How quickly we forget

I was checking out the new google earth functionality and their new closer satellite photo sets they've just installed.

I was measuring something and google told me it came to 67'

I thought to myself hmm thats a shame i know for a fact its 62' long so its out about 8% - a minute or two later i slapped myself in the side of the head thinking wtf are you talking about, you are measuring something on a computer from freaking SPACE!!!!

All of this without getting your fat ass out of a chair and looking for a tape measure.

How quickly we forget :)


Cheers,
Dean

Australian bodyguards

lol @Aussie secret service bodyguards......amateurs. Time to go back to bodyguard school for you to learn how its really done.

lol this isn't how its done.

Alternative payment methods

Imagine a world in which all you need before heading out the door to shop, grab a bite or catch a movie is your smartphone. That is right: no wallet, credit cards or cash required, just your smartphone.
http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/columns/11958.html

Imagine a world when people are going to quit writing articles about how we get to leave slim bits of non-traceable paper and slim plastic magic credit cards that we can charge goods and services with and instead rely on a tax from the phone company.

People writing these articles make out that rfid / pin / mobile app based payment systems are all going to be puppy dogs and rainbows but at the end of the day you still have to pay for your goods, you are still going to have to carry something, and someone is still going to get shafter with the spiv for carrying costs of the transaction.


Cheers,
Dean

Udacity

Thrun told the story of his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, which ran from October to December last year. It started as a way of putting his Stanford course online — he was going to teach the whole thing, for free, to anybody in the world who wanted it. With quizzes and grades and a final certificate, in parallel with the in-person course he was giving his Stanford undergrad students. He sent out one email to announce the class, and from that one email there was ultimately an enrollment of 160,000 students. Thrun scrambled to put together a website which could scale and support that enrollment, and succeeded spectacularly well..... http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/01/23/udacity-and-the-future-of-online-universities

Another pretty good summary of the background here - http://theairspace.net/events/robotic-mastermind/
- I love the red pill, blue pill quote.

Looks like a lot of good links around this at - http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ 

Any thoughts?

Twitter suspends Proxlet

Twitter suspends Proxlet - http://mashable.com/2012/01/17/twitter-proxlet/

I didnt even know this app existed until now and it is exactly what i suggested i would love to have developed in a blog post just last week.

Twitter suspending worthwhile client apps is ridiculous. Time to take back control and make Twitter our bitch instead of the other way around.

BitCoin - The Good Wife

Anyone else find it weird that The Good Wife was based tonight on the mystery behind the creator of Bit Coin?

lol they are definitely using the tried and true "Law And Order" model of taking their storylines from current news topics
- http://www.observer.com/2011/06/bit-omoney-whos-behind-the-bitcoin-bubble/

The only problem was when they started the ghosting theory at the end, I almost barfed.

Came across some really interesting comments at - http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/10/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto-michael-clear.html
eg
Sometimes a crypto-research is just a crypto dude and not an evil scammer to boot.

> or has a large reserve of Bitcoin he plans to cash out at a later date?
Actually, it's generally believed that Satoshio and a very few far-sighted early adopters have an unknown amount of the earliest coined 1.6m bitcoins, and probably still have most of them (around 1.1m), based on lack of blockchain movements: see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37333.0  for the general discussion, and especially https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37333.msg458441#msg458441





Cheers,
Dean

Twitter app idea

Cool twitter app idea :)

Twitter client that allows you to read posts via api BUT allows you to block certain keywords eg people/accounts you dont want to see retweeted. eg block me from seeing any twitter posts with the word "Fox News" in it.

Though i think my next Twitter app idea will be a twitter app that allows you to follow people who you dont want to let know that youre following them eg, you get alerts when they post something (maybe even paid version allows you to get alerts for their posts with certain keywords).

What do you think?

Best comment I've ever heard about the TSA

Best comment ever on a TSA article "Where's our trillion dollar war on sharks and bears?"


:- http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/SDTSA-Makes-400K-off-of-Loose-Change-137192398.html


Craig Pitt: TSA is a joke. We're being trained like dogs for the day they implement mandatory body scans and pat downs at schools, stadiums, malls, and anywhere else they feel like. It's a psychological game they are playing to make us bow to our masters. As an American, there's a better chance you'll die from an animal attack than a terrorist. Where's our trillion dollar war on sharks and bears? It's a big phony lie to take your money and shut you up when you ask why they're taking your freedoms. How about spending a trillion dollars fighting cancer? Or not filling our foods with the toxic hormones that kill us off early in the first place? It's all a big joke.

The Hidden brain

The most interesting article you will read today.

- http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-hidden-brain

Until recently, our understanding of the brain was based on a century-old idea called the neuron doctrine. This theory holds that all information in the nervous system is transmitted by electrical impulses over networks of neurons linked through synaptic connections. But this bedrock theorem is deeply flawed.

Having just watched Limitless last month it makes you wonder.....

Traces

Saw the Traces performance last night (http://tracesusa.com/), some amazing feats that blew my brain about what the human body is capable of.

Could do with some better choreography (evolved storyline?) but the stunts are first class.

Couldn't begin to imagine how much training over their lifetime these athletes must have done to train to their current level, half of the crew are from Quebec so probably trained at some time of their life with cirque du soleil. Very much worth the ticket price.