April 2009
20 posts
1 tag
Roger Ebert on 'How To Review'
Ebert wrote an interesting instructional article on the do’s and dont’s of movie reviewing… This seems like something every reporter or writer should do to explain how they approach their topics of expertise…. hmmm.
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A Random Thought on Teaching Chem Labs....
I tend to like cooking shows like Alton Brown’s ‘Good Eats’ — and America’s Test Kitchen which claims to test its recipes to ensure that they are actually as tasty as most other cooking shows make their stuff look/sound… which reminded me of the total waste of effort there is in the US university system to teach students chemistry lab techniques. Instead of...
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Lunar Robots Would Be Awesome
Instead of more manned missions to the moon.. I think robots would be a much better investment. The daVinci surgical robot system is really neat — and “only” $1.3M or so… I dunno what kind of maintenance it requires, though. Reminds me that I heard that PG&E is funding a solar energy satellite and makes me wonder if a lunar energy generating station (manned by robots)...
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Website Benchmarks
Wikipedia is awesome. Not only does it provide a valuable free source of semi-reliable information, but it also provides a web traffic benchmark of sorts.
Currently, all of Wikipedia, including the photos and audio, fits in less than 5 terabytes of storage. The text alone is less than 500 MB compressed. With the new servers and the new media editing services, Vibber expects Wikipedia to be...
Dems Lasers...
Breeding seeds uses some pretty fancy techniques — like lasers! So maybe people are already using MRI in agricultural processes… (I just randomly saw this laser video.)
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Another Random Invention For The Public Domain
Just wondering when NMR (MRI) technology will get cheap enough that farmers will be using it on fruits to see what the sugar content is… Perhaps doing MRI on grapes will lead to even finer wine-making? I guess MRI could also help with selecting meat, too. But I assume MRI machines are a bit too expensive? (Hopefully, it’s getting cheaper?) Being able to see what fruits/meats/etc...
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By Jove! You've Got It...
Jove.com is a cool website… It’s basically a YouTube channel aimed at scientists to learn and publish experimental procedures and findings… so the reason why this is cool is that it opens up scientific journals a bit more. Information (eg. lab techniques) can hopefully be spread more easily using online sites like this — without having to buy a reprint or a trip to the...
YouTube Makes Money?
I’ve always wondered if YouTube makes money, so I was interested to randomly see this quote:
Estimates for YouTube’s ad sales range from $120 million (Screen Digest) to $500 million (Jeffries & Co.). In its 2008 annual report, Google said it “has yet to realize significant revenue benefits” from its $1.65 billion acquisition.
I guess I’ll need to look for an...
No More Space Races, Please
Manned missions to moon have already been done, so what do manned missions to Mars (or back to the moon) accomplish? Russia is planning a new space craft design for just $24 million, but that doesn’t mean we have to duplicate their efforts, does it? NASA should focus its efforts on robot missions, and then when the robots have exhausted their usefulness in exploration… maybe we...
Kindle At Libraries?
Is it really cost effective for libraries to lend out Kindles? Books last basically forever, barring abusive library patrons. Kindles need to have batteries replaced, and I assume wear and tear is a bit less kind to Kindles than to books. But I hope to find a library that lends out Kindles — cuz I wanted to try out a Kindle to see if the screen is any good (and how fast it refreshes).
Regression Graphs In Booms/Busts
Graphs that imply there is a “regression to the mean” always pop up… but do they actually have any significance? Should economies really only grow at about 1.5% per year (and anything higher or lower than that is irrational optimism/pessimism)?
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Another Idea For The Public Domain
Just thinking about my future need for bifocals.. and thought that instead of a LASIK Procedure that only shapes an eyeball lens, there should be a laser ablation technique that makes the lens more flexible by creating a pattern of holes in the lens that would make it less stiff… A quick Google search, tho, indicates that I’m not the only one who has thought of this — but this...
The Problem With Copyright Lasting An Author's...
Random thought about copyright lasting as long as an author lives: the problem is that medical science may figure out a way to keep an author’s body alive indefinitely. For example, Henrietta Lacks lives “forever” in a way — as an immortal line of cancer cells called HeLa cells. Okay, her body isn’t alive, (and HeLa cells are arguably a different species from human...
New Palm Pre apps underscore Apple's iPhone... →
I doubt this will get too many folks that jazzed about the Palm Pre… but it’s good to see some competition in the smartphone market. Hopefully, innovative features will start driving the creation of better wireless services. I think these features, tho, would have to be a bit more concrete — not just “we can do stuff that the iPhone can’t”….
...
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Web Services -- conferencing
I randomly saw that Google owns a web conferencing company — http://www.marratech.com/ — that’s no surprise. I’m just wondering when it’ll be incorporated into Google Accounts.
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Really Short URLs..?
Here’s another idea that I’m releasing into the public domain… I like the idea of bit.ly and tinyurl.com… but I want my urls to be shorter. How about a service that shortens URLs in the following way: using a short domain name (eg X.us) to create shorter URLs like http://X.us/1 (for the first URL a user creates — x.us/2 for the 2nd, and so on). So a lot of users...
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Temporary Incentives
As the California sales tax bumps up temporarily to deal with the CA budget crisis, I was wondering how much of a boost those Macy’s “one-day” sales events actually create. My thought was that if these kind of sales really encourage a temporary increase in spending — shouldn’t the government use the same tactic, too, when collecting taxes? Was there any significant...
... when will distributed storage be the default?
I saw this LinkedIn post and wondered why distributed systems aren’t just the standard way to store information safely… I assume there are a lot of technical reasons, but I also assume that the technical challenge will become more easily accomplished with time. So when will distributed storage become the default way to storage all information?
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Building Islands
With the financial crisis still going on — caused in part by the phrase “they’re not making any more land” — it’s interesting that there are some folks who are actually optimistic that more land can be created. Dubai is famous for building some man-made islands, and Singapore is slowly growing by making its nation bigger by shipping in more land from...