuation reflects the fact that I lean too far toward stupid.

...and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is. ~Oscar Wilde

Failure is Not an Option by Gene Kranz

2011-09-05T13:04:00.000-05:00

There are no surprises in Gene Kranz's Failure is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond. You get probably just what you expect: a detailed look back at NASA's space program from one of the men who basically invented the job of flight controller and then succeeded at it. You have to admire their achievements.

A couple of quotes are worth repeating. With respect to the infamous Apollo 13 mission Kranz writes "But this is the nature of our business - to live with risk." One might say that current NASA has become risk intolerant.

There are scenes in the movie Apollo 13 (and other movies of that ilk) where groups of controller types jump up, shout, high five, belly bump and do everything but kiss to celebrate successes. Regarding that, Kranz writes "if a controller ever did that before the mission was over and the crew was on the carrier, that would be the last time he sat at a console."

Recalling the winding down of the Apollo program in the 1970s, Kranz writes "Leadership is fragile. It is more a matter of mind and heart than resources, and it seemed we no longer had the heart for those things that demanded discipline, commitment, and risk." One might say that things haven't changed that much with our political leadership.

That's a lot of snarky political shots. Let's end with the foundations of mission control as copied shamelessly from page 393 of the book. Try to imagine applying them to your job.

Foundations of Mission Control

To instill within ourselves these qualities essential for professional excellence:

Discipline: Being able to follow as well as lead, knowing that we must master ourselves before we can master our task.
Competence: There being no substitute for total preparation and complete dedication, for space will not tolerate the careless or indifferent.
Confidence: Believing in ourselves as well as others, knowing that we must master fear and hesitation before we can succeed.
Responsibility: Realizing that it cannot be shifted to others, for it belongs to each of us; we must answer for what we do, or fail to do.
Toughness: Taking a stand when we must; to try again, and again, even if it means following a more difficult path.
Teamwork: Respecting and utilizing the ability of others, realizing that we work toward a common goal, for success depends on the efforts of all.

To always be aware that suddenly and unexpectedly we may find ourselves in a role where our performance has ultimate consequences.
To recognize that the greatest error is not to have tried and failed, but that in trying, we did not give it our best effort.

There is no real wealth...

2011-09-03T14:41:00.000-05:00

Is this blog smarter than a 5th grader? Thank god, yes. But only by two grades. One must accept these small victories.

Here's a list of 11 proofreading tips for blogs that you probably wish I'd use. #5 Read your post backward. (The way I write, it might make more sense.)

Jackson Pollock 51, a ten minute film worth watching. "Expressing emotions rather than illustrating them."

The lightning talk (aka pecha kucha) speakers for Business of Software 2011 have been announced. In case you've never experienced lightning talks before, imagine giving a presentation using 20 slides each shown for 20 seconds - and the slides automatically advance.

Controversial (or at least paradoxical) study showing that watching a demo of something hurts your understanding of it. The reason being that you interpret the demo within your own perspective of misunderstandings.

On the other hand, a 6 minute presentation at DEMO in front of high powered journalists and venture capitalists can make or break your company - and seem to last a lifetime. Tips on how to get through it and maybe become a DEMOgod.

The coolest dull photo you'll see all week. The earth (left) and moon (right) photographed by the Juno spacecraft from a distance of about 6 million miles.

In this interesting (yes, interesting) article about Windows Explorer (not IE, Windows Explorer) I learned a lot and because I use Explorer every day as the primary way to manipulate files on my laptop I'm hoping that the coming improvements are everything they promise.

The top 10 (paste, properties, copy, delete, rename, refresh, cut, new menu, command bar, new) of 200+ commands account for over 80% of the usage.
Only 2 of those top 10 commands are available via the command bar.
Slightly over half of command invocations are via the right click menu.
And this usage data influenced the design of Explorer 8 including addition of the ribbon.

In 1963 Aldous Huxley wrote an article about Shakespeare and Religion. It was the last article he wrote before his death and it was published in 1964 in Show Magazine. It's a nice piece and I'll just re-quote a passage from Henry IV used in the article.

But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool;
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop.

An example of video sharing. I sent someone the URL for the Unicorn Planet video. He sent me back this video of a first person shooter game filmed IRL.

More weather data about hurricanes that you'll ever want. There's a reason they're called Spaghetti Models.

