Great Solar System Comparative Pic

 

A giant image of 88 objects in our solar system, including 11 planets and 21 moons -- all the known objects bigger than 200 miles in diameter.

http://kokogiak.com/solarsystembodieslargerthan200miles.html

Six Million Dollar Man: The Death Probe

Awesome -- this freaked me out for weeks when I was a kid, back when I was 8 or 9 I guess. Had nightmares for weeks.

It's about an indestructible Russian Venus probe that accidentally lands in the US. Of course, Steve Austin has to deal with it.

Here's part 1.1:

And here's part 1.2:

Part 1.3:

Part 1.4:

Part 2.1:

part 2.2:

Part 2.3:

... and part 2.4:

The final section:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Six_Million_Dollar_Man_Episodes

Project Gutenberg's Sci-Fi Section

 

 

 

Free sci-fi books for download, including Burrogh's entire Barsoom series... very cool!

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Science_Fiction_%28Bookshelf%29

Thar She Blows!

 

A dead 60 ton whale exploded while being transported through a major Asian city. Seems like whales blow up during decomposition as gasses release. Must've been a fun clean up... reminds me of SCTV's "Farm Film Report" -- he blowed up real good! 

What's even funnier is that this animal was being transported from a local aquarium where it died. It was a star exhibit because of it's 5 foot penis. "May the Good Lord take a likin' to ya' and blow ya' up real soon!" indeed.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4096586

Who Needs A CIO?

Interesting dichotomy, and one that shows up readily at my level. The doers want to innovate but are constantly stifled by upper leadership, who want to cut costs and reduce change. So, who needs a CIO?

CIOs, it turns out, are mostly business people who have been given the thankless job of keeping the lights on, IT wise. And the best way to ensure that they stay on is to change as little as possible.

That puts many CIOs in the position of not being the technology innovator in their company, but rather the dead weight keeping the real technology innovators--employees who want to use the tools increasingly available on the wide-open Web to help them do their jobs better--from taking matters into their own hands...

The consequence of this is that many CIOs are now just one step above Building Maintenance. They have the unpleasant job of mopping up data spills when they happen, along with enforcing draconian data retention policies sent down from the legal department. They respond to trouble tickets and disable user permissions. They practice saying "No", not "What if..." And they block the ports used by the most popular services, from Skype to Second Life, which always reminds me of the old joke about the English shopkeeper who, when asked what happened to a certain product, answered "We don't stock it anymore. It kept selling out."

And this great quote about the CIOs of Universities:

The most dramatic example of this is on college campuses, where a generation raised on Google and MySpace meets its first IT department. Needless to say, the kids want nothing to do with "disk storage allocations" and "acceptable use policies". The life of a university CIO is like the life of a telco CEO, fast forwarded by about five years. The users want a dumb pipe, preferably at gigabit speed. They neither need or want the university to administer their email, wikis, blogs, video storage or discussion groups. They want it to simply get out of their way.

No kiddin'! The software is getting smart enough and is typically free -- just get out of our way!

http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/02/who_needs_a_cio.html

How To Finish A Meeting Well

• Clearly state what you plan on doing next with the information you’ve just been given, and if you expect or wish to have that employee participate and remain involved in some way.
• State what your next action will be, and ask for or suggest a next action for them, thereby creating collaboration for resolution between you.
• Ask if they agree, or if they have a better idea (they often will! They’re closer to the problem!)
• Last, set a time when you’ll have a follow-up conversation to update each other; set a date for another D5M.
• Before it arrives, take the action you agreed to take.
• When you have your follow-up conversation, speak of another agreement on the next step in the process until the issue has been taken care of.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/learn-to-finish-conversations-well.html

The Daily 5 Minutes

I intend to take this up at work. Basically, the idea is that every day you spend 5 minutes with one of your team. Some good suggestions are provided.
http://www.managingwithaloha.com/2007/02/the_daily_5_min.html

$25 10 Day Survival Kit For Your Car

This survival kit for your car looks easy to pull together and cheap. I'm going to see if I can get this going for the family wagon...
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/yago104.html

Torvalds Rants On OSS And GPLV3

Interesting stuff...

