The Big Think

Hear Hear! via johncoxart

A big bright flash in the night sky. Science is befuddled.
I love it when Science gets befuddled.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Actually, not current. I just finished Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner. Very interesting. They have some “controversial” aspects to their book that were very over-inflated by the critics. I thought they did a commendable job of following the data without imposing a moral stance. Overall a very interesting book.

Nifty high-speed video of a DSLR mirror/shutter in action.

The Mars Rovers have achieved their fifth birthday. That’s incredible for a mission that was supposed to end with dead rovers after only 90 days. Hat tip to the engineers.

Hard to say “best XKCD ever”, but this one come really close.

Good advice. Even better since it’s done in stop motion.

If there is a central problem with journalism, it is the lack of skepticism. Especially as it applies to government. Politicians and political organizations are not held to account for contradictory statements, false predictions and claims…

The Right has convinced itself that the problem is “that liberal media”, but that is obstructive rhetoric. Sure, there are a multitude of examples of media bias that favors the Left…but there are also a multitude of examples of media bias that favors the Right. People notice what they expect to see.

This isn’t a problem of personal bias; biases are unavoidable and don’t fit a left/right matrix, anyway. Ultimately, criticisms of Left/Right bias are tactical attacks against symptoms, not the problem itself. Crying “that liberal media!” delegitimizes our more fundamental criticisms.

The problem isn’t a biased media. It is a media that has lost sight of the role of journalism and reporters.

If there is even a question of whether they should be extremely skeptical of political claims, then they aren’t really a Fourth Estate at all. They’ve just become enablers of the Estates to which they are attached.

full article here.

Another reason to stay far away from Microsoft’s Zune.

Baffled consumers are griping about a mysterious glitch that appeared to cause thousands of Zune music players to simultaneously stop working late Tuesday and early Wednesday.
Microsoft issued the first Zune portable music player in 2006 to compete with the iPod.

Internet message boards have been flooded with complaints about Zune’s 30GB models freezing, prompting Y2K-like speculation about end-of-year hardware or software problems.

“It seems that every Zune on the planet has just frozen up and will not work,” posted a Mountain Home, Idaho, user on CNN’s iReport.com. “I have 3 and they all in the same night stopped working.”

more here.

The year comes to an end and I’ve clocked in 47 books. I just finished the last one a few minutes ago.

# of Books: 47
# of Pages Read: 13291
Average pages/book: 283
Shortest Book: 80
Longest Book: 1152

Stats since 4/1/01 (when I started counting):

# of books: 266
# of pages: 89107
Averages pages: 335
Shortest Book: 60
Longest Book: 1152

If you assume that I started reading 30 years ago and have kept the same general pace, somewhere in the past year I read my one-thousandth book. Pretty cool. I wish I had known which one it was. Hopefully something classic like Anthem or Cryptonomicon and not something like Air Tools: How to Maintain Your Tools.

It’s an interesting little habit I have of writing down all my books and pages. Doesn’t take very long, and it reinforces to me how many books are in the average small town library, or even the average Barnes and Noble. It would take dozens of lifetimes to get through a respectable fraction of them, and those collections represent pretty much just the most popular or in demand books of the past decade or so. There have been millions of books published in just the last decade alone. How is one supposed to keep up?

Years ago I read a science fiction story about a device that allowed you to “read” (absorb, really) a book by holding a small square cube that contained the “book” next to your head for a few seconds. You could plow through several books in a day. Unfortunately, reading more than one or two per day (a process that took only seconds) ran the risk of permanent psychosis. Hmm… good thing that little device doesn’t exist now, or I might be tempted. People probably already think I’m a little crazy for keeping track.

wingsuit base jumping

These guys are nuts.

I gave up making New Years’ resolutions several years ago, mostly because 100% of them were either dull and boring (watch less TV), or unattainable/unsustainable (read 100 books this year!). But I’ve been looking online a bit this morning and have seen several people who have listed what they want to accomplish in 2009. I know it’s a subtle distinction, but I figure that I’ll feel less pressure if I state things as “gee, it’d be nice to…” rather than set myself up for failure by making it an Official Resolution.

With that in mind, here’s a random list of things I’d like to see out of the new year (some are resolution-like, and some I have no control over).

1. Chrome for Mac. Google has a new browser called Chrome that is supposedly all teh hotness (1.5: stop saying “teh hotness” before it goes out of style and starts marking me as a greying member of the almost-40 set. Too late) and I’d like to see it come to the Mac in 2009. I use Firefox for 99% of my browsing and love it, but it still has some niggling issues (I’m looking at you, Flash). Chrome is supposed to be neck-snappingly fast, which would be nice on my aging G4.

2. Fix my computer. Do a full clean/wipe/new drive/more RAM for the current machine. I was going to upgrade to a new tower, but the combination of economics and gear compatibility has convinced me to try to get a few more years (!?!) out of my current machine. So now instead of spending $eriou$ ca$h on a new Mac and associated hardware, I’m going to spend a few hundred dollars and try to eke out a bit more life. My computers tend to last about 6 years, at which time they’re ready to be put out to stud. My current 1.25Ghz G4 (G4! Don’t laugh) was bought in August of 03, so it just passed its fifth birthday.

3. Acquire New Maker Skills. Here’s the big one. I’m currently learning how to make stained glass and loving the process. This past year I learned how to do RTV molding as well as a few other useful small skills. I love the idea of adding to my “Maker Skills” bag-of-tricks, so from now on I want to start each year with the idea of consciously looking for one big skill and several small skills to add each year. Not sure what that’ll be this year, but by next December I hope to be able to do something that I can’t do now.

4. Continue to edit my distractions. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m almost 40, maybe it’s the ongoing reverberations from Erin’s father’s passing, but I’ve become more conscious of how precious time is. I’ve become more aware of time-suckers in my life and less tolerant of wasting time on meaningless things. I think this is why I tend to get impatient at stoplights (and in long lines at the grocery store, and waiting to get my oil changed, etc). The idea that events have conspired to cause me to waste irreplaceable time on trivial things drives me bonkers. I’ve been trying to get rid of those things that distract from meaningful time, and part of this process is defining for myself just what “meaningful time” is. For some people, reading a book is a waste of time (Erin and I know someone for whom this is the case: you can’t sit down and read a book w/o being given a job), for others, cleaning house wastes time. It’s different for everybody, and I don’t want to preach that there is one set of timewasters. Hear that Kat? I’m not going to say that TV is bad for everybody.
But what I am going to do is this: this next year I want to look at my life and continue to decide what things are time-wasters, then figure out ways to eliminate or reduce the amount of time that I spend on those things. Then deliberately use that saved time to devote to the things (and people) that matter to me.

5. Not stress out if I don’t follow this list exactly. The point is for me to become more aware of where my time is going, and to make sure that I’m spending more of it on the important things. The point is not to get all bent if I mess up every so often.

So, what about you?

Scientific illiteracy among the glitterati. Hey, if they’re famous, they must be smart! Right? Right?

Read on to encounter the brilliant phrase (used with a straight face!): “highly trained medical leeches”.

Amazing:

Best line: “your face gets viruses”

Our friend Darla (that’s Chef Darla to you) has a new cooking blog. Yummmm.

Just finished (in two sittings) Neil Gaiman’s book Stardust. As he said in the afterward, it’s a fairy tale for adults. Great book! Highly recommended.

I met these guys at MakerFaire. They were a blast to talk to. They had a bunch of their ships on display and were really enthusiastic about the hobby. Looks like a hoot.

Merlin Mann has some good thoughts on Christmas sadness.