Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Fun Facts!

A medical study found that the slump in air travel following the September 11 terrorist attacks inadvertently slowed the spread of influenza.

* From the Freakonomics 2008 daily calendar.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Electric Car comparison

GM figures that it takes 8 kwh to give the Chevy Volt a 40 mile charge. They say at 10 cents per kwh that's 80 cents, so works out 2 cents/mile. More realistically it's 20 cents per kwh, so $1.60, or 4 cents/mile. At $3.00 for 1G gasoline, a 52 mpg Prius is about 6 cents/mile.

EDIT: 4/23/2009. My prius has been getting 44 mpg recently, so at ~$2.00 for 1G gasoline, that's roughly 4.5 cents/mile.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Barron's 10/13/2008

Michael Santoli, my #2 after Thomas G. Donlan, has some sage advice this week:
  • The past 2 months approximates the August 1987 crash, although back then there was a 22% loss in a single session.
  • In 1987 44% of people were in stocks, now it's more like 70%.
  • 401(k) assets were trivial back in 1987. Now they total about $9 trillion (much in stock funds).
  • Investors are now down to ~ 50% stocks, matching 2002 market bottom.
  • Irrational prices are showing - InBev (INB) is buying Anheuser-Busch (BUD) for $70 yet the market price is $58.50.

He also quotes Wood Dorsey of Market Semiotics:

"This is not the time to sell. If possible, it is better to just watch
and not act or even better, step away until Tuesday. Purgation can be over
at any time and be followed by a reprieve rally as occurred after Sept. 26,
2001."

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Ode to QuickTime

QuickTime, how I love those frequent updates that require me to reboot.
(For long enough, only my Mac required a reboot on QuickTime updates - the PC managed to do it without a reboot. That has now been fixed and the PC has to be rebooted as well.)

QuickTime, how I love that you can't remember the volume the last time I played something and so just assume I want the volume to be at max 100%.

QuickTime, how I love your embrace for closed proprietary codecs.

QuickTime, how I love how you take away the focus from having a flash player in the iPod.

QuickTime, how I love how you register yourself as the default app for a bunch of video file types and then play only the audio for them.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Florida has weird stuff


Florida has weird stuff, originally uploaded by nikconwell.

Seen in a Publix.

Budweiser and Clamato juice. In the same can. Together. Mixed together. At the same time.

I suppose bloggers of the 1940's had the same reaction when they saw Tomato juice and Clam Juice. Together. In the same can.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Why we banned Legos

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/21_02/lego212.shtml

Showed up on reddit and my knee jerk reaction was WTF! On further reading, as is typical of reddit, the headline is there to provoke reaction. The article was an insightful discourse on power structures as observed by teachers of a grade school age after school program. These are the teachers we need more of, not dispensers of rote.

Monday, February 4, 2008

Free Track

There have been recent hacks posted for the Wii and PS3 that let you do head tracking for immersive VR. Here's some open source PC software to do the same thing using some LEDs glued to a hat. This would also be cool for a window manager to let you see depth of the windows to look behind things.


http://www.free-track.net/english/

In the video, to the right is that mounted LED view from the webcam.


Saturday, January 26, 2008

EULA

Anti EULA from http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/26/applyyourself-in-ord.html

READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.


http://reasonableagreement.org/