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01 November 2008
Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:57:35 GMTAnathem
Neal Stephenson
Stephenson rocks once more. There’s such a great fantastical quality to his books, everything is stretched so close to absurdity but in such a way that you really just want to believe it. It’s great. This book makes me want a bolt, chord and sphere—how cool would it be if those were my three possessions?
Started it monday, finished it up on the soccer bus ride last night. That gives me a good burn rate of about 200 pages a day.
Stephenson’s bent here is almost spiritual. Where in his earlier books it was more techno–social (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Diamond age; at least as I remember them, rereads are now under consideration), and where the System of the World was historical and philosophic, here Stephenson takes his compelling and marvellous storytelling and wraps it around systems of existence and belief. There’s a very Emersonian transcendentalism (Emerson is even mentioned as an aside somewhere late in the book.)
Which is great, I love it when a book comes along that meshes with my insufficiently explored innate feelings towards some subject, here that of ‘god/religion/whatever.’
Nothing is more important that that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hum you in and come at you in so many ways. Fraa Orolo, 109
Why is religion such a universal in societies throughout history?
That’s right, people have a need to feel that they are part of some sustainable project. Something that will go on without them. It creates a feeling of stability. I believe that the need for that kind of stability is as basic and as desperate as some of the other, more obvious needs. But there’s more than one way to get it. We may not think much of the sline subculture, but you have to admit it’s stable! Then the burgers have a completely different kind of stability. Orolo in dialog with Erasmus, 205
I also love the formalized system of dialog, where it’s an objective of the theors to regularly argue with each other. If only people would actually do that! I’m generally a fan of arguing, and tend to do it just as often as I don’t. If only everyone else did as well…
I no longer respected that oath. Or at least, I no longer trusted those who were charged with enforcing the Discipline to which I had sworn. But I couldn’t very well say as much to these friends of mine who did still respect it. 231
Why do I hate politics? Why does going to church make me feel catatonic? It’s not that I hate democracy or that I think that believing in god in some unforgivably–backward and primitive notion; it’s more that both systems have steadily devolved in their lifetimes, leaving them (and their devotees) at the point where they garner at least as much of my disdain as they do my respect.
…the Convox was political, and made decisions by compromise. And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all. 573
I like the notion of introspectionist. 697
Stephenson posits the idea that google should ensconce itself as useful to the web by generating endless amounts of crap in different places on the internet, thereby requiring people to use it to actually find anything worthwhile:
Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into The Reticulum. But it had to be good crap. Samman, 795
(Maybe google already came up with this, and that’s why they bought out blogger.)
Mystic vs. Poetic (Laterran):
The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it’s true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.
“Anyway, my point is that guys like Flec have a weakness, almost a kind of addiction, for the mystical, as opposed to poetic, way of using their minds. And there’s an optimistic side of me that says such a person could break that addiction, be retrained to think like a poet, and accept the fluxational nature of symbols and meaning.”
“Okay, but what’s the pessimistic side telling you?”
“That the poet’s way is a feature of the brain, a specific organ or faculty that you either have or you don’t. And that those who have it are doomed to be at war forever with those who don’t.” Erasmus and Quin, 883-4And in the second-to-last paragraph of the book, Stephenson nails exactly and precisely they way I’ve tried to see the world for a few years now:
Orolo said that the more he knew of the complexity of the mind, and the cosmos with which it was inextricably and mysteriously bound up, the more inclined he was to see it as a kind of miracle—not in quite the same sense that our Deolaters use the term, for he considered it altogether natural. He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world. And so he had an instinctive skepticism of any system of thought, religious or theorical, that pretended to encompass that miracle, and in so doing sought to draw limits around it. Erasmus, 889-90
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30 January 2007
Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:45:16 GMTThe System of the World
Neal Stephenson
Stephenson wraps up his Baroque Cycle in high style. Read it.
And man do I wish Stephenson would’ve told what happened to precipitate Jack’s crowd-surfing episode.
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06 October 2006
Fri, 06 Oct 2006 21:41:00 GMTMoonlight ride
So tonight wasn’t just a beautiful, 65º night and a full moon. It was also a harvest moon, and probably the last big moon before things start getting to be freezing around here. Cool I thought, I bet that I could get a good bike ride in.
I wasn’t sure whether there would be enough light, but there was plenty. I went around the pomme de terre loop, which I think comes in at about 7 miles, and was probably out for an hour.
Best thing I’ve done in a while. I don’t know if it was the novelty of biking through the country in the dark or the perfect weather or the absolute silence (but for my bike, which just purrs, and the wind) or what, but I got that sense of euphoria that rises through your whole torso and into your throat, where you just can’t keep from smiling.
At one point I came around a bend and startled a pair of deer in a field off to my right, they took off along the path (which was following a road) and I got to chase them for a few hundred yards.
I took a few photos, and might just have to head back out tomorrow.
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14 September 2006
Thu, 14 Sep 2006 16:04:00 GMT Wiivia Kjell Olsen2078 days agoHoly shit I want one of these. The controller looks amazing. I’ve never had a console, played PC games a bit, but the furthest I’ve ever gotten with a handheld controller is the one on my C64, with one stick and one button. Beyond that I just can’t do it, and don’t enjoy button mashing. I’m really tempted to blow all my money on this and a tv screen to play it on. (Here’s a good summary of new Wii info)
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02 September 2006
Sat, 02 Sep 2006 12:24:48 GMT Bad Ass Cameravia Kjell Olsen2090 days agoIn Ross’s giant landscapes, you can mak out the woodgrains on barn shingles thousand of feet away, and see mountain trails seven miles off. The pictures seem to be made not of pixels but of vision itself.
The new R2, a video camera made by the same guy, captures nine gigabytes of data per minute. It takes 360º of video.
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29 July 2006
Sat, 29 Jul 2006 11:16:00 GMT MonkKjell Olsen2125 days agoI’ve mentioned it before, but as far as TV shows go, Monk is in the top 2. Just watch this.
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28 July 2006
Fri, 28 Jul 2006 20:32:00 GMTSelf inflation
So I’m apparently popular with the arctic explorers these days! I’m just awestruck. The other day Tony Haile stopped by and left me a comment, coincidentally on a book that I’d seen over at his site a month or two ago and decided looked good enough for a read.
Now I see that Ben Saunders (Tony’s partner in SOUTH, they’re leaving for a few months expedition to the south pole this fall(!!), an all around cool looking guy, who’s blog I’d also been following) links to me in his Elsewhere section, and as they apparently say over there in england, I’m chuffed.
I’m thinking that I’ll undertake adding in some sort of sidebar to return the favor, but for now here’s the good old linkage. And a good excuse for some bragging, I all to often take the I’m just some dumbshit kid approach to life.
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22 July 2006
Sat, 22 Jul 2006 15:23:00 GMT Grizzlies, on the internetvia Kjell Olsen2132 days agoGrizzly bear webcam. Someone is pointing the camera at all the action on a salmon stream, bears are frolicking. If it weren’t for the grainy 200×200 video stream it might feel like you were actually there. (Impressive tech setup, there’s a remote control wireless video camera hidden in a faux boulder, wireless signal is relayed 100 miles than sent over land to seattle.)
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07 July 2006
Fri, 07 Jul 2006 21:37:15 GMT The Most Amazing Dogvia Kjell Olsen2147 days agoAll I hope is that they’re breeding the dog and haven’t spayed her, because holy shit, how cool would a race of dogs evolved to walk upon their hind legs be.
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15 June 2006
Thu, 15 Jun 2006 17:03:00 GMT Gnarls Barkley - Crazyvia Kjell Olsen2169 days agoThere are all kinds of videos of this getting performed floating around the internet, but this one truly deserves the link. Fucking a. (If this is what MTV is becoming, I’m definitely about to start watching it.)
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05 May 2006
Fri, 05 May 2006 09:53:01 GMT Visible Earth: The Blue Marblevia Kjell Olsen2210 days agoAmazing images of earth from NASA.
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30 April 2006
Sun, 30 Apr 2006 14:50:00 GMT Statistical machine translation liveKjell Olsen2215 days agoGoogle has launched it’s Arabic <-> English translation machine, which fascinates me. A computer takes two examples of the same text and analyzes them, to the point that it knows how to translate the languages. Al Jazeera’s arabic homepage translated. An excerpt:
Thousands of people demonstrated in New York to demand the immediate withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. They declared their willingness to continue this campaign until the legislative elections in the US November next.
Some of it is a bit incomprehensible, but overall it’s quite impressive.
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11 April 2006
Tue, 11 Apr 2006 13:13:00 GMT Assembling North Americavia Kjell Olsen2234 days agoContinental drift images – wow.
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31 March 2006
Fri, 31 Mar 2006 10:46:53 GMT BLDGBLOG: Super Reefvia Kjell Olsen2245 days agoIn other words, locked into the rocks of Europe is the largest musical instrument ever made: awaiting a million more years of wind and rain and even war to carve that reef into a flute, a buried saxophone, made of fossilized glass, pocketed with caves and indentations, reflecting the black light of uncountable eclipses until the earth gives out.
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21 March 2006
Tue, 21 Mar 2006 19:11:00 GMT The Mighty Red Mousevia Kjell Olsen2255 days agoApple’s newest mice project a mouse when lifted up a bit. That my friends, is why apple is the coolest.
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07 March 2006
Tue, 07 Mar 2006 21:55:35 GMT Sporevia Kjell Olsen2269 days agoCompletely mind blowing. Imagine the sum of all games you’ve ever played – and here you go. There are some videos around, here’s one, demonstrating gameplay. I haven’t played videogames in any capacity since the Sim City 2000, Marathon, Madden ‘00 days, but all I can say is holy shit.
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24 February 2006
Fri, 24 Feb 2006 15:59:09 GMT Autistic basketball player causes mayhem at gamevia Kjell Olsen2280 days agoNothing but amazing. Three minutes you won’t miss.
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22 February 2006
Wed, 22 Feb 2006 23:35:00 GMTGrizzly Man
I caught wind of the film from a review on kuro5hin. Quite the review of the film, I read the first few paragraphs about a guy living 13 summers in Katmai National Park, in the middle of nowhere, for the most part all alone. (I applied for a job at Katmai maybe a month ago, and would really love to get it – but I’m grossly underqualified, and doubt it will happen.)
He took rolls and rolls of photo and video footage of bears roaming, romping, playing, fighting, eating. Right in the park, in an environment where over the course of a summer a few planes would fly over, a few boats might come for the afternoon. The documentary deals more with his personal side then it does his bear footage, but I can only imagine what kind of bear footage he managed to get.
It’s really amazing. Awesome. Reckless, maybe stupid, the guy might just have been a total wacko. But the film got the best out of me, I’d feel like laughing and crying at the same time, there would just be that energy surging through my chest.