Me, I just don't care about proprietary software. It's not "evil" or "immoral," it just doesn't matter. I think that Open Source can do better, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Source, but it's not a crusade -- it's just a superior way of working together and generating code.

It's superior because it's a lot more fun and because it makes cooperation much easier (no silly NDA's or artificial barriers to innovation like in a proprietary setting), and I think Open Source is the right thing to do the same way I believe science is better than alchemy. Like science, Open Source allows people to build on a solid base of previous knowledge, without some silly hiding.

But I don't think you need to think that alchemy is "evil." It's just pointless because you can obviously never do as well in a closed environment as you can with open scientific methods

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198002077

Why Great Minds Can't Grasp Consciousness

Personally, I believe that consciousness is an emergent property of complex, ordered (yet chaotic) systems which are not necessarily biological in nature. It's just that biology has spawned complex ordered systems to deal with information.

[Gross] wondered whether scientists would ever be able to measure the onset consciousness in infants and speculated that consciousness might be similar to what physicists call a "phase transition," an abrupt and sudden large-scale transformation resulting from several microscopic changes. The emergence of superconductivity in certain metals when cooled below a critical temperature is an example of a phase transition.

In a recent email interview, Gross said he figures there are probably many different levels of consciousness, but he believes that language is a crucial factor distinguishing the human variety from that of animals.

Gross isn't the only physicist with ideas about consciousness.

This bit sounds promising:

According to Greenfield, the mind is made up of the physical connections between neurons. These connections evolve slowly and are influenced by our past experiences and therefore, everyone's brain is unique.

But whereas the mind is rooted in the physical connections between neurons, Greenfield believes that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, similar to the 'wetness' of water or the 'transparency' of glass, both of which are properties that are the result of -- that is, they emerge from -- the actions of individual molecules.

For Greenfield, a conscious experience occurs when a stimulus -- either external, like a sensation, or internal, like a thought or a memory -- triggers a chain reaction within the brain. Like in an earthquake, each conscious experience has an epicenter, and ripples from that epicenter travels across the brain, recruiting neurons as they go.

 

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050808_human_consciousness.html

Stumbling On Happiness

Interesting book. It's not a self-help kind of thing, at least it's not intended to be. It's a rational, thought out expose on what happiness actually is and what causes it from a lecturing psychologist. Dan Gilbert is a genuinely funny and smart guy and backs up his thoughts with numerous studies and data. Some conclusions:

• We can predict future events but not future emotional states (our current one gets in the way)
• The best predictor of future happiness is not with ourselves at all -- it's by asking someone that is doing what you think may make you happy. We're not as different as we may like to think.
• Small misfortunes hurt more than big ones. We have an "emotional immune system" that kicks in for big upsets like death and divorce that works by rationalizing the events so they're not really our fault or they are for the best. However this immune system doesn't get triggered with smaller ones like losing $20, because we still need to learn from our mistakes.
• We are limited by the constraints of our imaginations. Quite literally, if we can't imagine it, we can't do it.
• We almost always exaggerate in imagining the long- term happiness something we want to happen will give us.
• Many of the most productive and creative people are those who are continually unhappy with the world. We imagine they are happy, but they aren't. Contrastingly, many of those we imagine to be unhappy (such as handicapped people) actually are very happy.
  
• Happiness is rarely as good as we imagine it to be, and rarely lasts as long as we think it will. The same mistaken expectations apply to unhappiness.

http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/1400077427/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-6232659-5188943?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174572888&sr=8-1

Slow Leadership

Very interesting blog on leadership and work. It basically flips the puritan work ethic on it's head and says that if work is too hard, do something else. Do something you find effortless -- you'll be more successful, enjoy work more, and be less stressed out.

