Enormous Copyright Infringement Claims
October 31, 2006 | Business & Commerce
Interesting business strategy analysis of the Google purchase of YouTube.
Related Links
October 27, 2006 | People & Society
CNN:
The widening waistlines of Americans have increased the consumption of gasoline since 1960 according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Virginia Commonwealth University. A report by Laura A. McLay of VCU, concludes that Americans now pump 938 million gallons of fuel more on a yearly basis than they were in 1960 because of their increasing weight.
ABC:
Fire officials said the six-hundred pound man was in being cremated when his body fluids were too much for the oven.
The body fluids seeped out onto the floor and ignited causing a fire at the Garner Funeral Home in Salt Lake City.
"Those fluids can be very flammable," said Scott Freitag of the Salt Lake City fire department. "Sort of like a grease fire."
jwz:
Fire. In crematorium. Dead man. Harmed.
Any questions?
Does the News Matter?
October 20, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Governance | People & Society
Aaron Swartz speaks for me:
But finally, I'd like to argue that following the news isn't just a waste of time, it's actively unhealthy. Edward Tufte notes that when he used to read the New York Times in the morning, it scrambled his brain with so many different topics that he couldn't get any real intellectual work done the rest of the day.
I agree, and it's a hard habit to break.
Speaking of the Onion
October 19, 2006 | Arts & Culture | People & Society
Hadn't checked in with them in a while.
Christian Rock Band Cleans Up Hotel Room: Hotel staff at the Highway 82 Best Western found the suite occupied over the weekend by members of the Christian rock band Ruggid Krøss swept, dusted, scrubbed, and readied for immediate occupancy.
Area Man Going To Go Ahead And Consider That A Date: Anthony Pennline, 28, decided Tuesday, following a random encounter at a coffee shop with 26-year old acquaintance April Geyer, that their cordial, 45-minute conversation along with his offer to walk her home basically constituted a date.
Area Woman Emotionally Invested In Jennifer Aniston's Well-Being: The divorced 41-year-old dental-office receptionist and self-proclaimed "Team Aniston" member said she felt an "uncanny" bond with the $8-million-per-picture superstar. The two have never met, and are not expected to.
The song remains the same.
A Genetic Upper Class and a Dim-Witted Underclass?
October 19, 2006 | People & Society | Science
BBC: Human species 'may split in two:'
The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.
Men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises. Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features.
Thought it was an Onion story.
The Tao of Holding Space
October 19, 2006 | Arts & Culture | People & Society
Chris Corrigan has posted a great book connecting the Tao Te Ching and Open Space:
It is a collection of interpretations of the 81 short chapters of the Chinese classic Tao te Ching as they apply to my experience of holding space. I started this book three years ago, when I began noting parallels between Lao Tzu’s words and my experience of leadership, facilitation and living in Open Space.
Thank you Chris! [Download]
Autumn Beauty
October 17, 2006 | Life | Nature & Environment
Saturday was a stunning late-fall New Hampshire day. We went for another 14-mile bike ride on the rail trail.
Bridge Over the Water
The ride includes several bridges over the Mascoma River, vehicle gates, dark forest, traveling past open green fields, under an Interstate highway, next to the Mascoma Lake for quite a while, through steep rock walls, and past rambling ramshackle mill buildings. It's a real gem of a community resource. Two more photos over at Flickr.
Kathryn On the Trail
When naming, always include the most important element no matter its prominence in the photograph.
Connect the Dots
October 16, 2006 | Governance | People & Society | Technology
The US election is November 7th. Three weeks away. Read this, then read this. Then, spend 12 minutes and watch this testimony under oath from a computer programmer who was hired to write software to flip the vote in electronic voting machines. Scary? Well, even worse is that he was hired by Tom Feeney, the Speaker of the House of Florida at the time, currently a US Representative.
Update: via TPM: Department of amazing coincidences: Saddam verdict to be read out on November 5th.
Getting Connected
October 16, 2006 | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Technology
Classic Steve Jobs quote:
Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?
In a word, no. I've seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left! You're much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you're connected with about two feet of headphone cable.
The guy sure knows how to give good media.
The Present
October 15, 2006 | Life
From Saturday's yoga class: "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift we call the present."
Obesity, Diet, and Activity
October 13, 2006 | Arts & Culture | People & Society
Hood Center: Children with TVs in their bedroom are significantly more likely to be overweight than children who do not have a TV in their bedroom.
[ My friend Scott Chesnut created and produced the design for this site. ]
PHP inside CSS
October 12, 2006 | Software
Did you know you can put php calls inside css? For instance, rotating images:
background: url(images/letterboxSpin.php) 0px 0px no-repeat; }
That's something of a mind bomb.
