Thursday, April 28, 2005
SS Post Clean Up
- My first point was just that if the private investments were so beneficial to the Chilean people, it should have affected the underlying poverty rate in the past 30 years. It hasn't.
- A corollary to my first point was that if the you really did end up with a huge windfall (as a % of base salary) at the end of your work, it seems to me people would be falling all over themselves to work in ANY job as long as they could participate in the retirement plan at the end (rather than working in the cash economy). However, given the breadth and depth of that cash economy (according to the article), Chilean citizens still appear to be choosing the cash economy over a government endorsed one. Note: This could be for ANY reason (availability, benefits, salary, etc) but if the market works as it should, and the government package is better end-to-end, the cash economy jobs would slowly fall out of favor.
- My second point was that if the private savings accounts are so much better at generating returns, why not take the existing social security surpluses and put them into the same private savings accounts that we are suggesting for individuals. You get instant benefits and no additional problems. No one is suggesting that because a) the government is using the surpluses today for other things and b) you can't have higher returns without higher risk.
Hope that cleared it up.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/28/2005 10:04:00 AM
0 Comments
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
More about SS Private Accounts
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: The Proof's in the Pension
I can't understand how we are still talking about this. The columnist says how great it is that his friend in Chile has his money in a government account that will make many percent better than social security and let him retire to a huge estate with many beautiful women and have been doing so since 1980. Ok, sweet! Couple of quick questions:
- If this is so great, then why does 20% of the country STILL live in extreme poverty? EVERYONE who was 40 in 1980 would be well out of poverty by now (or passed on, in which case their descendents would be). According to the article, we must account for so many people who work in the cash economy and thus cannot participate. Fine, I'll accept that, but if the benefits really WERE that fantastic, wouldn't people be falling all over themselves to take jobs in the real economy, no matter how much they paid?
- If we are so confident in the stock market, why do we continue to put the surplus have in social security in government bonds!?! We get 3.5% in 15-year non-negotiable US treasury bonds, resulting in $1.7 trillion in 2018 which then starts getting drawn down in 2018. But if we take the SAME surplus we're getting every year (call it $100 billion a year, growing smaller every year), and put it in the same accounts that the author is proposing, we'd double the surplus! It'd be around long enough for the baby boom bubble to significantly pass and we'd be free and clear. Either this math works or the people pushing privatization are hiding something. Make up your mind. Either way, it's totally unnecessary for a form of private accounts that are being proposed currently.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/27/2005 04:30:00 PM
1 Comments
Heart Beat Measure for Working Out
Instapundit chimed in with this measure for exercise. I have/had one of these (the battery ran out on the sensor and I have yet to replace it) and I love it. The thing it provides is actual measure of what you're supposed to be doing. For a long time I would just try and go at 70 RPM for 20 minutes, but I had no idea if it was long enough, too long, too fast, etc. Which leads me into one of Chooky's recent blogs (and not just cause he references me):
http://chookyfuzzbang.blogspot.com/2005/04/iron-yuppie.html
He brings up a perfect point. Until a few years ago, we were supposed to be drinking 8 glasses of water a day. And fifty years ago, smoking was healthy. And a hundred years ago, so was cocaine and opium. And 500 years ago, so were leeches. Ok, so I do not think anything we're doing today is quite as bad as this... asymptotically I think we're getting closer to what true health is. However, Chooky's right; Without universally agreed upon measurements and clear causality between the measurements and health, unfortunately we would end up in a situation where we would have constantly moving and different measures based on the different plans. I wonder if this could be alleviated and combined with Chooky's idea of simply looking at the three most expensive types of people who have a treatable condition. Just as an example, if you are over three bills, you've got to find your own way to get coverage.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/27/2005 03:28:00 PM
0 Comments
Inappropriately Dressed
Oh man. I'm going to Hell for this one. But read and enjoy.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/27/2005 01:39:00 PM
0 Comments
Adobe v. Microsoft follow up
This week's sign of the apocolypse: People agree with me.
I particularly like this one:
How many employees does Macromedia have?
