Chris

03:35 pm: Kevin Bacon game with Wikipedia articles
http://globalgamejam.org/games/wiki-paths

11:51 am: Perspective
1975 Datsun had 3 models @ 39MPG http://tinyurl.com/b433pm Smart car gets 35MPG

09:56 pm: Daniel Kahnemann and Nassim Taleb on a panel
Daniel Kahnemann and Nassim Taleb discuss biases, the illusion of patterns as well es the perception of risk and denial
http://video.dld-conference.com/watch/aj4OXAg
Optimal rational behavior vs. reality of how people work. Effects of cognitive anchoring, rationalism. Mismatches of time scales and interests with individual vs. the corporation's or vs. society.

08:46 am: because you can
Wing suit, check. Microturbines bolted to hockey skates, check. Hot water bottles filled with kerosene, check.
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/01/made_on_earth_fly_boy.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

09:03 am: Feedback loops are fun!
A final project for one of my college courses was building a software tool to model these sorts of ecosystem feedback loops, enter all known data about the system and you get to see what happens when you muck with part of it. This is a trivial example, it's usually a lot more complicated.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090113/ap_on_re_au_an/as_australia_rabbit_infestation

10:40 am: OPEC needs PR help
"I hope we surprised you," OPEC President when asked whether the size of the cut would shock moribund oil markets into an upward trend. "If you're not surprised we need to so something about it."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081217/ap_on_bi_ge/af_opec_meeting

You'd think OPEC could afford a PR firm...

01:45 pm: XRDS is reflection for REST services
Always trying to boil tech babble down to it's core, today's is: XRDS is reflection for REST services
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRDS

04:42 pm: neat web history tool
"But for brainier people, there's a whole lot more you can do, since the tool also allows two web pages to be tracked at the same time. For instance, you can open a weather page and a traffic page, and scroll backwards, watching how traffic patterns are affected by variations in the weather. You can also tie the oil-price page with an international news page, and see if there's any correlation between peaks of strife in the Middle East, and peaks of oil prices in the days following them."
http://gizmodo.com/5102939/adobe-builds-web-time-machine-called-zoetrope

11:30 am: Challenges in trying to improve the world
"One of the obstacles [to adoption] is the rumor that iodized salt is actually a contraceptive, a dastardly plot by outsiders to keep Muslims from having babies. That conspiracy theory spread partly because the same do-good advertising agency that marketed iodized salt also marketed condoms."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/opinion/04kristof.html?_r=1

09:50 am: Example of signal to noise issue with Twitter
Twitter has increased my signal to noise ratio, not decreased it as some people suggested the 140 char limit would. I can't ignore it as others have suggested, because people have chosen to intermix bits of content I am interested in there, right along with their breakfast reports. Example of two back to back tweets from Tim O'Reilly this morning

	timoreilly Woke up at 4:30 this morning. Wasted 2+ hours trying to get back to sleep. Should have just gotten up. Still, some good thinking done. about 1 hour ago from twhirl
	timoreilly Amazon iPhone app puts all the pieces together. Wild example of the future awaiting us: http://snurl.com/72pqu about 1 hour ago from twhirl

Twitter is offering up some great succinct posts and even more noise. The social pattern of usage of Twitter is making the problem worse, not better for people like me who are doing what they can to up the signal to noise ratio. The (current) lack of proper conversation management makes it worse. The lack of tagging, threading, etc. makes it worse. Twitter is neat, but all the things that have evolved to deal with these problems in email, blogs, and other similar mediums have been lost.