Children
October 12, 2006 | Business & Commerce
There's a new bead store in town. It's nicely decorated, and my favorite part is a sign on the wall:
Unattended children will be given an espresso and a free kitten.
Hard to believe they'll survive when Hanover rents are a couple of grand a month and a beads cost a nickel or a quarter apiece. But it adds a bit of funk to the neighborhood, and that's nice.
[ Local: In the Five Olde Nugget alley, where Ann Rose Travel used to be. ]
My Life at Work
October 12, 2006 | Life | Software
Excerpt:
- Would it be possible to have the h3 pick up the correct "subhead" style from the div id="centerwrap" directly? That is, it would be nice if the user didn't have to enter the class in the edit block. We use the Markdown processor, so typically the user would start an h3 line with "###" and it would generate the h3 tags for them. But we can't specify css classes that way. If the h3's inside the centerwrap div got the class styling automatically (via a css selector) it would be mondo cool.
- Likewise with the h2 class=movedot. Can this get picked up from the expTeaseWrap div? Generally speaking, we try to minimize class specs so editors don't have to worry about them. However, the "followme" class and the "last" class and the ones in the nav and such are fine because editors don't edit those ones.
From Open Space and World Café to Perl and CSS. No wonder I have a headache.
ISFP
October 12, 2006 | Life
How the ISFP sees Self
- Very affirming.
- Sympathetic and trusting.
- Good communicator especially where values and ideals are involved.
- Hard working and practical.
How Others see the ISFP
- Difficult to negotiate with.
- Won't follow divorce laws or is naive about what actual law is.
- Not serious enough about negotiations.
- Flaky and irresponsible.
And, of course, both Truth and Beauty lie in the eyes of the beholder. So don't take anything too seriously, because moods change like the Sun and Moon.
Gadgetoff
October 11, 2006 | Arts & Culture | People & Society | Technology
The New Yorker reports on this year's Gadgetoff event:
When asked what he planned to do with his three and a half minutes, he said, “I’m going to demonstrate how you can transfer data faster with snails than with broadband.”
Then he showed a slide of a snail hitched to a tiny chariot with DVDs for wheels. If each disk contains 4.7 gigabytes of data, and if the snail (chasing a scrap of lettuce) travels at 0.000023 metres per second, the snail-system performance rate is over thirty-seven megabits per second. That blows ADSL out of the water.
Also: robot soccer, magic lock-picking keys, and an "enormous vibrating-balls organ."
Stunt Software's Overflow
October 10, 2006 | Software
This has got to be the most elegant and straightforward software utility ever designed. Watch the short screencast movie to check it out. Without question, Apple should buy these guys and integrate this into the operating system.
Rosanne Cash
October 10, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life
Saw Rosanne Cash Saturday night at Dartmouth. Fourth row center. Amazing performer. Amazing band. Much more transformative than Amiee Mann a week earlier. Rosanne is Johnny Cash's daughter by his first wife (Vivian Liberto, not June Carter Cash). Cash's husband, John Leventhal, was the guitarist, and my comment after the show was, "Watching him made me realize how average most guitar players are."
The most poignant moment was her arrangement of Ode to Billy Joe, originally by Bobbie Gentry. I haven't heard this song, nor thought about it, in 35 years, but I could have sung the lyrics word for word. Somewhere along the line it was burned into my memory. Cash's performance was slow, moving, deliberate, and chilling. Afterward she commented, "That song is like a Walker Evans painting." Right on.
There was a Q&A after the show with her, the video director, and the producer. Maybe a hundred of the 900 audience members stayed. Eventually I asked a variation of my stock artist forum question, "How do you sync up with the audience, and how does the audience influence your performance, and what do you do if it's not gelling?"
Cash talked about how she has a bag of tricks to regain her center, and commented that sometimes you don't want to sync up with the audience because, you know, you don't want to sync up with some audiences."
I jumped in, "How can we be a good audience?" People giggled. She said, "Oh my God I love you, I want to come down there and kiss you." And continued on to say, more or less, "just listen." The producer elaborated, as I recall these three days later, on listening with intent, and feeling the music in you, and engaging with the performance in a heartfelt way. And then they moved on to another question.
I myself know how to be a good audient. My intent with the question is to give the performer a platform to educate the audience about engaging with music and performance at a level deeper than passive entertainment consumption. Especially the stoic New England elites. It's a softball question, but sounds serious because few people think about music or listening with any depth.
Walking out my date said, "Only you, Notio, could ask a question that made the star say she wanted to kiss you, and then have the producer get all touchy feely about listening." Yup, could be true.
