If the Earth were a sandwich

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http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/

"Never before have two pieces of bread been simultaneously placed on the ground directly opposite each other on the globe, thus making an EARTH SANDWICH.  The fact that the earth has never been a sandwich is probably why things are so f*cked up."

I guess Zefrank does a daily video blog, and this one was from May 16.  Be sure to watch the full video, it even includes a music video.  Also try out the "find the opposite" tool and the "current status tool" (Google Maps mashups).

From a June 19 Slashdot story:

A piece on NPR this Saturday details the concept and a team from New Zealand and Spain completed the challenge.
Then on Friday he allowed his show to be written by his viewers who
battled out 2,000+ script revisions in a Wiki. Sunday's New York Times describes the results."

Categoriesfun

Cory Doctorow on why new media will succeed

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As the old media companies try to resist the tidal wave of new media, they should pay attention to the following statement made by Cory Doctorow in his June 2004 Microsoft DRM talk:

New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at.

This parallels some of the ideas in Clayton Christian's excellent book, The Innovators Dillema.

Prosper: regular folks making loans to regular folks

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www.propser.com

I read about them in this article on TheRegister. The article sums it up nicely:

The company conducts background checks on loan applicants to get their credit scores and assigns them a risk factor. People willing to make a loan then bid on the interest rate they're willing to charge given the risk. Prosper spreads the loan across multiple loaners to reduce the overall risk for those handing out their hard-earned cash.

You can make about a seven per cent return on your money with minimal risk, which is better than a lot of low-return investments and not quite as a good as what a decent stock trader will see. Risk takers can make far more by venturing their cash on folks with low credit scores.

The real interweb part of Prosper comes from the stories people write to try and convince you to hand over money.

"I am a single, independent, reliable, responsible woman," writes one person. "My problem? I've overextended myself."

"I have two daughters that are graduation from college this year," writes another. "I need to pay off the outstanding balances at the schools in order for them to receive their diploma's in the mail."

We talked to a few people about Prosper, and everyone agreed that there's heart-warming, practical aspect to the company. Can it compete with more than happy to lend credit card companies and far more traditional loaners? We have our concerns.

Educating a CEO on "The Mythical Man-Month"

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After a certain point, adding more developers to a software project does not get the project done any faster.  Frederick Brooks wrote about this problem in The Mythical Man-Month:

When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned. Many software tasks have this characteristic because of the sequential nature of debugging. In tasks that can be partitioned but which require communication among the subtasks, the effort of communication must be added to the amount of work to be done. […] Oversimplifying outrageously, we state Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

This O'Reilly Radar blog post presents the story of a CEO who did not understand this problem.  The CEO hoped that adding more developers would speed up a project that was going to miss it's deadline.  What did the developers do to convince the CEO that adding more developers wouldn't help, and might make things worse?

The developers each bought a copy of Brooks' book, brought the CEO into a conference room, and stacked up the copies of the book, telling him: It is extremely urgent that you read this book. We've bought you many copies so that you might read it faster. They made their point.

Using cellular towers to measure rainfall

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Here's an interesting use of the radio links between cell towers — measuring the amount of rainfall. Rainfall interferes with radio in certain frequency ranges used by cellular companies to connect their cell towers to the landline networks.  Cellular companies must monitor the signal strength of these radio links to be sure that rainfall does not degrade the signals too much.

Using this data may be an inexpensive way to provide a detailed picture of rainfall reaching the ground.  Typically rainfall is measured either via a handfull of rain guauges which are expensive to operate and maintain, or via radar which measures rain at altitude rather than rain that actually reaches the ground.

Hypothetical Iraq scenario

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Scott Adam's posts an interesting hypothetical scenario in hits 29 April 2006 blog entry:

Suppose you believed that the world is soon reaching an oil supply crisis. Many experts believe that. And suppose the consensus of economists is that unless the oil supply problem is solved, America will be plunged into a spiral of depression the likes of which has never been seen.

If America goes down, the rest of the industrial world will too. Starvation will follow. Health services will crumble. Crime will soar. Lots of people will die. Imagine China losing half of its customer base in a year. Could 100 million people die from a large economic disaster? I think so.

Now suppose America’s experts thought that a smallish war to depose an evil Iraqi dictator was all that was needed to buy another 20 years of reliable oil supply – long enough to develop alternative energy sources that are economical.

Under my hypothetical scenario, would America have a moral obligation to attack Iraq under false pretenses if its experts believed that doing so protects the most lives in the long run?

This is strictly hypothetical.  Scott is not saying that he believes this is what happened with the current Iraq war.

Edwards AFB Air Show, 2005

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This site has a bunch of good pics and nice descriptions of the 2005 air show at Edwards Airforce Base.

http://www.richard-seaman.com/Aircraft/AirShows/Edwards2005/Highlights/

One of the premier airshows in the world is held at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave desert about an hour north-east of Los Angeles. It's a show like no other, held at America's most historic aviation test facility, adjacent to Roger's dry lake bed which is used as an emergency landing area during flight tests, and for occasional visits by the Space Shuttle returning from orbit. This is the only show anywhere in the world where you'll hear military aircraft break the sound barrier (twice in one day at the 2005 show, once by an F-16 fighter and later by a B-1 bomber).

Social TV

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Tom Coates post his concepts for Social Software for set-top boxes on his blog.  Similar to the way IM software (like AIM or MSN Messenger) will do a little pop-up showing you buddies comming online, set-top box software could show you what your buddies are currently watching.  It makes watching TV social even if you're alone in the room.