Proof #399 that I have way too much free time. Hand crafted from the Value Pack alphabet.

The lowly penny is a fascinating coin. 66% of them never get back to the central bank, probably because most of them are in my son's collection. Another random factoid, people carry on average 14 coins at any one time. I can't recall the last time I had any coins in my pocket, let alone 14.

Murfie Music seems to be a new spin on the CD/mp3 music deal - it's an online new and used CD store with a twist. You buy the CD and they'll rip it for you and send you the mp3s and store the CD for you. Hence, no DRM. Or you send them your CDs, they rip them to mp3 for you, and then sell the CDs for you. Interesting. If only they took LPs.

Fun to watch: the browser fountain.

Just one from the hidden meaning of logos. (I know someone who drives a Porsche but he'll never see this so it's OK.)

They say that half of America will be obese by 2030. I'm happy to be above average and ahead of the curve for once. How much will we be spending on avoidable fat-related diseases? Around $50 billion per year.

History is full of food-related disasters, including the 1814 beer flood of London that killed 8.

Maybe we could keep the pounds off by just looking at Scandybars rather than shoving them into our pie hole.

Someone dares you to finish these 10 novels (because they're long). Like most things in life, size doesn't matter. Regardless, 6 I've never heard of, 2 I haven't read (nor have I watched the movie of Gone With The Wind), and 2 I've read (my high school English thesis was a comparison of War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and a play by Gogol).

Play all you want with the super recursion toy.

Do you hate Captcha's, those verification tools on websites that require you to type-in some word displayed in a barely readable font? If you think that's bad, what might happen if they added smell? You'd get Fartcha.

...but the labor of man. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Happy Labor Day everyone. Enjoy your 3-day weekend.

I'd rather be hated for who I am...

2011-08-27T11:58:00.000-05:00

Must-see video of the week - an animation of the sheet music for Miles Davis' So What.

Too big? source

Marc Andreessen, the Netscape guy, thinks software is eating the world and offers as proof Apple (largest market cap, more cash than the U.S. of A.), a 40x growth in broadband usage over the past decade, 5 billion people with smart phones, Amazon v. Borders, e-books, Netflix, Pandora, Zynga, Foursquare, Skype, and the computerization of traditional businesses like automobiles, healthcare, investing, and more. Andreessen identifies three challenges we face before these software-centric businesses mature. First, it's hard to build and grow a company of any kind in the current economic environment. Second, too many people lack the education to participate. Third, all these software-based businesses need to prove that they're not another Pets.com.

Games like Curvy drive me nuts. I don't know why I bother.

The scourge of online collections continues with vintage bottle caps and chrome logos.

I've mentioned before that I enjoy the movie The Fifth Element. One scene in the film features an operatic alien being performing an aria. The filmmakers had a real opera singer record the song for the actor to lip-synch. Supposedly, the singer was initially astonished by the score because it was unsingable because of the range. Here's a video with part of that aria being sung. I would like to think it's real.

How well do you know the layout of the Linux file system?

The popularity of beer and wine in the U.S. seem to be converging in this poll. When asked what they drink most often, 36% say beer (a decrease) and 35% say wine (an increase). This continues a trend since 1992 when beer bested wine 47% to 27%. (64% of U.S. adults drink alcohol.)

Learn to code the fun and easy way with Code Academy.

Bob Parsons, the Go Daddy guy, has 16 rules. I'd quote one of them here but they come with a copyright provision that I can't be bothered with. So I'll just say there's nothing profound here. On the other hand, Bob did somehow manage to hire all them Go Daddy girls.

The geometric-inspired work of Andy Gilmore.

Beloit College, the Mindset List guys, have published their annual list of things to be aware of in the mindset of incoming college freshmen, the class of 2015. For example, #37 Music has always been available via free downloads. Ignoring the "free", that means they probably have no experience with compact discs let alone LPs.

Math controversy! What does 0⁰ (zero raised to the zeroth power) equal?

1
0
undefined

It's been a while without any new NYAN CATs so check out this smooth jazz Nyan Cat.

Video of pistols being fired underwater. What's next, running a lawnmower in the Sahara? Implanting a TV in your stomach? Installing an air conditioner in a fish tank?

The Inception of reading lists: The Top 10 "Top 10" lists for entrepreneurs.