Macromedia has approximately 1,450 employees worldwide.
Please note use of present tense.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/27/2005 01:35:00 PM
0 Comments
World's biggest airliner completes first flight
I love how Airbus is touting this thing like it's going to be a flying city. Let me give you a little hint... NOTHING is going to appear on that plane that does not increase the ability of a given airline to jam as many people into a given flight as possible. Store? Bar? Relaxation chair? Movie theater? Gimme a break. Welcome to the world of changing germs with 555 other people on a 6 hour long flight with nothing to eat but a bag of peanuts and pretzels. They'd pack people into the galleys if they could. And rightly so! If you, the airborn public, were willing to pay a nickel more so that you wouldn't get deep vein thrombosis for being shackled into your seat like a feed cow, the airlines would accomodate you! But, oh no, you had to Hotwire yourself into a seat that saved you a buck. Welcome to Hell, kid.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/27/2005 01:26:00 PM
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Microbial Fuel Cell Turns Waste Into Hydrogen
Every time I see these stories about bacteria turning garbage/waste/dirt/steel/sunlight/etc into something we can use, I'm always worried about it just being snake oil. Of course, had you asked me this about 50 billion years ago, I probably would have been skeptical of photosynthesis. Assuming this does work, I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to actually capture the hydrogen output and store it... let alone ship it on so it could be used broadly. Um... plus THIS whole thing.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/26/2005 09:28:00 PM
0 Comments
Google puts Adsense into RSS
The cool thing here is that Google is willing to push their revenue stream into many different areas even if it puts it original revenue stream at risk. Rather than Google forcing people back to the website, where they have their standard ad sense revenue stream, they put their ads into the RSS feed. In fact, this gives them even more exposure, but these ads are absolutely ripe to be stripped out. Interestingly, Google decided to render the ads as images rather than text... apart from being costly on the performance side for Google, I'd imagine they will be much more costly to download as well. One of the very cool things about RSS is how it's practically a nothing download and can be read in any device or format with little trouble. These images are forced to be of certain dimensions. Still, I have to respect Google for pushing the limits. I wonder what will happen when the next big thing comes along and Google has to do something that is a little bit more onerous such as interstitials or something similar.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/26/2005 09:16:00 PM
0 Comments
Monday, April 25, 2005
Adobe aims at Microsoft and Vice Versa
Metro document format
It is so motherfuckin' on, you don't even know. For those who are outside the tech industry, allow me to sum up how I see this. Adobe makes graphics software and specializes in stuff that printers and designers love. They tend to stay away from the stuff that directly impacts consumers, prefering more to focus on the tools behind the scenes that make the consumer stuff look great.
Microsoft makes OSes and associated applications for consumers. They focus on making the core components work or providing stuff directly for the end-user. They tend to stay away from tools in the middle that makes the consumer goods look great and they just focus on the plumbing and the end user apps.
Adobe bought Macromedia, a much more direct competitor to MS in both the plumbing and the end user space. MS is going into print ready document formats, an area that Adobe has totally owned with PDF. I don't know who planned to piss in who's swimming pool first, but damn if it isn't on like a mofo now. Round 1.... FIGHT!
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/25/2005 03:03:00 PM
0 Comments
The World Will Kick Humanity's Collective Ass
I wish I could read. Not that I lack the ability to see words in a sentence and comprehend them, more that I find myself just infinitely distracted from doing something as simple as sitting down and reading a book. I find myself continually just skimming to the briefest summary of the information and using that as my primary source. It's a shame really.
Anyhow, the NYT book review of this book makes it sound just fantastic. I wish people today had a better sense of context. We're so focused on the terrible (and they are terrible) things that happen today. But if one looks back, you'll always find something more terrible. Tsunami = 150,000 dead. Black death = 200 million dead. Titanic = 1,200 dead. Sultana = 1,650 dead. Jewish Holocaust = 6 million dead. Chinese Cultural Revolution = 65 million dead. It's easy to go on.