I can’t say I feel bad for the guy, he was living among fucking grizzly bears. But what he managed to do, the film he took, the fact that this guy could walk up to and pet wild grizzly bears right on the nose. He knew them by name. That’s impressive.
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21 February 2006
Tue, 21 Feb 2006 19:10:53 GMT World Sunlight Mapvia Kjell Olsen2283 days agoWhat the world looks like from space, right now.
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11 February 2006
Sat, 11 Feb 2006 11:15:00 GMTOh, come on!
I’ll sure miss Arrested Development. Best TV show ever.
I remember that I caught onto the first episode of the first season mostly by chance, but I’ve been more then hooked ever since.
I watched episodes 10, 11, and 12, and it sounds like there’s an episode 13 out there – but the copy I downloaded was identical to 12.
And please dear god, I hope Ron Howard was hinting at an AD movie at the end of episode 12. Maeby was discussing the TV series that her family had just signed the rights away to, with Ron Howard, and Howard said it wouldn’t make much of a TV show, but that he wanted to see it as a movie.
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05 February 2006
Sun, 05 Feb 2006 05:10:00 GMT Higher GroundKjell Olsen2299 days agoHoly shit, I’d rather be off skiing right now. More videos on the Warren Miller site.
There’s nothing I want more from life then to be skiing in powder so deep that I’d need a snorkel. Silverton Mountain? Heaven on earth.
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30 January 2006
Mon, 30 Jan 2006 11:53:39 GMT How Pixar Adds a New School of Thought to Disney - New York Timesvia Kjell Olsen2305 days agoPixar has become the envy of Hollywood because it never went Hollywood.
We’ve made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We’re trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners. It’s no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it’s a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people. Nelson
Pretty impressive stuff. I’m hoping something apprentice-ish like this comes to eventually take the place of university. Like filmmaking? Apprentice with pixar, learn the ropes, stay with them if you’re good enough. School shouldn’t end once you have a degree in hand.
Pixar University is at the center of Mr. Nelson’s agenda. The operation has more than 110 courses: a complete filmmaking curriculum, classes on painting, drawing, sculpting and creative writing. “We offer the equivalent of an undergraduate education in fine arts and the art of filmmaking,” he said. Every employee
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26 January 2006
Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:16:01 GMT[Steve Jobs] continued, “You know, I’ve been thinking about it. How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least once a day.”
“Well, let’s say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that’s probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you’ve saved a dozen lives. That’s really worth it, don’t you think?”
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25 January 2006
Wed, 25 Jan 2006 16:03:37 GMT Soccer with carsvia Kjell Olsen2310 days agoThe best ever.
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20 January 2006
Fri, 20 Jan 2006 15:59:26 GMT Death and Taxesvia Kjell Olsen2315 days agoUltrahot graphical breakdown of how the government spends money collected in the for of taxes. In short? 399 Billion dollars on the military, 383 Billion on everything else.
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18 January 2006
Wed, 18 Jan 2006 13:53:00 GMT12:38 < xal> sam-: 2 things
12:38 < xal> a) you are nuts. those selectors are pure crack
12:38 < xal> b) could you add them to actionpack so that update_javascripts grabs them?
13:02 < madrobby> c) add more crack -
11 January 2006
Wed, 11 Jan 2006 00:18:48 GMTHow fortunate for leaders that men do not think.
Hitler
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09 January 2006
Mon, 09 Jan 2006 19:01:00 GMT Beauty in The Beastvia Kjell Olsen2326 days agoEdward Burtynsky takes some impressive photos. Photos showcasing the unimaginable scale of human undertakings, in all their obscene glory. They’re just as beautiful as they are frightening.
I don’t think my photographs are neutral but they do allow a multiplicity of meanings. Burtynsky
I drove through Butte (MT) about two weeks ago now, there was a huge hole in a mountain that just blew my mind. The Berkeley Pit is a huge mining crater filled with groundwater that is so polluted with traces of metal that in 1995 a flock of geese landed there, and all 342 of them died. But there’s a monster dog who manages to survive on the site.
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21 December 2005
Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:19:44 GMT A photo tour of the Transparent Factory in DresdenKjell Olsen2345 days agoIncredible.
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19 December 2005
Mon, 19 Dec 2005 11:28:00 GMT Presidential Pipeline: Bush's top fund-raisers see spoils of victoryvia Kjell Olsen2347 days agoThose (548) who paid more then $100,000 to Bush’s reelection fund dictate his presidency. Doesn’t quite sound representative to me.
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17 December 2005
Sat, 17 Dec 2005 16:02:00 GMT First man In Space - Skydiving from the edge of the worldvia Kjell Olsen2349 days agoKittinger became the first man to reach the speed of sound without an aircraft.
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16 December 2005
Fri, 16 Dec 2005 18:39:55 GMT Topless sandalsvia Kjell Olsen2350 days agoSandals that stick to the bottom of your feet and simulate walking barefoot. I want some.
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Fri, 16 Dec 2005 12:24:20 GMT
Jim Brandenburg's Chased By The Light Imagesvia Kjell Olsen2350 days ago
Amazing photos shot in the north of minnesota, one each day for 90 days.
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14 December 2005
Wed, 14 Dec 2005 16:28:22 GMT ChangeThisKjell Olsen2352 days agoOne of the best sites on the web. Manifesto’s are publishes intermittently, in batches, and consistently rock.
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Wed, 14 Dec 2005 11:23:00 GMT
Dylan to jockey radio showKjell Olsen2352 days ago
Starting this march, on XM Satellite.
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11 December 2005
Sun, 11 Dec 2005 01:26:04 GMT Photo Contest - National Wildlife Magazinevia Kjell Olsen2356 days agoMore great nature shots.
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10 December 2005
Sat, 10 Dec 2005 13:31:20 GMT Leica Homepagevia Kjell Olsen2356 days agoI want one, but those goddamn prices…
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Sat, 10 Dec 2005 12:57:21 GMT
Naturevia Kjell Olsen2356 days ago
Very impressive photos. Coral cache, the actual link takes forever to load.
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03 December 2005
Sat, 03 Dec 2005 01:48:00 GMT Hey Ya Charlie Brownvia Kjell Olsen2364 days agoI hope you didn’t get tired of this earlier this year, becuase it’s just that good. I’m really not that much of an OutKast fan, nor have I ever loved Charlie Brown.
But who can’t smile while watching this movie?
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02 December 2005
Fri, 02 Dec 2005 21:42:38 GMT Football Dribble in LeidsePlein Amsterdamvia Kjell Olsen2364 days agoI’m so impressed there isn’t anything I can say.
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01 December 2005
Thu, 01 Dec 2005 14:28:48 GMT Russian squirrel pack 'kills dog'via Kjell Olsen2365 days agoCarnivorous Russian Squirrels:
A pine cone shortage may have led the squirrels to seek other food sources, although scientists are sceptical.
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Thu, 01 Dec 2005 13:28:45 GMT
Venom Line by the Specialized - Dexigner Design Forumsvia Kjell Olsen2365 days ago
Bas ass sweet prototype bicycles, for release 2006.
It’s one of the first bikes in the world to have no rear hub. That’s right, no rear hub. The rear wheel has a special magnetically polarized rim that is suspended inside the frame, where it floats inside a magnetic suspension field. [...] The Viper looks crazy, but it works!
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30 November 2005
Wed, 30 Nov 2005 19:38:20 GMT CollectionClosureMethodvia Kjell Olsen2366 days agoNeat ruby block syntaxes.
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28 November 2005
Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:22:10 GMT This stuff is absolutely the greatest evervia Kjell Olsen2368 days ago[OS X is] The Who playing live at Leeds, where Windows is your kid’s middle-school class playing “Jingle Bells” on the recorder. Andy Ihnatko
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25 November 2005
Fri, 25 Nov 2005 12:26:08 GMT IT Conversations: Brewster Kahle - Universal Access to All KnowledgeKjell Olsen2371 days agoExcellent talk about how the new Library of Alexandria is coming to be through the Internet Archive.
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21 November 2005
Mon, 21 Nov 2005 22:01:21 GMT Pilgrims flock to see 'Buddha boy' said to have fasted six monthsvia Kjell Olsen2375 days ago15 yo boy has been meditating until a pipal tree, the same kind that Buddha meditated under for 49 days, for six months.
Local doctors failed to reach a final conclusion, although they were allowed no closer than five yards from the boy mystic, declaring that they could confirm no more than that he was alive.
has not eaten or drunk
Drank, thank you very much.
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20 November 2005
Sun, 20 Nov 2005 11:04:29 GMT Flipbookvia Kjell Olsen2376 days agoBienvenue sur FLIPBOOK.info, un site enti
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19 November 2005
Sat, 19 Nov 2005 19:00:21 GMT Grand Canyon Westvia Kjell Olsen2377 days agothe Glass Bridge will be suspended 4,000 feet above the Colorado River on the very edge of the Grand Canyon.
More than one million pounds of steel will go into the construction of the Grand Canyon Skywalk.
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Sat, 19 Nov 2005 01:35:13 GMT
paper worksvia Kjell Olsen2378 days ago
Paper structures/sculptures.
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14 November 2005
Mon, 14 Nov 2005 12:15:17 GMT Shovelglove: Functional Sledgehammer Exercise in 14 minutes timevia Kjell Olsen2382 days agoNeat exercise idea – just be careful not to hit anything.
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10 November 2005
Thu, 10 Nov 2005 12:29:38 GMT C'etait un Rendezvousvia Kjell Olsen2386 days agoThrough Paris in an F1 racecar, insane speeds.
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07 November 2005
Mon, 07 Nov 2005 18:38:08 GMT Man Happier About Switch to Mac than Conversion to Christianityvia Kjell Olsen2389 days agoMac is religion, I’m not surprised.
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04 November 2005
Fri, 04 Nov 2005 19:48:00 GMT Blue Ball Machinevia Kjell Olsen2392 days agoThis ought to take care of my friday night.
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Fri, 04 Nov 2005 11:36:56 GMT
Cut thumbs off graffiti 'punks'Kjell Olsen2392 days ago
I’m saying maybe you put them on TV and cut off a thumb… Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman
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03 November 2005
Thu, 03 Nov 2005 16:47:00 GMT Class 4 Burning, Cutting Lasersvia Kjell Olsen2393 days agoLaser Guns finally get REAL.
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31 October 2005
Mon, 31 Oct 2005 17:28:00 GMT Material guyvia Kjell Olsen2396 days agoHow long do you think concrete lasts? It has many problems and it’s very difficult to replace or fix. If a paper tube is damaged it can be replaced by a new one. The lifespan of a building has nothing to do with the materials. It depends on what people do with it. If a building is loved, then it becomes permanent. When it is not loved, even a concrete building can be temporary.