From the movies I've watched more than once department, Ridley Scott is supposedly going to direct a new installment of Blade Runner. In the same news story, it's said that he has finished a prequel to the Alien franchise called Prometheus, due out in summer 2012.

I wanted a Shakespeare brain (powerful writing can literally change the way we think - pun not mine) but got this one instead. image source (Don't be put off by the picture - read the Shakespeare article.) (Damn, putting a disclaimer on a joke.) (Or is it an apology?)

I didn't know beer had any secrets but apparently scientists have only just discovered a species of wild yeast that makes lager beer possible. Somehow this yeast from Argentina made it's way to Germany where it hybridized with a local yeast and voila - Budweiser.

It's never too early to start making websites: HTML for Babies.

If vim is your editor, you might also like Vimium - an extension for Google Chrome that lets you browse the web in a vim-like way.

I've never been in any of the world's 18 strangest elevators. We have an elevator in our 2-story office and the ride, frankly, isn't that great. It's kinda hot and smells funny. I think the strangest elevator I've ever been on is the one in the St. Louis Arch.

Self explanatory: public toilet survival kit. Me? I'd just get the pee towel. (And you can get one too from Etsy.)

I don't drink diet soda and don't use margarine so I'm not sure how I feel about fake barf. And I wonder what would happen, god forbid, if one of their workers got sick on the job.

Check out this robot-inspired print called Where's WALL-E? Can you name all these robots from sci-fi? They say posters will be available soon.

I'm gonna live to be 90, or so I'm told by the Lifespan Calculator. Yee haw, 41 more years of Horse Bits.

I may have mentioned before that the music to be played at my funeral is Jean Sibelius' The Swan of Tuonela. (Tell everyone to shut up, play the tune once, send everyone home.) Here's a thought-provoking article about Sibelius including this observation: "His work is strikingly architectural, rather than paralleling in music the syntax, semantics, and grammar of language."

Check out these NASA blueprints of a Saturn V, Hubble, Apollo, Mercury and more.

No time to get to Dayton? Take a virtual tour of the National Museum of the Air Force. Go straight to the R&D wing and lay eyes on the XB-70.

What about Vegas? If your travels take you to Las Vegas later this year, visit the Chuck Jones Experience in Circus Circus. It's an interactive and historical exhibit centered around the legendary animator and his work including Wile E. Coyote and The Roadrunner.

...than loved for who am I not. ~Kurt Cobain

And experience indicates that I'm getting my wish.

All men's miseries derive from...

2011-08-20T16:19:00.000-05:00

Another book vs. e-reader article that makes the case that books are more than words on a screen. Tru dat.

Only the truly demented will watch the Planet of the Apes Party Fun Time video all the way through. But if you do, you will be happy and demented.

Pretty amazing when you think about it. NASA's Dawn probe is orbiting the 330 mile wide asteroid Vesta. Be sure to click through and watch the video.

Several years ago a Keurig coffee machine was the perfect addition to our kitchen. When we were both around, my wife and I could never agree on the style of coffee. I liked mine strong while she liked hers a bit milder and less bold. On weekdays when I'd have my coffee at work, she'd be stuck trying to get the water and grounds mix just right so Mr. Coffee would create a single cup. The Keurig, a cup-at-a-time device what uses single-use pods of ground coffee saved the day. She could have her favorite and I could have mine, whether that was 1 cup or 10. Now I see Keurig machines in homes and waiting rooms all over the place. According to The Buzz Machine, a story about the rise of the Keurig company, 13% of workplaces have one and 25% of all coffee makers sold last Xmas was a Keurig. It's nice to be on the leading edge of a trend for once. And all the credit goes to my wife for finding this device. Plus, now that I've switched from coffee to green tea the Keurig meets that need too because there are over 200 varieties of "K-Cups" from coffee to tea and everything between. (We order ours from Big Cat Coffee.) I will admit, however, that the coffee isn't quite as good as you can get from doing your own fresh grinding and using an espresso machine. But I've never seen the fascination of Starbuck's and its ilk so the Keurig works for me.

Damn, the forehead support apparatus is already patented.

A man photographs a water droplet falling in front of an M.C. Escher poster and the resulting photo is amazing. Equally amazing is this M.C. Escher-like tribute to bacon. Bacon itself is so amazing someone made a statue.