Advice on Work
October 6, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
The best place to work, if you want to start a startup, is probably a startup. In addition to being the right sort of experience, one way or another it will be over quickly. You'll either end up rich, in which case problem solved, or the startup will get bought, in which case it it will start to suck to work there and it will be easy to leave, or most likely, the thing will blow up and you'll be free again.
It's mostly focused on advice for graduating college students, but I especially like the focus of a job as a temporary condition. Another nugget:
Professors will tend to judge you by the distance between the starting point and where you are now. If someone has achieved a lot, they should get a good grade. But customers will judge you from the other direction: the distance remaining between where you are now and the features they need. The market doesn't give a shit how hard you worked. Users just want your software to do what they need, and you get a zero otherwise. That is one of the most distinctive differences between school and the real world: there is no reward for putting in a good effort. In fact, the whole concept of a "good effort" is a fake idea adults invented to encourage kids. It is not found in nature.
If you're self-employed you learn this fast, or you find yourself a job PDQ. More:
You know from an early age that you'll have some sort of job, because everyone asks what you're going to "be" when you grow up. What they don't tell you is that as a kid you're sitting on the shoulders of someone else who's treading water, and that starting working means you get thrown into the water on your own, and have to start treading water yourself or sink. "Being" something is incidental; the immediate problem is not to drown.
As usual, the whole essay is a good read.
Jellyfish the Size of Small Cars
October 6, 2006 | Nature & Environment
Pink Tentacle: Jellyfish invasion in full swing
Thousands of the giant jellyfish, which can grow up to 2 meters (6 ft 7 in) in diameter and weigh up to 200 kg (440 lb), become caught in fixed fishing nets each year.
Includes an amazing photo that I'm too lazy to steal borrow and post here.
Addled
October 5, 2006 | Life
I just asked my office-mate: "Addled; is that a word? I just wrote 'my addled brain,' is that the right usage?" He replied, "Yes."
F12 to the dictionary:
addle |ˈadl|
verb [ trans. ] chiefly humorous
make unable to think clearly; confuse : being in love must have addled your brain. adjective archaic
(of an egg) rotten.
ORIGIN Middle English : from Old English adela [liquid filth,] of Germanic origin; related to Dutch aal and German Adel ‘mire, puddle.’Oh, how God smiles.
Sonny Boy
October 2, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society
The meeting was 15 people, by invitation. Hosted in a very comfortable high-tech room. The guest speaker was from a famous university a few hours south. Worker bees and VPs gathered to talk shop and think big. 45 minute presentation, then lunch is served. We introduce ourselves. Discussion ensues.
Eventually I ask: "What kinds of governance and decision-making structures work for highly complex topics? I have evolved many processes and approaches to working with this, but frequently executives override the advice of their best domain experts, which is bad for morale, bad for projects, and bad for institutions."
[Paraphrasing and editing makes me sound better than I did at the time.]
A few people speak. Eventually the VP says, among other things, with a wry smile pointed in my direction, "Those of us who have been around a while know that politics can't be avoided." Smile.
"Yes," I thought, but didn't say, "my point is we need to subvert politics. It's bad for morale, bad for projects, and bad for institutions. How about if we make decisions based on the merits, instead of the patronizing hierarchical power?"
"Those of us who have been around a while...." Those of us who have been around a while.... Those of us who have been around a while....
[I should grow my beard a little longer to show off the gray hair.]
This is your brain on intelligence, honesty, and enthusiasm. This is your brain on politics and power. Any questions?
Just Ignore Any Conflicts
October 2, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society
I'm scheduling interviews for a project and I received the following (lightly edited) email at 10 AM today, illustrating the problems of "groupware."
That works for Susan! If this works for others, please feel free to add it to Susan's calendar (I'm leaving at 10:30am today). Just ignore any conflicts that show at that time.
First of all, I'm not an internal employee (read the email sig much?), so I can't add it myself, she has to do it for me. And, uh, what does an assistant do if not manage the boss's schedule?? In this case, direct other people to add it to the schedule, I guess... Everyone needs someone to supervise.
But further, note the last line: "Just ignore any conflicts that show at that time." So, when the boss looks at her schedule she has to manually filter what she is doing when, instead of just having one item per time slot.
It's no wonder there are so many problems in the world. People don't do their jobs, or don't know what their jobs are, and then somehow people think they can do more than one thing, or be in more than one place, all at the same time. By the time they head home to find out their government is torturing people to manufacture evidence of terrorism to perpetuate it's own power, they're too exhausted to think. Mission accomplished.
Update: I requested that she add it, since I couldn't, and received the following reply:
Sorry, lost my mind. ;o)
Honesty duly noted.
Is that what you said?
October 1, 2006 | Governance
Nice rant from Brian Dear on the manipulations and distortions and hypocrisy of the US government.