The next year, the Kobe earthquake struck in his native Japan, and Ban came to the aid of the Vietnamese refugee community. “All the temporary houses were outside the city, but if they moved out of the city they would lose their jobs. So they had to live under plastic sheets in the park, and it became very unhealthy. Neighbours tried to kick them out. I thought maybe if I redesigned everything very nicely they could continue living there.” Ban came up with a simple “log cabin” made out of thick paper tubes, with plastic sheeting for the roofs, prefabricated windows and beer crates filled with sand for the foundations. Each cabin can be assembled in a few hours. He also built them a new “temporary” church out of paper columns (and money from his own pocket), which was only dismantled a few months ago – to be reassembled in Taiwan.
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Mon, 31 Oct 2005 12:23:29 GMT
Ruby on Rails chases simplicity in programming | CNET News.comvia Kjell Olsen2396 days ago
Rails hits c|net, buzz buzz wow.
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30 October 2005
Sun, 30 Oct 2005 16:44:57 GMT Gallery of Best Panoramic Scenes by Erik Goetzevia Kjell Olsen2397 days agoImpressive photos.
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25 October 2005
Tue, 25 Oct 2005 20:32:00 GMT US death toll in Iraq hits 2,000via Kjell Olsen2402 days ago2,000 too many.
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Tue, 25 Oct 2005 20:03:00 GMT
Wellstone
I just watched Wellstone!, and you’d better go see it yourself. Wellstone died three years ago today.
These days, with fucking baboons dominating american politics, I’d sure love to see a guy like Paul show his face.
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24 October 2005
Mon, 24 Oct 2005 10:29:00 GMT Ninjas rob Idaho bankvia Kjell Olsen2403 days ago -
22 October 2005
Sat, 22 Oct 2005 13:41:46 GMT De Avonden -> Afleveringen -> De avondenvia Kjell Olsen2405 days agoOffice builds all it’s furnishings out of cardboard. And they look pretty sweet.
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Sat, 22 Oct 2005 13:40:08 GMT
Welcome to the house of FUNvia Kjell Olsen2405 days ago
Impressive looking subterranean ultra green home. When I build my house it’s going to be south facing and subterranean with a green roof – this is almost my dream home. More at CNN, and click via to read the great summary at treehugger”
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18 October 2005
Tue, 18 Oct 2005 23:45:00 GMT How Apple Does Itvia Kjell Olsen2409 days agoGo apple go. I’ve pledged allegiance to you ever since I’ve had an allegiance to pledge. You could rule the world way better then google.
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Tue, 18 Oct 2005 19:46:58 GMT
The Normalization of Treason, the Republicans' gift to Americavia Kjell Olsen2409 days ago
The Republican party’s gift to the American people, and the Bush administration’s legacy, will be the normalization of treason. They are trying to convince Americans that betraying our country during wartime for personal gain is no more serious than running a stop sign or going 60 in a 55 zone.
I can’t believe the change in politics since bush got elected. In 2000 I was in eighth grade, and took a politics class. I volunteered for both Gore and Mark Dayton (running for the only open MN Senate seat, still serving).
I remember staying up late watching the election coverage and going to bed completely and utterly stunned.
I’ve always gone to public schools within Minneapolis, and I remember in that 8th grade class of twenty or thirty, just one girl pledged republican. In my high school the only known republicans ware that same girl, and the health teacher.
I’ve never understood how bush managed to get elected. But holy shit, he is sure fucking things up. I still can’t understand how people can put up with all the stuff he has done and is doing. I’ve stopped capitalizing his name, not to mention losing any shred of respect I ever had for him.
(Yet all I do about it is show up at a student democrats meeting and flame about it?)
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13 October 2005
Thu, 13 Oct 2005 11:00:00 GMT MySpace hacked: Samy is my Herovia Kjell Olsen2414 days agoViral myspace hack – embed javascript so that it embeds itself in the pages of those who view your profile. Make the js do cool things like make you everyone’s hero. 20 hours and 1,000,000 people get infected. But myspace sucks.
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12 October 2005
Wed, 12 Oct 2005 09:51:40 GMT Verizon FiOS - FiOS For Homevia Kjell Olsen2415 days agoVerizon is starting to bring fiber right into the home to build it’s internet tv system, with 30-50mb/s!
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10 October 2005
Mon, 10 Oct 2005 22:45:00 GMT Ruby Code & Stylevia Kjell Olsen2417 days agoRuby is really starting to hit the big time. I picked a good one to start with. I’m working with php now with my campus job, and it really pales in comparison. Now ruby leapfrogs both perl and python into a prestigious publication.
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08 October 2005
Sat, 08 Oct 2005 01:12:07 GMT Tactiva - Introduction to the TactaPadvia Kjell Olsen2420 days agoIs this even real? It’s just a movie, but a sweet demo of a totally new physical interface to your computer. I want one.
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04 October 2005
Tue, 04 Oct 2005 18:40:00 GMT Ski Pr0nvia Kjell Olsen2423 days agoSki movie trailers. And more ski movie trailers. And just for fun, some fixed gear bike photos to boot.
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Tue, 04 Oct 2005 11:32:43 GMT
Rocket Racing Leaguevia Kjell Olsen2423 days ago
!!!!!!
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30 September 2005
Fri, 30 Sep 2005 19:06:00 GMT Wired 13.10: The Trend Spottervia Kjell Olsen2427 days agoTim O’Reilly looks like a pretty cool guy.
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29 September 2005
Thu, 29 Sep 2005 08:46:00 GMT Computer users move themselves with the mind - Electrode cap allows users to think themselves along a virtual street.via Kjell Olsen2428 days agoCalled a brain-computer interface, the device detects activity in certain brain areas linked to movement, and uses the signals to mimic that movement in a virtual world.
Could make for a kickass video game.
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20 September 2005
Tue, 20 Sep 2005 11:06:46 GMT BBC NEWS | Technology | Inventor plans 'invisible walls'via Kjell Olsen2437 days agoA new fabric which presents a 3d image on its surface, coupled with computer aided optics makes a cloak that makes you invisible.
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18 September 2005
Sun, 18 Sep 2005 20:53:36 GMT Piemonade - Homestar Runner Wikivia Kjell Olsen2439 days agoYum.
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09 September 2005
Fri, 09 Sep 2005 14:11:36 GMT Daring Fireball: The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface ThemeKjell Olsen2448 days agoJust the other day I started a facebook group evangelizing anthropomorphics. I’m not kidding! And Gruber comes along with this bit of genius.
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Fri, 09 Sep 2005 13:48:00 GMT
dirtSimple.org: The Multiple Selfvia Kjell Olsen2448 days ago
The thing you need to understand is that it’s not a question of “using only 10% of your brain”. The point is, you are only 10% of your brain. The rest of your brain is bigger, smarter, and better-educated than you, because it can learn things you don’t even know you’re learning, faster and better than you.
This is what I mean about not getting in your own way. Your operating system has enormous parallel processing power, whereas “you” are a serial processing filter.
most of us don’t really know how to use our own brains in a systematic way. We give them commands like we were a cat walking across a keyboard: every now and then we end up with something syntactically valid, but semantically… questionable.
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01 September 2005
Thu, 01 Sep 2005 16:52:12 GMT The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Trapped in the Superdome: Refuge becomes a hellholevia Kjell Olsen2456 days agoHoly Shit.
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Thu, 01 Sep 2005 08:20:07 GMT
New algorithm for learning languages | Science Blogvia Kjell Olsen2456 days ago
For example, the sentences I would like to book a first-class flight to Chicago, I want to book a first-class flight to Boston and Book a first-class flight for me, please may give rise to the pattern book a first-class flight—if this candidate pattern passes the novel statistical significance test that is the core of the algorithm.
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08 August 2005
Mon, 08 Aug 2005 12:22:54 GMT Elevator Hacking 101via Kjell Olsen2480 days agoNext time I’m riding an elevator I’ll have to test this: press the door close and floor number buttons together, and some elevators enter express mode and won’t stop until your there!
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01 August 2005
Mon, 01 Aug 2005 22:21:00 GMTSnow Crash
Neal Stephenson
Sweet novel by Neal Stephenson. Set in the near future, the US has fallen into a collection of corporations controlling everything from Suburbia and Religion to Pizza Delivery. The Metaverse becomes the global vessel for person to person interaction, and Hiro, the main character knows his shit about the metaverse. But when Da5id, Hiro’s close friend and co-conspirating hacker is infected with a deadly virus after watching a virtual video, Hiro knows something big is happening.
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25 July 2005
Mon, 25 Jul 2005 08:52:00 GMT Library of Congress - Panoramavia Kjell Olsen2494 days agoCollection of panorama’s from 1912 to 1991. Spectacular view of milling era Minneapolis.
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24 July 2005
Sun, 24 Jul 2005 10:32:46 GMT Kite Aerial Photography by Scott Haefner | 360º Panoramasvia Kjell Olsen2495 days agoImpressive panorama photography from a kite rig.
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23 July 2005
Sat, 23 Jul 2005 10:22:05 GMT Mike Matas - Mikevia Kjell Olsen2496 days agoMike Matas is 18, my age, and worked for the Omni Group for a few years before starting his own software company (Delicious Monster!) and now is shipping himself off to Apple. Do I just set my goals low or what?
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22 July 2005
Fri, 22 Jul 2005 12:26:37 GMT Paul Wellstone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediavia Kjell Olsen2497 days agoI felt that in the light of the last post I might as well showcase my number one political hero, Paul Wellstone. It might have been that I was at an impressionable age while he was a prominent figure in local politics (I tend to think it was because he was simply a spectacular person), but he is my number one cultural icon.
He was just an honest and hard working guy, who spoke from his heart and worked for what he felt was right. The thing that makes him stand out against his peers is that he was a good man before he was a politician. In the throes of his final campaign he voted against the resolution for war with Iraq, after confessing to his wife just that morning that the vote would cause him to lose his senate race. Nobody in politics today is as earnest a man as he was, I don’t know if anyone will ever be.
Here are a few Wellstone quotes, a quick primer on his life, and the Wellstone Action Foundation.
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17 July 2005
Sun, 17 Jul 2005 07:33:25 GMT Two Seas, Two Feet: My Hike Across the Continentvia Kjell Olsen2502 days agoHike from Nova Scotia to Washington…
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16 July 2005
Sat, 16 Jul 2005 23:28:00 GMT Optimus keyboardvia Kjell Olsen2503 days agoA keyboard built with little screens as keys – want to change a keyboard layout? All you need is the software for the keyboard, all the keys can change magically. an interview with the head of the firm responsible.