To the point at hand, the world is just so going to kick our ass in some major event, you don't even know. It'll be an Earthquake, plague, massive storm, whatever. And it'll kill a billion people. Fortunately, because there is nothing whatsoever you can do about it, I invite you to ignore it until it happens.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/25/2005 01:53:00 PM
0 Comments
Oil Fields Are Refilling?
Heh, this is scary. Not because oil fields could be refilling... I think everyone would agree that would be a good thing. The very scary thing is that people would depend on something which may be appearing in some oil fields. Logically, it makes sense that something like this would occur... but the thought of relying on this phenomenon for the world's oil for the future seems terrifying.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/25/2005 12:44:00 PM
0 Comments
Friday, April 22, 2005
Woo.... Shred!
Man, now is when I feel more primal than ever. I could sit and watch these shredding demos all... day ... long. I love it!
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/22/2005 11:09:00 AM
0 Comments
Urban Cosmetic Dentistry
1) I always wondered how people got that solid gold teeth action going. Now I know!
2) Are you really going to trust your teeth to a flyer that says "Sale" with handwritten text all over the front?
3) Welcome to the long tale of the internet. Not only does Medgadget not only requires a "Denistry" section, but there's at least a story a day in there. Really? Is there that much denistry news out there?
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/22/2005 10:55:00 AM
0 Comments
MSM is so predictable
The author is complaining that the mainstream media (MSM) only picked up the oil for food story once a Texas oilman was indicted. He's right about one thing, the MSM is predictable. But it's not the fact that it's because a Texas fellow who was indicted. It's because it was an American, and it actually affects people in America. Many people are remarkably focused on the things near them and an oil-for-food scandal had as much to do with our day to day life as a presidential corruption scandal in a Central American country or the Enron of Italy. It just did not matter to most people (And before you go bad mouthing Americans, I think most people behave this way... in Europe, because the countries are so packed together, you have to find out about the country next store.) But once there's an American in the mix... pop, people realize it could affect them, and they pay attention. I'd argue the MSM is exhibiting the symptoms phenomenon rather than being the cause.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/22/2005 10:40:00 AM
0 Comments
The Nanobubble
On 60 minutes this past Sunday, they had a round up of all the new flying technology which is coming down the pike. I leaned over to my girlfriend and said "You're looking at the next bubble." The above article suggests it's nano we should be wary of.
We all know another bubble is coming; it could be nano, it could be aero, it could be both! The opinion I like in the above article is that while bubbles cause "loss" of dollars on an individual basis, the investments that bubbles leave in their wake tend to be quite valuable. I would not be typing this today on a computer as fast as I'm running connecting to servers in God knows where if it hadn't been for at least two bubbles. What I cannot wait for is the absurdity of it all. It was so fascinating watching things get founded and everyone looking around saying "what the hell is this thing again" while they're digging into their pockets to fund it. Nano-burgers served at 10,000 feet while eating at a flying restaurant anyone?
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/22/2005 10:30:00 AM
0 Comments
Thursday, April 21, 2005
chooky fuzzbang's blog
Goodness, my friend is an absolute blogging machine. In addition to having remarkably good insight, he churns out content at a fantastic rate. Highly recommended subscription.
As to this article, using math and healthcare seems like such a super straight forward thing to do, but no one ever does it. In college (many moons ago), I took a class in Medical Philosophy where the prof suggested that all you need to do is outcome studies on procedures and that dictates whether or not a given procedure should be paid for. For example, open heart surgery on a 35 y/o 170 lb man with 17% body fat yields 30 additional years of life. Open heart surgery on a 85 y/o 160 lb man with 17% body fat yields 2 additional years. Draw a line at the number of years or pain improvement (or whatever metric you want) and things above the line get paid for, things below the line do not. Done!
