Posts from — April 2011

Sebatian’s brief TED talk on Google’s diverless car project:

(http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/eng//id/1109)

I’m curious to see when this will become a reality, but also where it will become a reality.

Some people have contested my claim that San Francisco is widely known as “The City Of Smells”. I’m not claiming that San Francisco is the only city to sport a distinctive set of scents, much like Paris is not the only city with lights… same idea. I have assembled some photographic evidence of this fact.

Caption: A cloud of a smell envelops downtown San Francisco

Caption: Former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom addresses a crowd of supporters: “If there’s one thing San Francisco is known as, it is The City of Smells.” Newsom continued, “It has been the policy of my administration to preserve and enhance the wide variety of smells that permeate this city, so that they may continue to be enjoyed by all San Franciscans today and for years to come.”

Caption: One of San Francisco’s many hills. The hills were built in the 1970s in order to separate different “scent zones” of the city, giving it the name “The City of Smells”.

Caption: The fire following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake converted many flavors into the smells that San Franciscans take for granted today.

Thanks for reading. I now consider this matter closed.

Yesterday, Chris featured Fitz and the Tantrums – Don’t Gotta Work It Out on his blog. I hadn’t heard of Fitz and the Tantrums before. They described their music as “soul-influenced indie pop”, which seems pretty accurate. I also like the band name a lot.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpK63g3-AOI)

If you want to hear more, Chris also posted their song MoneyGrabber.

Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the Web) outlines his very real concerns about the future of the web in Scientific American:

The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.

If we, the Web’s users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands. We could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want. The ill effects could extend to smartphones and pads, which are also portals to the extensive information that the Web provides.

Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected.

This is a big deal. The recent trends are pretty worrisome.

A Russian wedding videographer made this beautiful video from a visit to Thailand:

Phuket Breathing // Thailand from artisland on Vimeo.

It’s a four-minute vacation.

Lapham’s Quartly has a chart of history’s “worst jobs in the world”. The axes are a bit odd, but the chart’s content is definitely interesting.

(via)

I recently heard something interesting on NPR’s On The Media about code names in war. From the wikipedia article about “Battle of the Beams” (the radio navigation/disruption arms race in WWII):

British monitors soon started receiving intelligence intercepts referring to a new device known as Y-Gerät, which was also sometimes referred to as Wotan. R V Jones had already concluded the Germans used code names which were too descriptive. He asked a specialist in German language and literature at Bletchley Park about the word Wotan. The specialist realised Wotan, the name of a one-eyed god, might be a single beam navigation system.

If you’re interested in the role of radar and signal processing in World War Two, you should watch the talk “The Secret History of Silicon Valley”, which covers this topic extensively. I saw this at work, and it was fascinating:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ)

The 2011 winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature was Inside Job, a movie about the 2008 financial crisis. I saw it not too l long ago and strongly recommend seeing it. It’s one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in a while and it left me more angry than any other movie I’ve seen (except maybe Battlefield Earth.. but I was just angry that I paid to see that).

Trailer:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzrBurlJUNk)

I wish we could make a movie about how we dealt with a crisis and how we fixed the system. A movie with heroes who work for the common good and eventually turn things around. Or at least villains being punished. None of that happens. We’re still living with a system of too-big-to-fail banks controlling wider and wider swaths of the economy, helmed by vicious, cynical Gordon Gekkos who haven’t the slightest regard for the well-being of others. We allow crooks in suits to operate in broad daylight: swindling us and raiding the treasury when things go wrong, then when it comes time to balance the budget, many propose we go in and strip programs that benefit society’s most vulnerable.

I’ll stop there for now, but expect to be writing more on this subject soon.

The movie is on Amazon and Netflix.