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01 July 2005
Fri, 01 Jul 2005 12:54:00 GMTIt's Here!
The last six days have been easily the most agonizing of my life – I’ve been compulsively checking the shipping info on my powerbook, jumping up and running to the window whenever I hear a truck rumbling nearby, and anticipating the arrival of this guy like nothing else. But it came!
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27 June 2005
Mon, 27 Jun 2005 17:21:00 GMT Motorola i860 Specs & Features (Phone Scoop)via Kjell Olsen2522 days agoTry this – type some product into the location bar of firefox (I pasted motorola i860 there instead of in the google bar) – and whoa! Firefox routes me to the particular phone at phonescoop.com. works with nokia [model number], apple powerbook, windows xp… neat.
The phone looks cool because of a neat little easter egg that lets you upload your photos (with latitude and longitude) to flickr instead of motorola’s own photo site. I want a gps phone.
update: are you kidding me?! I ordered my powerbook, and have compulsively been checking the status of the order since. Type apple store order status into the location bar, and boom! I get to the sign in page to view my order status. I wonder if it looks through my history and learns new places and keywords for them, in addition to some basic ruleset thats programmed in (because I’d never been to the windows xp page or the phonescoop page, but it still worked). Wow.
update again: Firefox redirects you to googles first result for whatever query you put in the location bar, and its very very useful.
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26 June 2005
Sun, 26 Jun 2005 12:39:30 GMT june 2004 hastings-mammatusvia Kjell Olsen2523 days agoAmazing animated looking mammatus clouds.
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25 June 2005
Sat, 25 Jun 2005 07:34:00 GMTBuying a computer
I’m finally ready to get a computer, now I just need to pick the right one and get it. Just some rumination. update: I ordered it this morning, and boy am I giddy now (and I deleted the last post because I hated it).
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Sat, 25 Jun 2005 06:40:55 GMT
Uberman's sleep schedule || kuro5hin.orgvia Kjell Olsen2524 days ago
Reduce the amount of sleep you get into six thirty minute naps, and your body will apparently compensate by quickly dropping in and out of REM sleep. And you will feel as rested as ever once you acclimate yourself, although you sleep only three hours per day.
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20 June 2005
Mon, 20 Jun 2005 13:41:00 GMTThe Very Small Home
Azby Brown
Azby Brown details 18 beautifully designed compact Japanese homes. The mantra of constraints fostering creativity is beautifully reinforced in the book, with incredible solutions to space problems.
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Mon, 20 Jun 2005 11:04:00 GMT
Lost in Norway
Per Eide
Coffe table book full of fascinating photographs of the Norwegian landscape. Panoramas galore. The book was a gift from Joachim, the norwegian AFS student, and I’d leafed through it but not fully read it until yesterday.
From the author’s website you can check his Picture Archives for a good peek at some of his work, but the book is just incredible. It’s a wide format book, and half of the pictures in it take up two pages across the fold. The photos are just spectacular.
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Mon, 20 Jun 2005 10:27:20 GMT
Summer Moon Illusionvia Kjell Olsen2529 days ago
I saw this last night and it was mondo impressive.
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Mon, 20 Jun 2005 10:22:42 GMT
KickReal (LIVE PENALTY SHOOTOUT-CHASE THE BALL INTO THE GOAL WITH YOUR OWN FOOT)via Kjell Olsen2529 days ago
Wow, camera phone + foot + software lets you play a soccer shootout by mock kicking a ball for the camera! Sweet, I really want a high tech phone to be able to play with stuff like this.
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Mon, 20 Jun 2005 09:54:00 GMT
Lightsabers from the Big Yellow BoxKjell Olsen2529 days ago
Build your own lightsaber. Six different base designs, and yes – they have emitters for the light part.
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16 June 2005
Thu, 16 Jun 2005 21:05:00 GMT Main Page - WikibooksKjell Olsen2533 days agoWikibooks is really getting fleshed out these days – maybe a year ago I was all over the site but there just wasn’t much polished content. Looks like that is changing!
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15 June 2005
Wed, 15 Jun 2005 13:03:00 GMT FLlWHallvia Kjell Olsen2534 days agoA photo of Wrights Marin County Hall of Justice before additional landscaping work was done, jesus christ it looks sweet. via landandliving’s followup to this earlier post on the subject.
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Wed, 15 Jun 2005 12:59:55 GMT
mekentosj.com | Modern Cubismvia Kjell Olsen2534 days ago
A CT scan of the Apple Design Award trophy, wow, apple rocks so hard.
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09 June 2005
Thu, 09 Jun 2005 21:10:03 GMT MIT OpenCourseWareKjell Olsen2540 days agoI’ve never actually taken a class here, but fantasized about it lots.
a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT’s mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century. It is true to MIT’s values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.
How about intro linguistics?
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Thu, 09 Jun 2005 19:46:31 GMT
Flickr: Photos from bricklovinfreakboyvia Kjell Olsen2540 days ago
Lego porn. Wow, I thought that I was a half decent builder in my day – but look at this stuff! And this guy has a heck of a building environment.
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Thu, 09 Jun 2005 18:49:56 GMT
Anarchaiavia Kjell Olsen2540 days ago
Architecture is that great living creative spirit which from generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man, and his circumstances as they change. That is architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright, 1937
I love Wright, and architecture too.
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08 June 2005
Wed, 08 Jun 2005 21:31:00 GMT Japan unveils "robot suit" that enhances human power - Yahoo! Newsvia Kjell Olsen2541 days agoThe 15-kilogram (33-pound) battery-powered suit, code-named HAL-5, detects muscle movements through electrical-signal flows on the skin surface and then amplifies them.
Bioengineering, I have a friend going to Michigan Tech to study it. Wow. When do we get electrical systems in our brains to record what we’ve been thinking?
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Wed, 08 Jun 2005 20:36:22 GMT
Transcendentalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediavia Kjell Olsen2541 days ago
Have a good night surfing wikipedia re transcendentalism. I love this list, identify with almost everything on it.
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06 June 2005
Mon, 06 Jun 2005 14:47:41 GMT WWDC 2005 - Live Coverage of Keynote || The Mac Observervia Kjell Olsen2543 days agoWow. Wow. Wow.
Rosetta will allow PowerPC compiled apps to work on an Intel Mac. It’s completely transparent, and does not require a separate emulation environment.
I don’t know whether to love or to hate apple – on one hand, intel could probably make chips just as well as IBM – but to get my hopes up like that for a G5 powerbook… And then just snatching it back from me! I don’t know what I’ll do now, I was looking to get a laptop for this summer, but I don’t want a G4 now that apple has an entirely new processor.
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02 June 2005
Thu, 02 Jun 2005 16:09:06 GMT TextDrive Community Forum / We're a Year!Kjell Olsen2547 days agoTextdrive turned one today, which means that this site is officially one also. I’d been running it locally on my box, and registered the domain name as soon as I bought the VC 200 account (5/26). Then I spent a few days anxiously awaiting the results of my purchase. I’ve been happy ever since.
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24 May 2005
Tue, 24 May 2005 14:59:00 GMT How to become a firefighter in the national parksvia Kjell Olsen2556 days agoNow here is a summer job I should look into a few years down the road. How about smoke jumper! I think this would be fun, but thats coming from someone who just shoveled 14 yards3 of dirt from a neighbors drive over a fence into my yard, for $150 (relatively) easy bucks. Hard labor!
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22 May 2005
Sun, 22 May 2005 20:58:00 GMT Apartment Therapy - Smallest Coolest Apartmentsvia Kjell Olsen2558 days agoA collection of beautiful and functional small spaces, really cool stuff. The last one (Luke’s?) has the sweetest sleeping loft I’ve ever seen, and I have a fairly sweet one myself. How can anyone not sleep up in a loft?
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21 May 2005
Sat, 21 May 2005 09:24:17 GMT Substrate | Gallery of Computationvia Kjell Olsen2559 days agoWow – fractals, beautiful colors, and the simulation of a cities growth. And built with that processing thing.
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19 May 2005
Thu, 19 May 2005 11:59:23 GMT deviantART: powerdraw by ~Diamonstervia Kjell Olsen2561 days agoBeautiful photo of Venice (?) drawn in MSPaint. This one is going onto the desktop.
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16 May 2005
Mon, 16 May 2005 21:09:59 GMT Guardian Unlimited | Life | 'This is how science is done'via Kjell Olsen2564 days agoThe sky was lit up with a bright yellow light — the earth appeared white. The yellow gradually became darker, turning gradually to orange. In the sky I saw white clouds from above the gadget caused by the sudden expansion following the blast wave — the expansion cools the air and fog clouds form — we had expected this. The orange got deeper, but where the gadget was, it was still bright, a bright orange, flaming ball-like mass. This started to rise, leaving a column of smoke behind, below looking much like the stem of a mushroom. The orange mass continued to rise, the orange to fade and flicker. A great ball of smoke and flame three miles across it was, like a great oil fire billowing and churning, now black smoke, now orange flame. Soon the orange died out and only churning smoke, but this was enveloped in a wonderful purple glow.
Another after-image I thought, but on closing my eyes it did disappear, and appeared on opening them again. Others said they saw it too, probably caused by ionised air produced in the great heat. Gradually this disappeared, the ball of smoke rising majestically slowly upward, leaving a trail of dust and smoke. Richard Fenyman, on the detonation of one of the first atom bombs in the New Mexico desert.At almost 13 I dropped out of Sunday school just before confirmation because of differences in religious views but mainly because I suddenly saw that the picture of Jewish history that we were learning, of a marvellous and talented people surrounded by dull and evil strangers was far from the truth.The error of anti-Semitism is not that the Jews are not really bad after all, but that evil, stupidity and grossness is not a monopoly of the Jewish people but a universal characteristic of mankind in general. Most non-Jewish people in America today have understood that.The error of pro-Semitism is not that the Jewish people or Jewish heritage is not really good, but rather the error is that intelligence, good will, and kindness is not, thank God, a monopoly of the Jewish people but a universal characteristic of mankind in general.
Therefore, you see at 13 I was not only converted to other religious views but I also stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way “the chosen people”.I am glad that I am not so teased because I am sure of nothing, and find myself having to say “I don’t know” very often. After all, I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there. It is fun to find things you thought you knew, and then to discover you didn’t really understand it after all.
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13 May 2005
Fri, 13 May 2005 22:07:00 GMT Plutohome.comvia Kjell Olsen2567 days agoA real sweet looking framework to automate and monitor your house, really incredible looking. Mostly a wrapper for OSS projects (AsteriskPBX for telephony, Xine for media viewing etc), it ties everything together and even lets you control everything from your bluetooth symbian mobile device (!!). The software is open source, and they also sell hardware thats plug-n-play.