As to Chooky's point about why US healthcare is so much worse than other countries, I think it's a combination of the above (paying for and supporting procedures that should not be undertaken) and a complete lack of preventative medicine. I wish my company charged me based on whether or not I was in shape. People who are not in shape MUST pay more. Bad drivers pay more. Bad credit risks pay more. Being in shape is the exact same thing, and should be passed on to the consumer. And this would spurr a massive preventative campaign to get within the right boundaries. Of course, there will be the worker who chooses to opt out of insurance because it's too much money and she's not in the right boundaries and then she dies of a perfectly preventable disease and there are hearings out the ying-yang. But sad though that story may be, being hardline with this will allow a higher quality of care for everyone.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/21/2005 10:36:00 AM
0 Comments
Linux Gets Bigger
I don't know why this is such a big surprise. More features = more complexity = more likely to fail or go slower. And all the people who suggest that people recompile their kernels to get their version running in a state they want... yeah good luck with that. A: You may not even know what a given feature does B: it's unlikely you will know what apps in the future will depend on something that you stripped out C: 90% of Linux users will not know to do that by default or to improve their performance D: 99.9999% of computers have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/21/2005 10:20:00 AM
0 Comments
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and Blog Usage
I'd like to think of myself as a fairly smart guy. Actually, though probably unnecessarily arrogant, I think that I recently came to the conclusion that I was a remarkably smart guy. Perhaps even genius. This is a real awakening for me (whether or not it's empirically true). I've never been one to ACTUALLY have confidence in my intelligence and it's a nice change of pace for me. I'm not sure about how that makes me feel. Nonetheless, I spent some fantastic time reading my friend's notes on a book he read about Godel. Whenever I need to absolutely sharpen my mind, I love talking to this guy. It's like a giant squeegee, wiping away all the emotions and other crap that builds up on your understanding of the world and reducing it to the essence. That, and the fact the he simply is one of the smartest people I have ever met in my life.
So, above and beyond that, Godel's theorem was riveting. But even more fascinating for me is that my friend simply used his blog as a source for notes back to himself. For me, this is the next natural extension of the web. Today, we have pages up that require people to go to specific sites and enter in all kinds of information. But that does not have to be the case! Imagine if there was some way you could make available ALL your understanding in a structured way. You could make the web that much more rich, and it would require no additional work besides the notes and information you already use to process through the day. Of course there are the privacy and security issues, for which I admit I do not have a great solution, but if you could make the sum knowledge of all your documents, emails, IM chats available widely, you have the very real opportunity to enlighten the world. Do not underestimate the amount of information and understanding that you carry around that no one else knows about. With luck, blogs like the one my friend did on Godel will be an excellent bridge from here to when we have our neural implants. Then we simply borg it up and we're one giant mutha-fuckin' consciousness. Oh yeah!
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/20/2005 02:37:00 PM
0 Comments
NYC's Population Decline
I'm not sure why this would be so suprising or controversial. If pricing of NYC apartments is spiraling out of control, which certainly appears to be correct, and someone making $0.5 Million a year cannot afford to buy a place in NYC, wouldn't market forces just indicate that eventually people would begin to move out?
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/20/2005 02:25:00 PM
0 Comments
300GB holographic discs
This is great, but I have two questions. One, how much does it cost? Two, HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?? I do not care if something takes a week to backup and restore, I would love to get backups of my data but the cheapest and easiest way to do that now is to buy extra hard drives and use them. I do not need speed. I do not need portability. All I need is cheap, reliable and big enough to handle the largest HD I have (250 GB right now, though 500 GB would be preferable). I know I can get this today with tape, but it's too damn expensive. Come on... there's got to be a better way.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/20/2005 01:32:00 PM
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Dvorak Comments on the Dumbing Down of America
I'd like to believe in the general intelligence of human kind. But, as a "tech" person (READ: geek), I certainly see a lot of this. Basically, his point is that people ask stupid questions which they could simply ask of Google to save them the trouble. I agree that people are too quick to ask questions frequently, but I believe an enormous amount of this comes from a certained "learned helplessness". Until VERY recently, computers were so difficult to use that attempting to do anything would result in nothing but pain and frustration. Even now, technology is spectacularly difficult to use, though it is getting better. Until we make technology as simple as a telephone or a television, expect people to continue to trust others to do the hard work for them. Especially if the primary source of that research involves the web.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/19/2005 04:03:00 PM
0 Comments
The Most Brutal STD
"'Burning Passion' is my film about the guy who ejaculates fire."