This taxes even my ideas about abstract and minimalist art. Joan Miro's Painting on a White Background 1968.

The top answer at OnStartups to the question "Why do techies avoid salespeople?" seems more like one person's vendetta than useful advice. "The mean IQ of good coders is higher than the mean IQ of salespeople." I've known stupid sales people and I've known stupid developers. I've known intelligent sales people and intelligent developers. The interaction between sales and tech is no different than the interaction between any two other pairs of professionals.

Check out Huy Lam's art in which creates paintings using the printed word. Be sure to see Genius, his homage to Van Gogh.

I'm not mocking Huy Lam's work by posting this image made using Black-Text.com.

Use LiveATC.net to listen to almost any airport's air traffic control. (I write "almost" because they don't have Meacham KFTW so I listened to KDFW.)

What do Shakespear, Nikola Tesla, and J.J. Abrams have in common? They all appear on Circles of Influence, a graphic illustrating influence between figures in the arts and sciences. If you prefer your circles to be more geometric, check out this Venn diagram of authors, head, mouth and heart.

Who are the top earning authors? The first name that popped into my head was J.K. Rowling. But you, like me, may be surprised to find out where she ranks.

When do employee perks cross the line from awesome to pandering? Rock climbing wall, dog-friendly office (don't get me started), and a $10,000 office setup budget. Sure, a lot of the perks listed in this article are nice but honestly, some point to excess discretionary cash.

Next time you're stuck in a boring meeting, pull up the Meeting Ticker on your smartphone and see how much the meeting is costing you.

Duck with a WHAT?

For my programming friends, the 6 books every programmer should own. I own none, but that train left the station a long time ago.

Wired presents ten winning scientific videos from SciDAC's Visualization Night competition including three fluid dynamics examples for blood flow, shock compression of carbon dioxide (this one is really cool), and a wind turbine farm.

Why should John Cleese have all the fun? Introducing the Ministry of Alien Silly Walks.

Boo hoo. Why are engineering students so unhappy?

Boo hoo too. Why is engineering management hard? Summarizing: management is hard because humans didn't evolve to be managed. And managing engineers is only slightly harder because engineers tend to be introverted (I'd like to see the Meyers-Briggs to back that up), a trait that is a barrier to being managed. (A joke: How can you tell the difference between an introverted and extroverted engineer? The extrovert looks at your shoes when he's talking to you.)

It's a shame that Charley's Hamburgers didn't win the judges votes in the 2011 Burger Battle but at least they won the reader's poll. Read about their last victory in the battle versus M&O Grill. Mmmmm. The Greatburger (aka the Barnyard Burger because it has a piece of every animal you'd find in a barnyard. Just wish it had an egg.) is my favorite.

This is really all I'm doing.

According to this article, Twitter has 27 laws. Who knew? How many have I broken? Well, the first one is "Don't swear" so my track record only goes down from there. You can visualize your tweets (or anyone's) using Visible Tweets. And, to find out where your followers are, try Twocation.

How to write a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad blog post. I take that as a challenge.

Despite knowing that a reader (Surprise! I have a reader!) is not a fan of business books, here's Time's list of the 25 most influential business books. I think I've read 2 or 4 of them (sad that I can't remember). But Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People from 1936 makes yet another "top" list. Perhaps it's time to add it to my reading list.

Time also shares with us the 50 Best Websites of 2011 (hey, the year's not over yet!). By the time I got to the 10th site I was so bored there's nothing to say.

I don't know what's more amazing about this video. The fact that it's a machine that turns shredded office paper into toilet paper or the fact that it's named White Goat. Viva la innovacion! Watch out for the staples!

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Like Mondrian? Like fractals? Try this video animation of the Mondrian fractal.

In case you haven't seen this yet, Warren Buffet, investment guru and super rich guy, tells Washington in a NY Times Op-Ed piece to tax him more. Specifically, he thinks we should immediately raise taxes on those making more than $1,000,000 per year. That's about a quarter million households.

Top Gun IRL - a one minute video of aircraft operations aboard the Ike in the Arabian Gulf.

Derek Sivers, founder of CDBaby.com, spoke at last year's Business of Software Conference and will be speaking this year too. Check out the video of his talk about how and why he sold CDBaby.