In many cases, a Pluto DCE device is just a thin wrapper for another open source project. The wrapper’s job is to launch the open source project with the right parameters, forward incoming commands to it, and fire DCE events in response to triggers within it. We added DCE wrappers for the projects Asterisk (pbx telephone switch), Xine (media player), Linphone (SIP software telephone) and Motion (surveillance video capture). In most cases, no modifications to the open source project were needed since the project already contained a mechanism for feeding it commands. cite
Wonder what kind of overhead it takes? POS out of the basement, or does it need top of the line… This just makes me drool:
By allowing these various projects to work together seamlessly, many new features and benefits are now possible. For example, if there’s a security breach in your house, the lights and TV’s in the house come on automatically using our home automation DCE device interfaces, and the security pn pad appears on all the Windows webpads and PDA’s. After 30 seconds a menacing video plays for the burglar using Xine, while the surveillance cameras monitored by Motion feed a live video to your mobile phone over GPRS. Hit ‘Talk’ on the phone and Xine suspends, passing control to Linphone which makes a call using Asterisk to your mobile phone with the audio piped through the stereo so you can shout at the intruder and let him know you’re watching him from a remote location and calling. To the end-user, it works seamlessly, like 1 cohesive whole, but in reality, what Pluto did is enable a bunch of existing applications to work together. cite
Pluto specifically decided to sacrifice revenues from software sales, focusing its sales efforts exclusively on embedded solutions, so that it could work more closely with the open source community and develop a general-purpose platform that makes it very easy for programmers to build upon. cite
Check out all these sweet looking modules, and the documentation home.
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Fri, 13 May 2005 21:18:52 GMT
MisterHousevia Kjell Olsen2567 days ago
A nice looking X10 interface in perl, which kind of sucks, but it’s cooler then a GUI based client.
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Fri, 13 May 2005 11:55:08 GMT
MakeZine.com: MakeShift 01: Analysis, Commentary, and Winnersvia Kjell Olsen2567 days ago
Impressive summary of Make Magazine’s issue one challenge: How do you start your car with a dead battery in the middle of nowhere with the shit you have in your trunk. Wow.
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Fri, 13 May 2005 11:08:15 GMT
Google Maps - 33409via Kjell Olsen2567 days ago
UFO over florida – cool picture at least.
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09 May 2005
Mon, 09 May 2005 20:28:00 GMT Index of /deobfu/via Kjell Olsen2571 days agoFlorian Groß goes over entries into some ruby obfuscation contest, and I don’t understand a word of it. I need to look at this and learn from it à l’avenir.
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Mon, 09 May 2005 19:37:08 GMT
Nag yourself in a new wayvia Kjell Olsen2571 days ago
Neat looking new mobile app by a ph.d candidate at the U of M (Pam Ludford), looking to be tested by “super busy” twenty somethings who try do way too many things and keep track of it all. Kind of like backpacks neat new sms reminders, but reminding you when your two blocks from the library or grocery store, instead of at a certain point in the future. Sweet.
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Mon, 09 May 2005 12:05:00 GMT
Timecatcher.com - Experience The Beautyvia Kjell Olsen2571 days ago
Great (landscape) photography site, “dedicated to the beauty this planet has to offer”.
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07 May 2005
Sat, 07 May 2005 15:20:37 GMT A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AFRICAvia Kjell Olsen2573 days agoBreathtaking set of photos from all over Africa, all taken by different photographers.
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02 May 2005
Mon, 02 May 2005 20:43:00 GMT Mike Clark's Weblogvia Kjell Olsen2578 days agoLearning ruby through testing it feature by feature – nice idea. Not only do you have a quick reference of everything you’ve ever learned, but if something in the library changes, you’ll know about it quickly.
We have no idea if Ruby did what it should have done: we just know what it did. That is, we used the language as a tool to explore itself. In the same way that a test is better than a specification, the language is better than a description of the language. The test is definitive—when we ask Ruby what the answer to ‘Hello! ’ * 3 is, we’re going to the horse’s mouth. It doesn’t matter what the documentation says; what we’re testing is what actually happens. And that’s learning. So the test is both a learning test and a regression test.
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Mon, 02 May 2005 20:40:30 GMT
Earth Sheltered Technology, Inc. - 25 Reasons Why You Should Consider EarthSheltered Livingvia Kjell Olsen2578 days ago
I already knew all of this, it’s pretty bs – but I’m just reminding myself how sweet the house I want to build up at my cabin is going to be when I get around to it. It’s going to be the sweetest!
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01 May 2005
Sun, 01 May 2005 20:10:00 GMT DISTRO.Y :: DISTRO.Y :: Commodore 64via Kjell Olsen2579 days agoI absolutely need to have this shirt, but alas, I’m broke (first shirt I’ve wanted to buy in a long time!). I still have my C64, btw.
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Sun, 01 May 2005 12:46:27 GMT
Social GPSvia Kjell Olsen2579 days ago
A map of wherever you are is laid under a map of the gps signal from you and your buddies gps enabled cellphones, allowing you to know where they are even when they’re out of sight. God this is cool.
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29 April 2005
Fri, 29 Apr 2005 20:17:00 GMT Bore Me - your daily fix for entertainmentvia Kjell Olsen2581 days agoBeatboxing into a harmonica: it’s sweet.
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Fri, 29 Apr 2005 06:47:22 GMT
BME - Brano Meresvia Kjell Olsen2581 days ago
BIkeframe made from bamboo! Sweet little hack.
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24 April 2005
Sun, 24 Apr 2005 14:10:12 GMT A Large Detailed Map of the Appalachian Trailvia Kjell Olsen2586 days agoI really want to hike this someday, along with the Continental Divide Trail and whatever else I get a chance at.
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20 April 2005
Wed, 20 Apr 2005 12:07:08 GMT EVDO StompBox Projectvia Kjell Olsen2590 days agoImpressive linux box running broadcasting a wireless signal with a verizon cell data card to give an always connected link, even in the middle of nowhere.
The weekend of April 15 two of us took the system along during an 800mi drive through the high deserts of Southern California (Mojave and areas near). I’m quite surprised how far 1xRTT covers! We had continuous data for >90% of the trip. If the connection was re-established within 2 minutes (not hard when driving highway speeds) established TCP sessions resumed without worry. The only time we had extended data losses were when we stopped behind blocking geologic features (hills, ridges, etc) that kept us from seeing the nearest cel tower.
Also with gps and an ultra cool web app to google map the car’s exact location at any time… sweet. Also a camera to show where you are.
This should be good for security situations. If you point a camera inside at the driver’s position (from, say, the headliner or dashboard) you can make the video router start recording upon motion-sense. It would constantly upload the results to an offsite server along with timestamp and GPS coordinates. Even if the thief ripped the system out it would get a few good frames of him/her and store them offsite. If the equipment is hidden correctly it’ll give live GPS tracking and video to help with retrieval of the car.
Man, this stuff is cool.
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18 April 2005
Mon, 18 Apr 2005 20:04:00 GMT furialogvia Kjell Olsen2592 days agoiTunes power user skillz:
My music collection is far larger than my Powerbook or iPod can accommodate, so my encoded selection rotates as new and revived interests push other things out of the active 20GB. Much of the time I use iTunes in Browse mode, listening to individual whole albums in the same way I would have pre-shuffle-era. But increasingly, and especially during periods when my listening isn’t so dominated by new releases, I also use iTunes’ Party Shuffle mode, fed by a Smart Playlist that filters out non-music genres, cuts out tracks that are too short (<1:30) or too long (>5:22) for my shuffle attention-span, and via another playlist reference excludes anything that has been played recently (i.e., in the last two weeks, or the last 10 hours of music, whichever list is shorter). If I’m in an especially random mood, I have an Applescript that goes through the upcoming Party Shuffle selections and eliminates repetition of artists.
Although on very rare occassions I do rate tracks manually, for the most part I find that it is more effective to treat the rating as a temporary variable representing my actual behavior towards the track, instead of an attempt to measure my subjective assessment directly. In my case, the rules are approximately these (I’ve left out some of the more logistical obscurities):
I love how concrete this is. I should do it like this, and maybe rate the song in the comments subjectively.
Automated payment of artists who’s work was downloaded, but not paid for. Sweet script to do it all without lifting a finger.
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Mon, 18 Apr 2005 13:54:49 GMT
TextDrive Community Forum / Anyone else getting an iPod shuffle?Kjell Olsen2592 days ago
I guess apple made the iPod shuffle waterproof – at least washing machine proof. Wow.
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17 April 2005
Sun, 17 Apr 2005 20:55:15 GMT Save Arrested Development!! PetitionKjell Olsen2593 days agoSign this petition, because Arrested Development really does kick ass. On a related note. Mike Bluth has the same bike as me! Which is really cool because he’s pretty much my favorite person ever. 37,265 signatures.
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15 April 2005
Fri, 15 Apr 2005 06:27:00 GMT HTTP in da housevia Kjell Olsen2595 days agonation p
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14 April 2005
Thu, 14 Apr 2005 13:05:00 GMT Spirit of Snowvia Kjell Olsen2596 days agoSweet looking documentary on powder skiing. Wow.
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12 April 2005
Tue, 12 Apr 2005 06:25:00 GMT The blend of mind, talent, and passion (Loud Thinking)via Kjell Olsen2598 days agoWhy we like rails:
Ruby on Rails is turning out to be that place in the middle capable of igniting excitement from both ends of the spectrum.
So what we’re basically trying to achieve is the meeting of quick’n’dirty with slow-but-clean into quick’n’clean.
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11 April 2005
Mon, 11 Apr 2005 21:46:00 GMTOrdinary Wolves
Seth Kantner
Absolutely stunning novel about a white boy raised as an eskimo: hunting, fishing, and living off the land and not much else. His struggles to fit in both in the Eskimo town a days sled from his home and later in ‘white’ alaskan cities show that the only place he really fits is out on the tundra – living by his own hands.
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09 April 2005
Sat, 09 Apr 2005 08:23:00 GMT The Mike Matas Blog: Save Arrested DevelopmentKjell Olsen2601 days agoNO fucking way can they cancel this show: I’ve watched every episode since it started and it just keeps getting funnier and more absurd. Normally anything I watch on tv I get tired of before the season finale, and I just quit watching it.
Fox setup a site, get arrested, where you can pledge your support to the show and sign up for an announcements list (I need to stop giving my email away) – and do it.
More importantly, watch the show – it’s on sunday night in fox’s last good time slot (I put it on the recorder so I don’t actually know) and simply put, its the greatest show ever. Bar none, really. If this gets cancelled there will be some serious family guy ressurection happening down the road.
