![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
soulrefraction's journalLog in Create a LiveJournal Account Learn more
| You are viewing soulrefraction's journal Log in Create a LiveJournal Account Learn more | Explore LJ: Life Entertainment Music Culture News & Politics Technology |
ChrisRecent Entries | |||||||
|
|
You are viewing the most recent 20 entries February 11th, 2009February 1st, 2009January 29th, 2009: 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/aj 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. January 15th, 2009: because you can Wing suit, check. Microturbines bolted to hockey skates, check. Hot water bottles filled with kerosene, check. http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/0 January 14th, 2009: 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_ December 17th, 2008: 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_o You'd think OPEC could afford a PR firm... December 7th, 2008: 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 December 5th, 2008: 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-w : 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/opinio December 3rd, 2008: 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
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. : Cheap finite element analysis software for composites? So I'm mucking with models in SolidWorks CAD, and looking into doing some finite element analysis for stress loading, and failure analysis on said structures. They're complicated structures, 40+ piece bonded, fastened and bolted composite structure(s) with multi layer carbon, carbon-aramid (kevlar), and carbon sandwiched over honeycomb materials. I looked around, and ABAQUS/CAE with the composite modelling package looks awesome, right down to modelling the drape and direction of the layers and their specific weave and materials, etc. However, the price is 30K per year to lease the software, so that isn't going to happen for me just noodling around with a few ideas. Any alternatives? Hoping someone in the TechShop, Burningman, engineering geek circles may have some pointers to other options. December 2nd, 2008: Twitter myths pmb777 said :140 char limit forces you to care about your audience's time^h^h^h^h attention span. ;-) No it does not, that's why people still Twitter about what they ate for breakfast. Not all interesting things to say appear in a Tweet, which is exactly why you see a lot of links to other, longer things like books, debates about books, articles, discussions, etc. If you really believe what you just said you'll never link from Twitter. RSS feed summaries have been around for some time now, I use it extensively in all my readers. Same benefits. : Image processing with Mathematica So you can twiddle pixels in Mathematica now. I can see this being useful for developing image processing, recognition, and other algorithms, and now that Mathematica can leverage Amazon EC2 for processing I can imagine large scale image processing jobs done this way. This is just weird on so many fronts that my head hurts a bit. http://blog.wolfram.com/2008/12/01/t : World of Goo design tour World of Goo is a great game that Corey and I have been playing lately, think Lemmings with a physics simulation. Here is a game design tour of some of things that are done really well in the game http://blog.wolfire.com/2008/11/world-o November 28th, 2008November 26th, 2008: Elise in an Evora? Putting Elise in an Elise would be weird, and difficult as it only has 2 seats. So clearly a Lotus Evora is in order! http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/11/lotu November 25th, 2008November 24th, 2008: Social networks are for fun(ding) "Azi Gera, a Ph.D. candidate who works with Mr. Kirsch, used the archive to reveal the key role that social networks play in venture capital financing. Looking at a data set of 1,018 companies, Mr. Gera determined that not a single entrepreneur received venture capital funding by submitting a business plan “over the transom.” By contrast, about 5 percent of entrepreneurs who knew the venture capitalist or gained a personal introduction received funding. Asked what his finding meant for today’s entrepreneurs, Mr. Gera says, “In this economy, the social network will be even more necessary.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/busineNovember 22nd, 2008: How all Smart for Two cars should be http://www.autoblog.com/2008/11/21/vide Be to watch the video until then end when the car does a front brake stand. |
||||||