Greatest. Movie. EVER.
Greatest. Comment EVER.
At 3:14 PM, classymac said...
So, I guess this kills my script about a guy who shits liquid nitrogen.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/19/2005 02:02:00 PM
0 Comments
ClearRx Pill Bottle
You know when you've found a good invention? When someone comes along and says "That's so simple, anyone could have done it. But I'm still going to throw out whatever I use today and use that one." Example A:
Why DO bottles today have the name of the medication so small anyway?
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/19/2005 12:39:00 PM
0 Comments
Nordic Affluence, or lack thereof
INTERESTING study. Basically, this shows that European economies have tracked very poorly against US economy growth rates. The only thing that might be the out for the Scandinavians is that I'm not sure how government funded programs factored into their disposable incomes. If their disposable incomes WERE half as much, but they did not have to pay for school at any level, medical treatment at any level and so on, their ability to buy or do different things per disposable dollar might be much higher than represented here.
One thing that irritates me about the original article is the following paragraph:
In Oslo, library collections are woefully outdated, and public swimming pools are in desperate need of maintenance. News reports describe serious shortages of police officers and school supplies. When my mother-in-law went to an emergency room recently, the hospital was out of cough medicine. Drug addicts crowd downtown Oslo streets, as The Los Angeles Times recently reported, but applicants for methadone programs are put on a months-long waiting list.I know that reporters are just trying to paint the background, but reporting like this is so subject to the whim of the author. If Oslo is really that destitute, then you can certainly put out some data indicating how what you describe above is the norm and not just your view from your apartment.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/19/2005 12:07:00 PM
0 Comments
My New Commuter Vehicle
Oh baby. The real problem here is exactly what I said before. It's not traffic; though there will be plenty of mishaps to start, people don't exactly go the wrong way down a one way street today. What the real problem is is security. Today, you have a nice high razor wire fence keeping prisoners from society, or people off military bases, or criminals off the roofs of buildings. With this, we're going to have to develop cheap SAMs in order to keep our critical facilities secure.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/19/2005 11:56:00 AM
0 Comments
The New Gay Mafia
All Hail the New Gay Mafia
This simply could not have been more well timed! I was just chatting with my girlfriend about how much I wanted to bring back the word "gay" meaning 'Showing or characterized by cheerfulness and lighthearted excitement; merry'. And now I have an entire mafia to help me do it. Huzzah!
Gayly,
D
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/19/2005 11:17:00 AM
0 Comments
Monday, April 18, 2005
BREAKING NEWS: STILL NO POPE
(Sung to the charge song) Pope, Pope, Pope, Pope... Pope, Pope, Pope, Pope... Pope, Pope, Pope, Pope... Pope, Pope, Pope, Pope... Pope, Pope, Pope, Pope... Pope, Pope, Pope, Pope.. Pope! Pope!
Man, this is why I hate the 24-hour news cycle. Everything is a crisis. I wandered by a TV today and saw four talking heads screeching about how hard it was to pick a Pope and so on. I remember making this comment to someone about ten years ago... At the time I was really into watching CNBC. It's an interesting channel, but during the day, every second something is going on and you have to be aware constantly! Dow up. Dow Down. Dow flat. Trading heavy. Industrials off. Energy stocks rallying. Big box retailers spiraling. Home builders on fire. Now the ad-wizards have just extended that to all news. Pope alive. Pope dead. Schiavo alive. Schiavo dead. Michael Jackson... still a pervert. Should you allow burning of judges who ban the ten commandments. But this does not end when the market closes. There's no breather! The talking head channels are addictive though... they play right into the limbic system. We love conflict and we love to watch it.
This is why RSS is so nice... everything is event driven. If some area of the news has no updates, you see nothing. Well, no news stories anyway. You still see comments and op-ed out the yin-yang.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/18/2005 05:08:00 PM
0 Comments
Pandamonium in the OR - MedGadget - www.medgadget.com
Nothing much to say here other than pandas look funny. It's such a trip to look at it being operated on. It even looks nice when it's asleep. Also... subscribed!