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07 April 2005
Thu, 07 Apr 2005 19:54:08 GMT RollingStone.com:The Long Emergency: PoliticsKjell Olsen2603 days agoThe United States passed its own oil peak—about 11 million barrels a day—in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.
Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.
It will change everything about how we live.No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.
We’re screwed, doomsday is coming, and this is an entirely plausible – if pessimistic – account.
bq The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world’s richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq’s oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.
So with china and india exploding in both population and consumerism/consumption, how do we expect to ration the worlds quickly evaporating pool of oil?
We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. [...] In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that “the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.”
Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.
The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.
The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. [...] These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.
The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the “level of service” (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.
We shouldn’t fuck the nat’l rail systems:
Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway network.
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30 March 2005
Wed, 30 Mar 2005 18:25:51 GMT zestyping: How to really confuse your party guests.via Kjell Olsen2611 days agoBlow the minds of college kids next time your frat house hosts a kegger. Real fun looking.
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Wed, 30 Mar 2005 17:33:33 GMT
Wired 13.04: La Vida Robotvia Kjell Olsen2611 days ago
Undocumented immigrant teenagers kick ass in a NASA sponsored robotics competition.
The teachers had entered the club in the expert-level Explorer class instead of the beginner Ranger class. They figured their students would lose anyway, and there was more honor in losing to the college kids in the Explorer division than to the high schoolers in Ranger. Their real goal was to show the students that there were opportunities outside West Phoenix. The teachers wanted to give their kids hope. ??1??
[Installing their battery on board, instead of tethering it from above] was a bold idea. If they didn’t have to run a power line down to the bot, their tether could be much thinner, making the bot more mobile. Since the competition required that their bot run through a series of seven exploration tasks – from taking depth measurements to locating and retrieving acoustic pingers – mobility was key. Most of the other teams wouldn’t even consider putting their power supplies in the water. A leak could take the whole system down. But if they couldn’t figure out how to waterproof their case, Cristian argued, then they shouldn’t be in an underwater contest. ??2??
Cristian had hacked together off-the-shelf joysticks, a motherboard, motors, and an array of onboard finger-sized video cameras, which now sent flickering images to black-and-white monitors on a folding picnic table. Using five small electric trolling motors, the robot could spin and tilt in any direction. To move smoothly, two drivers had to coordinate their commands. The first thing they did was smash the robot into a wall. ??2??
The Carl Hayden teammates tried to hide their nervousness, but they were intimidated. Lorenzo had never seen so many white people in one place. ??3??
Now that they were focused on the mission, both pilots relaxed and made almost imperceptibly small movements with their joysticks. Oscar tapped the control forward while Cristian gave a short backward blast on the vertical propellers. As Stinky floated forward a half inch, its rear raised up and the sampling pipe sank perfectly into the drum.
“Díos mío,” Oscar whispered, not fully believing what he saw. ??4??“Why don’t you have a PowerPoint display?” he asked.
“PowerPoint is a distraction,” Cristian replied. “People use it when they don’t know what to say.”
“And you know what to say?”
“Yes, sir.” ??4??Still, both teachers were in a good mood. They had learned that the team placed third out of 11 in the seven underwater exercises. Only MIT and Cape Fear Community College from North Carolina had done better. The overall winner would be determined by combining those results with the engineering interview and a review of each group’s technical manual. Even if they did poorly on the interview, they were now positive that they hadn’t placed last. ??4??
“And the overall winner for the Marine Technology ROV championship,” Merrill continued, looking up at the crowd, “goes to Carl Hayden High School of Phoenix, Arizona!”
[...]
They hope to see all four kids go to college before they quit teaching, which means they’re likely to keep working for a long time. Since the teenagers are undocumented, they don’t qualify for federal loans. And though they’ve lived in Arizona for an average of 11 years, they would still have to pay out-of-state tuition, which can be as much as three times the in-state cost. They can’t afford it. ??5??You can send your donations to a fund set up by the phoenix school system, if ya like.
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Wed, 30 Mar 2005 07:55:00 GMT
Guardian Unlimited | Life | Two-thirds of world's resources 'used up'via Kjell Olsen2611 days ago
Goddammit… A UN report tells us how much we’ve really fucked up mother earth over the centuries, and the answer is – she’s mother fucked. They say that we’ve used two thirds of our natural resources. A group of 95 elite scientists participated in the study, and its our entire enviroment that is being destroyed – wetlands, fisheries, savannas – all the interesting geological features that do things like turn carbon dioxide into the air we need to breathe.
The wetlands, forests, savannahs, estuaries, coastal fisheries and other habitats that recycle air, water and nutrients for all living creatures are being irretrievably damaged. In effect, one species is now a hazard to the other 10 million or so on the planet, and to itself.
At least a quarter of all fish stocks are overharvested. In some areas, the catch is now less than a hundredth of that before industrial fishing.
!!!
Since 1980, about 35% of mangroves have been lost, 20% of the world’s coral reefs have been destroyed and another 20% badly degraded.
An estimated 90% of the total weight of the ocean’s large predators – tuna, swordfish and sharks – has disappeared in recent years. An estimated 12% of bird species, 25% of mammals and more than 30% of all amphibians are threatened with extinction within the next century. Some of them are threatened by invaders.
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28 March 2005
Mon, 28 Mar 2005 20:24:46 GMT Jeremy Scahill: Sgrena Sets the Record Straightvia Kjell Olsen2613 days agoAccording to Klein, when Calipari was killed and Sgrena wounded, they were on a secured road that can only be accessed through the heavily-fortified Green Zone and is reserved exclusively for top foreign embassy and US officials. “It’s a completely separate road, actually a Saddam-era road, it would seem, that allowed his vehicles to pass directly from the airport to his palace,” says Klein. “And now that is the secured route between the U.S. military base at the airport and the U.S. controlled Green Zone and the U.S. embassy.”
“It was simply a tank parked on the side of the road that opened fire on them. There was no process of trying to stop the car, she said, or any signals. From her perspective, it was just opening fire by a tank.”
That could explain why the US military in Iraq has blocked the Italian government from inspecting the Italians’ vehicle, even though the car is the property of the Italian government which bought it from the rental agency after this incident. “I think they have something to hide if they won’t give the car over for inspection,” Sgrena told Klein. “It’s very strange. If there is nothing to hide, why not let Italian justice officials see the car?”
What is all this? Are we really this clueless in Iraq right now? Christ, I hope that Sgrena si somehow mistaken, that she is exaggerating out of shock, because otherwise we just can’t know whats going to happen next in Iraq.
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26 March 2005
Sat, 26 Mar 2005 21:42:00 GMT Thoroughly Rehearsed Human Combustion | MetaFiltervia Kjell Olsen2615 days agoCrispin Satrwell, “cryptic and sensational” for sure. A real interesting looking man.
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23 March 2005
Wed, 23 Mar 2005 20:45:14 GMT Esperanto - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaKjell Olsen2618 days agoA cool looking language created by a polish philosopher in the mid 1800’s, efficient in its use of grammar and simple because it was constructed artificially to be as simple and efficient as possible. I wrote une composition for French on it.
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22 March 2005
Tue, 22 Mar 2005 22:40:06 GMT Hidden Monkey—Pissed Off Tiger | MetaFiltervia Kjell Olsen2619 days agoFunniest thread I’ve seen on metafilter in awhile, excompassing all this ‘unstoppable fighting technique’ bs.
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Tue, 22 Mar 2005 21:51:58 GMT
Analysis and Notes on Walden -- Henry Thoreau's Text with Adjacent Thoreauvian Commentaryvia Kjell Olsen2619 days ago
I was just going to bunch this into the last link – but it deserves its own. A great look at Walden, easily my favorite book, with all the juicy quotes and analysis and paralells from Ken’s own life, I haven’t read it all yet but sure intend to.
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20 March 2005
Sun, 20 Mar 2005 16:07:06 GMT The Daily Whim: Get Your Own Personal BillKjell Olsen2621 days agoIs it just me, or has much of our congress, and even the rest of out federal government, en masse become raving lunatics? All this Terry Schiavo bull, Iraq war bull, Bush being re-elected bull, social security bull, and bush has only served two and a half months of his second term!
I ask, are there any limits to their power, or their perversion of priorities? If they will strip state’s rights on a 48 hour whim, what right will they strip next when it becomes inconvenient, or a good point for political triangulation?
“We should exhaust every avenue before we take a life of a human being,” House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said. “That’s the very least we can do for her.”
Do you think Delay would do the same for you? If it was to his political benefit, he sure would. Since he’s in the frying pan on multiple ethics charges, it behooves him to fire up his core base on his behalf, and this is a primo opportunity. Likewise, Congress has been unable to do the Big Things (a budget, SS reform, etc.), so this makes great news-inducing busy work. It’s important to look like you’re doing something, even if it’s only subpoenaing multi-millionaires on steroids and the comatose.So I’m going to have my own special session. It’s time to update your Living Will, people, and include a new clause: “My wishes, as expressed here, supersede any and all new laws or bills Congress or any other body may pass trying to save me. And any Congressperson who attempts to do so will be haunted mercilessly when I finally do go. Starting with Tom Delay, on general principles.”
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18 March 2005
Fri, 18 Mar 2005 15:47:41 GMT U.S. National Debt Clockvia Kjell Olsen2623 days agoThis just about choked me: the only word that comes to mind in expressing this sort of thing is, well, fuck!
The estimated population of the United States is 295,692,676
so each citizen’s share of this debt is $26,300.01.
The National Debt has continued to increase an average of
$2.35 billion per day since September 30, 2004!
Concerned? Then tell Congress and the White House! -
14 March 2005
Mon, 14 Mar 2005 23:58:00 GMT Wired 11.12: The Key to Geniusvia Kjell Olsen2627 days agoAnother article on savant abilities, this time about a kid with musical and logistical talents:
When Matt was 6, he confided to his mother, “My mind is made of math problems.” Diane started buying him math workbooks for kids twice his age. He zipped through them so quickly, she learned to hide a few in a drawer so he’d have something to work on the following day.
Then one night, Diane and Larry heard a melody coming from downstairs. It was their son, playing “London Bridge” on a toy keyboard. Diane brought Matt into the family room and introduced him to the middle C on the piano. Within a day, he was devouring music books as hungrily as he had math books.As we finish lunch, Matt asks me in his distinctively high-pitched voice, “Did you know that numbers can be friendly and amicable?” He means friendly and amicable in the math-geek sense – numbers that can be factored into one another – but I also felt he was using those words in their ordinary sense. Matt is intimate with numbers. They come to him in dreams and inspire him to write songs. One of his tunes on the album Groovin’ on Mount Everest is called “Forty-Seven” – a number he feels is “lonely” because when he asks people to think up a random number, no one ever chooses it.