If knowledge-work activity takes great effort and determination, that must mean one or more of these descriptions apply:

• It’s something you have never done before, you are not competent in doing it, or you lack the know-how and training required. Basically, you are out of your depth.
• It’s something you haven’t done for a long time, so you are extremely rusty. Once again, this means you are not competent.
• You hate doing whatever it is, you have no interest or aptitude for it, and you are only involved because you have no choice. As a result, you are likely to be unmotivated as well as incompetent.

 

http://www.slowleadership.org/

How To Write A Good Email At Work

How to write a good email at work:

C: Is it connected to my job??
L: Give me a list of things you want me to do about this information
E: What do you expect me to do about this information?
A: What is my ability in this regard? How can I uniquely help here?
R: What is the return on investment (me or the company)?

http://sanderssays.typepad.com/sanders_says/2007/03/make_your_email.html

Obesity Unrelated to Athletic Activity

Weird. A new study in the UK says there is no impact to exercise with childhood obesity. It suggests that genetics and diet are the prime factors.

"Those children who had little opportunity at school to undertake activity were bouncing around after school whereas those who'd had a lot of opportunity during the course of the school day settled down, and did relatively little," he said.

"The most important thing (was) if you added the in-school activity to the out-of-school activity, they were exactly the same."

That is not the only surprise. Professor Wilkin said children's activity levels had no bearing on their body mass index - their risk of obesity.

"Even looking over a period of years, because we repeat these measures year by year in these children, we have been unable to show any relationship between the physical activity that a child undertakes and his BMI."

If true, these findings cast serious doubts on the government's strategy to halt the increase in childhood obesity by the end of the decade, largely by encouraging physical activity.

Professor Wilkin said it was based on unproven prejudice - that today's children do not exercise as much as previous generations.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6442293.stm

Why Smart People Are Less Happy

Interesting...

Adults tend to believe that intelligent kids can deal with anything because they are intellectually superior. This inevitably includes situations where the intelligent kids have neither knowledge nor skills to support their experience. They go through the tough times alone. Adults don't understand that they need help and other kids don't want to associate with kids the social leaders say are outsiders.

 

As a result we have many highly intelligent people whose social development progresses much slower than that of most people and they have trouble coping with the stressors of life that present themselves to everyone. It should come as no surprise that the vast majority of prison inmates are socially and emotionally underdeveloped or maldeveloped and a larger than average percentage of them are more intelligent than the norm.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8778/Why-Intelligent-People-Tend-To-Be-Unhappy

A Nosedive Into The Desert

Very interesting blog... this guy has done some remarkable analysis of Saudi oil production and expects that they've peaked and will go into a near continuous state of decline.

In this post, I extend my analysis of Saudi Arabian production backwards four years earlier than my post of last week. I explain in detail how the evidence strongly suggests that since late 2004, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has entered rapid decline of their oil production, at least for the time being.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2331

In Praise Of Simplicity In Our Programming Lives

Amen!

Now saying I like simple doesn't mean I like useless or powerless functionality. Einstein's famous equation E=MC² doesn't look like much but it changed the world. He (and those his work was based on) took a lot of time to come up with how to express the concept in this compact form. The trouble with a lot of software that I have seen is that the architects, designers and coders either don't or can't take the time (or aren't imaginative or experienced enough) to understand how to create something that does the job with a minimum of complexity. Sometimes the tools or frameworks or environments we are forced to work in or with don't make it possible. That's a sad thing.

Sometimes what we are working on is complicated to understand, code and create. My argument is not to simplify the requirements for what we are doing but to find the simplest, most effective way to implement them. It's not that I want to write code so simple my mother could understand it; I want to find the minimum of complexity (the "not simpler" clause).

http://codist.biit.com/fiche/thecodist/article/in-praise-of-simplicity-in-our-programming-lives

TARDIS MAME Console

Very cool makezine blog on building a MAME (arcade emulator) inside a mockup TARDIS - the telephone box/time machine from Doctor Who. Especially cool is that he's built the console itself in the shape of the classic 70's style TARDIS console from the Tom Baker era.
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/03/tardis_mame_console.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

SVN

Going to try some source control for the website... SVN (backend) and WebSVN (php frontend) look interesting.
http://websvn.tigris.org/