Hot shuttle on shuttle action.

Returning college students must be thinking about their upcoming career fairs because Forbes is writing about the 10 toughest interview questions. Why are manhole covers round? (Everyone should know this by now.) How do you measure 4 gallons of water with only 3 gallon and 5 gallon jugs. (Didn't everyone watch Die Hard 3?) I'll take a shot at their #3: What would the person who likes you least in the world say about you? He's an arrogant, stupid, selfish, insipid dullard with delusions of adequacy. And he smells funny.

Make your own music from the decay of radioactive isotopes with the Radioactive Orchestra.

I'm willing to try this trick to make a WiFi booster out of a beer can. As it is, I can't play Words with Friends when I'm upstairs. Now someone will tell me why this won't work.

I dare my beer friends to make, drink, and blog about a Michelada. Or maybe try this personal brewery. Or try one of the world's most expensive beers. ($100 for a Sam Adams?)

From SIGGRAPH 2011, this video shows how the Kinect can be used to map a room in 3D in real time, something they call KinectFusion.

I wish I had the time and ability to do the kind of crazy web tricks they do at Paper.js. Or these.

OMG, teh interwebs knows where I'm at - the IP address locater.

Avatar Portraits lets you have a little fun with your Twitter avatar.

How fast can you tranquilize sheep? I'm a bobcat. Or do you prefer the classic shell game?

A good portion of my summer meandering up and down the beach was spent hunting sea glass. At the end of the week we had collectively found about a dozen pieces. Seems like futility when you see pictures of California's glass beach.

In closing, I leave you with something truly bizarre: Bill vs. Betty.

Maybe that was a little too harsh for a goodbye.

the quiet place

...not being able to sit in a quiet room alone. ~Blaise Pascal

Wild Fire by Nelson DeMille

2011-08-14T15:55:00.000-05:00

I listen to enough audio books that I sometimes forget whether I've listened to one before. That's what happened when I checked out Nelson DeMille's Wild Fire from the public library. Chapter one didn't play too long before I realized I'd done it again. But, because I'm too lazy to return it and get another and because the plot involves nukes and because it had been several years since my first listening, I kept it.

Former NYPD detective and supreme smart ass John Corey now works for the federal government's Anti-Terrorism Task Force. When a colleague goes missing on a stakeout of an oil billionaire John and his FBI agent wife pledge to get to the bottom of things. What they don't know (but their bosses might) is that the billionaire has hatched a plan to rid the world of Islamist terror once and for all. His thinking is something like this: if he destroys an American city or two with nuclear weapons and makes it look like a terrorist plot, the U.S. government will enact a secret protocol called Wild Fire to deal with the Islamists.

DeMille tells a pretty good story and the fact that his lead character, Corey, is such a wise guy keeps things interesting. Moreover, you're told exactly what the bad guy is planning very early in the book and the rest of the story is the good guys trying to figure it out before it's too late. A friend of mine prefers DeMille to Vince Flynn, another thriller author whom I like for more reasons other than the fact that his lead character is a graduate of my alma mater, Syracuse University. All in all, not a bad story even for the second time around.

I Like the Swiftpoint Mouse

2011-08-06T20:25:00.000-05:00

I've been using the Swiftpoint wireless laptop mouse for quite some time now with my netbook and it's a pretty handy device. I'm not coordinated enough to use a touchpad well so I was searching for an alternative and came across the Swiftpoint.

As you can see from the photo it's got a unique design where you grab the red part with your thumb, put your middle finger on the other side, and work the buttons and wheel with your index finger. The wheel on the right can be flipped with your index finger or the whole device picked up and run alongside whatever surface you're using. And speaking of surfaces, you can use just about anything. I've used a conventional desktop, an armchair, carpet and the mouse works great each time. Also, if you look closely in the photo you can see some damage where I dropped it about 6 feet onto a tile floor and it kept on working.

You can also see in the photo the Swiftpoint's charging station sticking out just a bit from a USB port. The station is magnetic and attaches to a recess on the bottom of the mouse so you can carry around the netbook with the mouse attached - very convenient.

If you're looking for a highly portable mouse for your netbook or laptop, give the Swiftpoint a chance. Check out the videos on their website at http://www.americas.futuremouse.com/.

My month's old Swiftpoint in action.

I received no compensation of any kind for this review.