The brains of typical children grow in response to lessons learned from the environment – that was one of the significant upgrades in the evolution of Homo sapiens. As new stimuli are absorbed, the neurons in the cortex adapt gradually, and synaptic connections are forged or eliminated. Our brains are cast in the image of our experience.
The overgrowth of the brain tissue of autistic kids, however, is random and automatic, a reaction to an unknown stimulus – perhaps testosterone or some toxic agent in the environment. The result, says Courchesne, is an onslaught of neural noise that makes the infant lose the ability to make sense of its world.Hermelin and her colleagues found that savants also use rule-based strategies for calendar calculating. For a long time, the assumption was that they memorized tens of thousands of day-date pairings during months of obsessive practice. But as in music, the researchers discovered that when figuring dates in the distant past or future, savants supplement their prodigious memories with algorithms they derive from the cycles of the calendar.
This oddly adhesive memory is what binds together every domain of savant skill. In the brains of savants, Treffert believes, associative memory systems located in the higher regions of the cortex fail, and older parts of the brain – the ancient pathways in the basal ganglia known as habit memory – take over.
Habit memory is Pavlovian, an archive of involuntary stimulus/response loops – the memory that never forgets how to ride a bike. To reproduce a Bach sonata with slavish accuracy requires an inner tape recorder and a book of rules. But to play Bach with fire and originality requires Proustian memory, with its nuanced webs of association and metaphor. This higher-order memory, like a living text, is constantly under revision. It’s not just that savants remember everything, says Treffert, it’s that they are unable to forget anything, like the protagonist in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, “Funes the Memorious.”The drawing abilities of most savant artists, for example, burst forth with no preparation, no training, and no practice – as if their skills were already there, fully fledged, needing only access to a pencil or a brush.
Children who seem to come into the world with profound artistic gifts have been objects of fascination for centuries, but recent discoveries suggest we may all carry a savant inside us waiting to be born.Miller formulated a provocative hypothesis to explain the fact that as some FTD patients get worse, they also get better. He posited that the dementia does not create artistic powers in these patients, it uncovers them. The disorder switches off inhibitory signals from the left temporal lobes, enabling suppressed talents in the right hemisphere to flourish. (emphasis mine)
“It looks as though there’s a critical period when every infant has the opportunity to learn absolute pitch, if they grow up in a culture where pitch is associated with meaning,” Deutsch explains. By starting music training early, every child might be able to preserve this inborn ability.
“Our knowledge and expertise blind us,” Snyder told me last spring. “If we could switch off our conceptual mind, we could have a momentary literal viewing of the world.”
Along the same lines – savant art
books to read: “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, “Extraordinary People: Understanding Savant Syndrome”, (Oliver Sacks).
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13 March 2005
Sun, 13 Mar 2005 16:16:00 GMT cityofsound: Shortsighted Shuffle?via Kjell Olsen2628 days agoAs products get smarter in terms of being aware of their behaviour – in some senses, becoming reflexive – and as their raison d’être gets increasingly close to personal, social functionality – in some senses, becoming involved in presentation of self and the behaviour of the users – there is huge potential to build devices which become increasingly, personally meaningful, which can adapt to personal context and preference like never before.
I know I love having everything I play on my iPod put into audioscrobbler – apparently you can’t do this with a shuffle. But this sort of technology is fascinating – with sites like audioscrobbler and del.icio.us and flickr being able to show you where you fit amidst a group of people with similar interests.
It strikes me that the basic condition for these products is to be essentially self-aware – in this specific case, that the iPod Shuffle should be able to keep a track of what tracks the user has played on it, and communicate that information such that that metadata can then be transferred and combined with the overall iTunes Music Library. This ecosystem of music experience software and hardware can therefore keep a track of what tracks have been played (track, album, artist etc), when, on what device, and by whom. Upon this basic usage data, we can build a panoply of useful, interesting services. Look no further than Audioscrobbler for some inspiration.
I really like how community sites are tying people together in their interests – a site like 43things showing you people who have similar goals to you, who live in your city, and eventually both together. When the application fades away and the data that is collected by the application is brought together and made sense of, I think that applications will be able to become entirely more useful.
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10 March 2005
Thu, 10 Mar 2005 20:34:38 GMT How to Start a Startupvia Kjell Olsen2631 days agoAnother neat essay by Paul Grahm, and I heard that there were only five mentions of lisp this time ;) I only saw one, but who knows?
If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. You don’t even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.
When I was trying to think of the things every startup needed to do, I almost included a fourth: get a version 1 out as soon as you can. But I decided not to, because that’s implicit in making something customers want. The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions.
In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them.
Stephen Hawking’s editor told him that every equation he included in his book would cut sales in half. When you work on making technology easier to use, you’re riding that curve up instead of down. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn’t just increase your sales 10%. It’s more likely to double your sales.
In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It’s easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the “high-end” products against the ceiling. Sun did this to mainframes, and Intel is doing it to Sun. Microsoft Word did it to desktop publishing software like Interleaf and Framemaker. Mass-market digital cameras are doing it to the expensive models made for professionals. Avid did it to the manufacturers of specialized video editing systems, and now Apple is doing it to Avid. Henry Ford did it to the car makers that preceded him. If you build the simple, inexpensive option, you’ll not only find it easier to sell at first, but you’ll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the market.
Our angels asked for one, and looking back, I’m amazed how much worry it caused me. “Business plan” has that word “business” in it, so I figured it had to be something I’d have to read a book about business plans to write. Well, it doesn’t. At this stage, all most investors expect is a brief description of what you plan to do and how you’re going to make money from it, and the resumes of the founders. If you just sit down and write out what you’ve been saying to one another, that should be fine. It shouldn’t take more than a couple hours, and you’ll probably find that writing it all down gives you more ideas about what to do.
...Bill Gates was young and inexperienced and had no business background, and he seems to have done ok. Steve Jobs got booted out of his own company by someone mature and experienced, with a business background, who then proceeded to ruin the company. So I think people who are mature and experienced, with a business background, may be overrated. We used to call these guys “newscasters,” because they had neat hair and spoke in deep, confident voices, and generally didn’t know much more than they read on the teleprompter.
Unless you’re in a market where products are as undifferentiated as cigarettes or vodka or laundry detergent, spending a lot on brand advertising is a sign of breakage. And few if any Web businesses are so undifferentiated. The dating sites are running big ad campaigns right now, which is all the more evidence they’re ripe for the picking.
More generally, design your product to please users first, and then think about how to make money from it. If you don’t put users first, you leave a gap for competitors who do.
For most startups the model should be grad student, not law firm. Aim for cool and cheap, not expensive and impressive. For us the test of whether a startup understood this was whether they had Aeron chairs. [...] We had office chairs so cheap that the arms all fell off. This was slightly embarrassing at the time, but in retrospect the grad-studenty atmosphere of our office was another of those things we did right without knowing it.
When you’re looking for space for a startup, don’t feel that it has to look professional. Professional means doing good work, not elevators and glass walls. I’d advise most startups to avoid corporate space at first and just rent an apartment. You want to live at the office in a startup, so why not have a place designed to be lived in as your office?
he key to productivity is for people to come back to work after dinner. Those hours after the phone stops ringing are by far the best for getting work done. Great things happen when a group of employees go out to dinner together, talk over ideas, and then come back to their offices to implement them.
More people are the right sort of person to start a startup than realize it. That’s the main reason I wrote this. There could be ten times more startups than there are, and that would probably be a good thing.
So who should start a startup? Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38, and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life.
Why I shouldn’t start a company right now:
The other reason it’s hard to start a company before 23 is that people won’t take you seriously. VCs won’t trust you, and will try to reduce you to a mascot as a condition of funding. Customers will worry you’re going to flake out and leave them stranded. Even you yourself, unless you’re very unusual, will feel your age to some degree; you’ll find it awkward to be the boss of someone much older than you, and if you’re 21, hiring only people younger rather limits your options.
And why I should…
ome people could probably start a company at 18 if they wanted to. Bill Gates was 19 when he and Paul Allen started Microsoft. (Paul Allen was 22, though, and that probably made a difference.) So if you’re thinking, I don’t care what he says, I’m going to start a company now, you may be the sort of person who could get away with it.
My final test may be the most restrictive. Do you actually want to start a startup? What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years, you work like hell for four. And maybe end up with nothing—though in that case it probably won’t take four years.
So mainly what a startup buys you is time. That’s the way to think about it if you’re trying to decide whether to start one. If you’re the sort of person who would like to solve the money problem once and for all instead of working for a salary for 40 years, then a startup makes sense.
Sorry for all the dumps, but there was a lot of stuff here and I found it quite interesting.
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09 March 2005
Wed, 09 Mar 2005 19:52:00 GMT Young + Brilliant, Blessed + Cursedvia Kjell Olsen2632 days agoFascinating article on different teen “prodigies,” or kids with lots of ability.
“When you are a child prodigy, you are mastering a domain that has already been discovered – you are not inventing it,” says Boston College psychology professor Ellen Winner, author of Gifted Children: Myths and Realities. “To be a `big C’ creator, you have to do things in a different way, and most don’t make that transition, and it is very, very painful for them. Most prodigies are never heard from again. They drop out, or they become experts.”
These talented people get to a stage at which age doesn’t matter anymore, and they’re just like every other bright guy or gal trying to get ahead. Their test scores are irrelevant in a world where things like charisma and character are often the tickets to success. And that realization can be shattering. [...] Some suffer from what psychologists call the “imposter phenomenon,” the fear that they are not as smart as everyone said they were.
School certainly wasn’t working out. He had a teacher whom the Mercers liken to Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His parents decided to home-school him after a rocky year, and Kiki left her career in marketing behind. Looking back, Robert realizes that there was no other choice. “I would have retreated into an emotional shell, or I just would have lost it and had an emotional nervous breakdown at some point,” he says. “It’s not a light issue. For a lot of kids, it becomes a matter of life and death.”
We want a kid who can interact in society and feel confident about himself, be comfortable with a myriad of people, because if he’s this big brain who can only figure out how to design letter bombs . . .” She interrupts the thought, and we know she’s referring to Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, the child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16 and went on to lead a life of isolation and terrorism.
With great power comes even greater responsibility…
Consider the contrasting fates of two prodigies from the early 20th century. Norbert Wiener entered Tufts University in 1906 at age 11 and went on to graduate studies at Harvard in 1909. That same year, a brilliant 11-year-old named William James Sidis also enrolled at Harvard. Wiener became the father of cybernetics. Sidis became a recluse who collected streetcar transfers. He died alone and disillusioned at the age of 46.
A number of groups like Voyagers exist to help parents who don’t know what it means when their toddler conducts adult conversations at the supermarket. But these things cost money, lots of money, and that’s the open secret of this particular subculture. If you can’t afford to pay for services, or if you come from a background that hasn’t prepared you to work the system, your child could go without support, or his or her talents might not be acknowledged.