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/18/2005 02:48:00 PM
0 Comments
MP3 wristwatch
Ok, I get it, you can take MP3 players anywhere. This one, which is certainly not the first, has a nice look to it. My question is when are people getting all this time to listen to music? Other than the car, or walking between buildings, it's not like I have some unlimited amount of time to listen to music where I'm not sitting in front of a computer anyway. Which leads me to my other point. I know I already talked a little about video blogging and, while podcasting is a great idea for time shifting radio and other formats which are already audio, I have to reiterate my earlier comment that podcasting does not work great for content which is already in a more usable format. RSS is great because I can parse through MANY different stories at once and read only the PARTS of them in which I'm interested. Podcasting/video blogging/etc which plays right into the utility of all these portable media players seems like a less efficient way to access just the information of value. I have to sit there for 25 minutes of an hour long show just to get the 2 minutes that are interesting.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/18/2005 12:12:00 PM
0 Comments
Friday, April 15, 2005
The Echo Chamber
Yep, no question about it, this columnist was wrong. Really wrong. But in response to this, I count no less than six updates, ten links and a handful of blog entries all written on this. I'm always surprised that people dedicate so much time to focusing on opinion columns and Op-Ed pieces. Anyone with twenty minutes and a computer can hammer out one of a column; it's really not worth your time once someone has been proven wrong. A lot of the rancor today appears to be in response to the supposed affect that voicing a person's opinion in a public media outlet. There's such a huge difference between a story on page A22 and one two pages later on the Op-Ed page. Yet people who do not like a media outlet, for whatever reason, allow their criticism to bleed over from the items clearly identified as opinion to the outlet as a whole. I just do not think it's worth anyone's time (excluding my time to comment on the commentors... now THAT'S valuable).
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/15/2005 01:49:00 PM
0 Comments
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Girl Scout Cookies
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/14/2005 09:57:00 AM
0 Comments
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Memory via Maps
Does Google maps make this possible? Not really... you could do this through TerraServer (at higher resolution I might add (I do not know exactly where he lived, so I just picked a random street and zoomed in there)).
Is this really really cool? You betcha. I've always been astounded how a slight change in perspective gives you such a richer view of your world... looking forwards or backwards in time. This individual looked at his childhood, and it is riveting, for some unknown reason. What is it about the web that makes other people's fairly normal histories so interesting?
D
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/13/2005 04:28:00 PM
0 Comments
The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy
You keep using this term "untold". I do not think it means what you think it means.
Apparently the book is about how the Democrats attempted to use the media (through documentaries like 'Outfoxed', 'Fahrenheit 9/11' and so on). Interesting premise. Some of my friends are confident that those firms responsible for producing those pieces were tied at the hip with the Democratic party. I do not agree, but can certainly see the possibility of connection. I do not agree that Sinclair Media was tied to the Republican party, though the same possibility of a connection exists between those two organizations. I believe the one exception is the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who DID appear to be tied to Mr. Rove very closely.
My thoughts on the book are that it seems a rather silly reason for a book. Of course they're going to try and take down the president... they're the opposing party! Just FYI, Mr. York used the phrase "take down", I think he meant "defeat in the election" which, last time I checked, was totally legal. Further, I revel in books like this... they save me endless time! Why bother reading them, you know everything you want to know about it just from the title! I was going to come out in a tirade against such front covers/titles, but I've changed my mind... I think they're a huge benefit. Now I don't have to even pick up the book... if it was even slightly more subtle or intriguing, I'd probably pick up the book and flip through it wasting valuable time I could be dedicating to slurping down mochachinos or using wireless networks or whatever other distractions they have in "book stores" nowadays.
D
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/13/2005 04:25:00 PM
0 Comments
Britney's Child
Oh Britney… *shakes head*
As always I must quote the eloquent Defamer:
Don’t be nervous, K-Fed, the first non-bastard is always the hardest.
