May 2012
3 posts
Feynman's letter to his dead wife →
Physicist Richard Feynman was born this day in 1918. In 1946, he wrote this incredibly heartbreaking letter
Via @LettersOfNote
WatchMaurice Sendak and Stephen Colbert. A great interview.
via ColbertNation
April 2012
1 post
Today I Became a US Citizen
I’ve lived here for 20 years. Three years learning who I was in Northern Massachussetts, four building life long friends in the woods of New Hampshire. A summer coding in Seattle, Thanksgivings in Delaware, Spring Break in the Florida Keys. I almost died hiking Tennessee’s fabled Smoky Mountains. I spent a year in DC mostly because someone gave me a job, before discovering San...
March 2012
3 posts
On Healthcare
Government exists to provide for citizens what they cannot provide for themselves adequately and at scale. We agree on roads and schools, but for some mystifying reason in the United States, healthcare is not intrinsically considered to be part of that essential group. Mystifying because no one argues about the need for a military to protect us. To protect our freedom to live healthy lives in...
“Paulie’s Bouncing Bible
He carried his basketball wherever he went....”
– From Dennis Bernstein’s Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom, a really beautiful collection of poems.
February 2012
1 post
“If the insurance industry should experience a $250 billion loss from some...”
– Buffet’s 2011 Letter to Berkshire Hathaway Investors
December 2011
2 posts
Prostitution, Welfare and Uber →
This an old post that I just recently came across. Love how the data nerds just keep getting sidetracked by more interesting data, totally losing their initial focus. I love this because I am a data nerd myself.
What it takes to make minimum wage as an...
There’s been a lot of talk in my circles these days about the pros/cons of different musician revenue models.
Some good thoughts about it are laid out here: http://derekwebb.tumblr.com/post/13503899950/giving-it-away-how-free-music-makes-more-than-sense
And here’s a great infographic depicting the options.
via Information is Beautiful
October 2011
6 posts
The World's Most Mysterious Book →
The Voynich Manuscript has stumped cryptographers for 500 years.
I’ve been reading all about this manuscript. Fascinating stuff. Learned a new word through the process: ductus (“the number of strokes that make up a written letter, and the direction, sequence and speed in which they are written”). eg, The author’s ductus seemed practiced, evidence that the symbols were...
Revisiting the Chunking Mansions →
Allison and I crashed here for a couple nights a few years ago in a room probably about 8x6. We paid extra for a window facing a wall close enough you could reach out and touch it. Every race and ethnicity packed into the maze of a building, anything imaginable can be bought or sold, the true black market wild west.
“Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big...”
– History Matters
September 2011
2 posts
Faster than speed of light? →
I hope this result holds. We’re due for a major physics revolution.
via Jean Bredeche
August 2011
6 posts
Old SF →
Great Mashup of the San Francisco Public Library’s Image Archives with the Google Maps API. Enjoy.
“There is an extraordinary breadth and depth and tenure among the Apple executive...”
– Tim Cook, on assuming the day-to-day operations of Apple, after Steve Job’s first medical leave two years ago.
Dear Photograph →
pictures from the past, in the present. via Grace Boyle
100 year old Antarctic Scotch
Last year a team of researchers discovered a 5 crates of scotch left behind by Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated attempt at the South Pole in 1909.
The Mackinlay Distillery doesn’t exist anymore, but some master brewers have painstakingly recreated the exact blend.
Behold the Mackinlay’s Shackleton Rare Old Highland Malt
Move, Eat, Learn
These make me want to get back on the road.
Mereki traveled with two friends, DOP Tim White and Actor Andrew Lees, to 11 countries in 44 days, shooting the three short films. They caught 18 flights, traveling 38 thousand miles with two cameras that shot almost a terabyte of footage.
Thanks to Sharif Nasser for pointing me at them.
MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.
EAT from Rick...
Nice visualization of US Debt →
July 2011
2 posts
I love this tune. Imagine an 80s nintendo track...
June 2011
2 posts
April 2011
4 posts
A ride through San Francisco…in 1906 [Video] →
This is apparently four days before the big earthquake. What I liked best was watching everyone dancing around the cars. They’re clearly new and without precedent of road rules. Everyone looks like they’re having fun jumping out of the way, but I’m sure a lot of people got hit in those early days.
Thanks Collin
March 2011
3 posts
Google's Castle: still breachable
Warren Buffet famously describes his favorite businesses as “economic castles protected by unbreachable ‘moats.’” The Apple ecosystem is a good example of this. Apple makes money a few different ways, but its primarily from hardware. While other manufacturers might make a faster tablet, or a phone with more features, it’s the full package of the ecosystem that keeps their loyal...
January 2011
2 posts
“When we launched AOL 4.0 in 1998, AOL used ALL of the world-wide CD production...”
– Reggie Fairchild, Product Manager for AOL 4.0, via Quora
December 2010
3 posts
Go Confidently... is available on Amazon!
Allison and I spent the last year converting our travel blog into a photo book. It’s now published and up on Amazon!
http://www.amazon.com/Go-Confidently-Couples-Yearlong-Adventures/dp/1456389149/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1293031596&sr=8-4
It’s been a fun project, which took me back to my high school days when I was responsible for laying out portions of The Phillipian
But...
WatchTime-lapse video of Robert Josiah Bingaman painting ‘New Mexico’. Reminds me of gardening. The early layering process is akin to all the effort of planting, weeding, nurturing, before the explosion arrives that makes all the effort worthwhile.
via Robin Sloan
Jasper Akhnoukh: The worst week of my life... →
This is the most scared I have ever been. He was in bad shape for a little while there. I’m sure this is something you get more accustomed to as a parent, but it really rocked my world. But all is good now, and we’re really thankful for everyone’s support. I’m especially thankful for Allison who was both our family’s emotional rock (when I was falling to pieces),...
November 2010
5 posts
“Let us aim for the virtue that will ever make any democracy withstand the...”
– Dr Richard Botham (Jan 1, 1926 - Nov 18, 2010), from his 1944 High School Commencement Speech
U2's Natural Logarhythm: Exponential Decay in the... →
I believe all of the world’s secrets will be revealed when we finally understand why a) e is found all over the natural world and b) why we find it so beautiful
I Fixed the Federal Budget
Rarely are the trade-offs of budget dealings as well laid out as this. The ads we see only show one side of the story as do the ridiculous California propositions…of course I don’t want to cut pay for firefighters.
Here’s my budget: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?choices=fvu30lm3
communitas:
The New York Times produced a...
Alain Delorme's 'Manufactured Totems' →
a great photo project
October 2010
4 posts
1 tag
John Sculley on Steve Jobs →
worth reading in its entirety
Twitter Event Horizon
The Twitter Event Horizon is my term for the first-in first-out information consumption habits that the we’re all familiar with these days thanks to the “stream”. For reasons both technical (bandwidth) and user experience (I can only scroll so much), your average stream will contain < 100 items. For me that is about 2 hours of tweets on an average day. For those that have...
Community in technology
When starting a new software project without a lot of baggage attached you’ve got a wide swath of tools to choose from. I’ve used a bunch of different tools over the years, but increasingly and especially in the past few years, the most important influencer of that choice is where the most active and passionate community is.
These days that is in the Ruby community with Github as its...
September 2010
1 post
A Philosophical Investigation of the Singularity →
This is worth a read for those inclined. The best analysis I’ve seen of the possibility/impact of the singularity, the moment in time when machines become more intelligent than humans, which leads to each generation of machines creating even more intelligent machines and an exponential intelligence explosion.
Mainstream philosophy doesn’t think the topic is even worth discussing,...