“You know, being that smart, you end up feeling that you have some sort of duty, or at least I ended up feeling that it would be an incredible waste not to make use of my talents and leave behind an equation that would be remembered. Or something. An idea.” Jonathan Edwards
How does a brainy loner learn to communicate? “I thought the only purpose of communication was to exchange ideas,” he says. “If someone was telling me something that didn’t have an interesting idea, it was noise, and I would ignore it. That was the point of communication, right? To exchange ideas. Wrong! Completely wrong. The point of communication is to exchange emotions. I was on a different wavelength from everybody else.” (emphasis mine)
This kind of stuff just fascinates me, people who seem to be so far above what is average. I wonder why?
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06 March 2005
Sun, 06 Mar 2005 22:02:27 GMT Toronto, Canada on Flickr - Photo Sharing!via Kjell Olsen2635 days agoIncredible pano taken from 443m above toronto, and explanation. Nice.
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Sun, 06 Mar 2005 19:27:58 GMT
MilesTag - DIY Laser Tag SystemKjell Olsen2635 days ago
Here’s a heck of a priject: diy, open source laser tag sets!
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01 March 2005
Tue, 01 Mar 2005 13:40:01 GMT Skiing, Climbing and Riding Photos in Chamonix by Phil Inglevia Kjell Olsen2640 days agoHoly shit – the illustrated account of skiing an insane couloir. Wow.
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26 February 2005
Sat, 26 Feb 2005 23:51:00 GMTLe Petit Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exup
A great book recounting the life of a
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Sat, 26 Feb 2005 23:06:36 GMT
Bill Watterson at Kenyon Collegevia Kjell Olsen2643 days ago
Commencement speech given by Bill Watterson at his alma mater – one of his few public works besides his comic strips.
Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.
If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.
We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running.
Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules and rewards.
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success.
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Sat, 26 Feb 2005 22:30:00 GMT
Calvin and Hobbes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediavia Kjell Olsen2643 days ago
What a great series, and quite a pleasantry to stumble upon this after just finishing reading Le Petit Prince. Two whimsical and incredible pieces of work – go read them1 over and over.
1 Calvin and Hobbes can be had here until it’s hammered by some legality, while le petit prince seems to be under some sort of copyright, and is better in print with the pictures anyway.
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19 February 2005
Sat, 19 Feb 2005 21:44:27 GMT Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | A genius explainsvia Kjell Olsen2650 days agoAmazing:
Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn’t “calculating”: there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. “When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think.”
Savants (I read an article on the topic awhile ago but can’t find the link) are utterly amazing, and usually autistic people. They can use their minds to do incredible things, but then are sometimes also incredibly mentally disabled.
“Savants have usually had some kind of brain damage. Whether it’s an onset of dementia later in life, a blow to the head or, in the case of Daniel, an epileptic fit. And it’s that brain damage which creates the savant. I think that it’s possible for a perfectly normal person to have access to these abilities, so working with Daniel could be very instructive.” Dr. Snyder
It’s just incredible some of the things the human mind can do, but why, and how?
Last year Tammet broke the European record for recalling pi, the mathematical constant, to the furthest decimal point. He found it easy, he says, because he didn’t even have to “think”. To him, pi isn’t an abstract set of digits; it’s a visual story, a film projected in front of his eyes. He learnt the number forwards and backwards and, last year, spent five hours recalling it in front of an adjudicator. He wanted to prove a point. “I memorised pi to 22,514 decimal places, and I am technically disabled. I just wanted to show people that disability needn’t get in the way.”
Peek can read two pages simultaneously, one with each eye. He can also recall, in exact detail, the 7,600 books he has read. When he is at home in Utah, he spends afternoons at the Salt Lake City public library, memorising phone books and address directories.
This stuff just amazes me completely, sorry for dumping so much of it in quotes.
“I went to the playground, but not to play. The place was surrounded by trees. While the other children were playing football, I would just stand and count the leaves.” Tammett
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15 February 2005
Tue, 15 Feb 2005 14:25:34 GMT Top Tech City: Minneapolis, MN - Popular Sciencevia Kjell Olsen2654 days agoMinneapolis rocks. Now if we could just get some decent public transit…
More than a year ago, a crack team of editors and researchers here at Popular Science launched an exhaustive effort to find out. We input reams of data from dozens of private and government sources, tabulated our results, and came up with … Minneapolis.
“I would have guessed Silicon Valley,” he [a coffee jock] says. “But I guess I’m not that surprised. Minneapolis is a progressive place, always looking at what’s next. It’s just not in our nature to brag about it.”
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Tue, 15 Feb 2005 13:21:31 GMT
Setting up a development environment on my Mac | TextDrive Manualsvia Kjell Olsen2654 days ago
Textdrive is the coolest. Manual on how to rock your mac into imitating your txd server.
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Tue, 15 Feb 2005 13:12:13 GMT
Routing: Native Ruby Rewriting | Hierakivia Kjell Olsen2654 days ago
Such a cool addition. I wish everything was as cool as rails.
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13 February 2005
Sun, 13 Feb 2005 12:05:51 GMT RedNova News - Can This Black Box See Into the Future?via Kjell Olsen2656 days agoWow, this is interesting:
But then on September 6, 1997, something quite extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards, recording a sudden and massive shift in the number sequence as his machines around the world started reporting huge deviations from the norm.
That was the day of Princess Diana’s funeral. It’s also “sensed” other big worldly events, like 9/11 and last decembers tsunami. The graph referenced above refers to the deviance of a number of random number generators hooked together through the internet, which normally over the course of time generates as many 1’s as 0’s, resulting in a flat graph.
I’ve always had an inkling that scientific theory these days couldn’t possibly all be “right,” I’ve thought along the lines that the theories explain things that go on, and help us better understand them, but only barely scratch the surface of what actually goes on. This could be another very interesting discovery.
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29 January 2005
Sat, 29 Jan 2005 22:06:28 GMT The Steve Jobs NextSTEP 3.0 demovia Kjell Olsen2671 days agoWow – OSX came from a very impressive OS. I’d never actually seen NextStep before this – but again, wow! A lot of the coolest stuff in OSX right now, and a lot of the stuff that is going to be in tiger, and hopefully a lot that will make it’s debut further down the road.
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Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:04:03 GMT
GPS::Tronvia Kjell Olsen2671 days ago
Tron, where you try and corner your opponent while not running into the line he makes, now playable in the (semi)real world, with cellphones and gps receivers(!). Now I want a cellphone and a gps receiver.
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28 January 2005
Fri, 28 Jan 2005 13:12:06 GMT Gene Kelly 2005via Kjell Olsen2672 days agoWow – take an old clip of singin’ in the rain, be incredibly good at 3d graphics – and this is awesome.
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27 January 2005
Thu, 27 Jan 2005 19:41:54 GMT The New York Times > Health > Study Ties Weight Loss to Restlessness and Fidgetingvia Kjell Olsen2673 days agoOverweight people have a tendency to sit, while lean ones have trouble holding still and spend two hours more a day on their feet, pacing around and fidgeting, researchers are reporting.
I could have told you this ten years ago when I was fidgety as all hell, I couldn’t even sit back and watch cartoons (I had to play along) much less in school.
But it ’s interesting – why can’t I just sit like others can?
The difference in activity levels may be biological and inborn, the researchers say, the result of genetically determined levels of brain chemicals that govern a person’s tendency to move around. It is the predisposition to be inactive that leads to obesity, and not the other way around, they suggest.
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26 January 2005
Wed, 26 Jan 2005 21:02:15 GMT World of adventure Sportsvia Kjell Olsen2674 days agoI have to be sure to see the first episode of this NBC/Jeep Adventure Sports special – backcountry skiing and boarding at Jackson Hole!
Join Teton Gravity Research as they venture out of the boundary gates of Jackson Hole mountain resort with local pro skiers and snowboarders. Experience one of the greatest continuous vertical drops in North America, deep powder, amazing lines and backcountry kickers all under high avalanche danger.
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24 January 2005
Mon, 24 Jan 2005 19:42:00 GMT Video of Jobs introducing the Macintosh in 1984 (kottke.org)via Kjell Olsen2676 days agoAll the images you are about to see will be generated by what is in that bag… Steve Jobs, 1984
Mac comes out. Lights darken, some funky music comes on – and computers change forever.
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23 January 2005
Sun, 23 Jan 2005 17:36:21 GMT MC Lau -- snake charmervia Kjell Olsen2677 days agoWow – people really can charm snakes?
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02 January 2005
Sun, 02 Jan 2005 21:30:00 GMTRalph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Heres a few quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson. I really love his thoughts and also Thoreau’s, two prominent american transcendentalists. Amazing stuff, really.
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28 June 2004
Mon, 28 Jun 2004 17:01:00 GMTWalden
Henry David Thoreau
So Far I’ve only read Walden, which is the bulk of this collection, I’m going to read the others later but evaluate them as I go along.
I loved Walden, but did find myself falling asleep through the middle chapters. Economy, the first chapter, and the Conclusion were my favorite parts of the book, I read them intensely. Some of the things Thoreau says really help me confirm what I have been thinking lately. Recommended reading. -
26 May 2004
Wed, 26 May 2004 14:36:00 GMTTextDrive VC 200
A little more about that amazing hosting deal I talked about in my entry yesterday – it was part of an incredibly good deal offered to finance a new startup web hosting company, TextDrive.
The deal was this – for $199, you purchased a hosting plan for one year. That comes out to about $16 dollars a month, and that compares fairly well to other webhosts for the features1 it includes.
But the amazing part of the deal is that in addition to the first year, you would continue to have the best offering of TextDrive for as long as the company exists. Yes, it blew me away when I first heard it too.
I wasn’t quite sure when I first saw the deal early monday morning (right when Dean posted it in the textpattern forum), but I went to bed, then school, and by the time I got home I decided that it was well worth the money.
I scraped some dollars together, collected all the money my friends owed me that day at school, then went to the bank and threw all of it in. I already had plenty more then the cost in there, but I didn’t feel like burning too big a whole in my balance.
And I still can’t convey how anxious I am to get my confirmation – although I bought very quickly and the shares didn’t sell out until today, I still haven’t got anything more then confirmation that my payment went through to Dean from paypal. But Alas, I’m positive that I got in.
A Great Attitude
What really impressed me about this deal, more then the specs and the lifetime gratuit, was the attitude that the two men behind it (Dean Allen and Jason Hoffman) took towards the project. They weren’t out to make all kinds of money – that wanted to provide people with the kind of hosting that they thought would be great.
We
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Also somewhat recently