Indeed. I, for one, am extremely pleased that we’ll have a baby half-stubbled half-ass-cleavage-showing Brit-Fed throwing milkshakes at paparazzi in no time.
D
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/13/2005 01:49:00 PM
0 Comments
Childhood through Flickr
Does Google maps make this possible? Not really... you could do this through TerraServer (at higher resolution I might add (I do not know exactly where he lived, so I just picked a random street and zoomed in there)).
Is this really really cool? You betcha. I've always been astounded how a slight change in perspective gives you such a richer view of your world... looking forwards or backwards in time. This individual looked at his childhood, and it is riveting, for some unknown reason. What is it about the web that makes other people's fairly normal histories so interesting?
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/13/2005 01:38:00 PM
0 Comments
Some NYC subways are now computer driven
NYC subway gets a computerized facelift via Slashdot
Well it looks like the NYC trains are finally joining the rest of the world and, of course, the folks on Slashdot have something to say about it. According to the article, there are still "concerns about safety". I find this funny for a number of reasons:
- First, why is this being referenced from the Boston.com site? From my understanding, there are a couple of newspapers in NYC who probably could have covered it (and probably did!) Wouldn't it be appropriate to check one of those first?
- Second, look at the slashdot readers and their comments. As they bicker back and forth about fail-safes and hackers, I wish they would think a little bit about what they were saying before they said it (note: present company and/or me excluded). Is it really possible that they NYC MTA would do a change like this without thinking a LITTLE bit about the ramifications?
- Third, why would they be concerned about safety? Do you think that trains are really that safe today? I suspect you could tell an operator to stop RIGHT NOW and they wouldn't be able to bring it to a halt in under two hundred feet. With computers, you could do some amazing shit. Pressure sensitive doors and walls. Infrared cameras. It'd be awesome! Not that it'd be that much safer. The train is still about 65 million pounds and trying to stop that quickly is not easy.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/13/2005 12:52:00 PM
0 Comments
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
CNN.com - Has Cookie Monster given up sweets?
NOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooo.
COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKKKIEEEEEEEEEEESSSSS!
Come to think of it, on the other hand, I do not think I ever saw the Cookie Monster ever eat a cookie. This was always very disturbing... basically, he (?) just put the cookies in his (?) mouth and crushed them until they fell out. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I was only four at the time.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/12/2005 09:40:00 PM
0 Comments
Sweet sweet robot action
CREEPY videos.
Video: Robot pirate [.mov / .wmv]
Video: Eva the unfortunate [.mov]
Anyone else look at this picture and think: "Twooo Weeeeeks"?
I for one think there's been far too LITTLE pirate research going on recently. It is our mission... nay our DUTY... to be constantly pushing the boundaries with all things pirate. Arrrrr!
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/12/2005 10:39:00 AM
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Google Maps + Craigs List
ACK this is cool. So cool I want to punch myself. Yes, I've seen RedFin which is also very cool, but the fantastic thing about this is that it combines a totally user driven ad system (Craig's List) with a totally open map system (Google Maps) and gives you more information than just looking at each individually. To quote the mailing list I saw this on, it probably breaks Google's Terms of Service, but if they block this (and other functionality which is coming), they're making a big mistake. Just think, if you could have all real estate activity pushed through RSS you could subscribe and paint entire sections of maps with MULTIPLE sources! Then you could say what was hot, what was cold, who is moving where... it'd just be fantastic!
D
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/12/2005 10:15:00 AM
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Monday, April 11, 2005
Distributed Knowledge
I suppose my admiration will simply result in one more topic for a book I’ll never write would be to walk around and simply capture this intelligence. It does not have to be everything about the job… just the non-intuitive stuff that differentiates the amateur from the professional (how does that window washer do that anyway!?) I'd love to record that stuff on this website.
Thought for the day? When painting anything, pull the tape off the edge before the paint has dried (in fact, pull it off as soon as possible!). This will lead to a much cleaner edge.
D
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/11/2005 01:46:00 PM
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Friday, April 08, 2005
Jackson attends Lakers' loss to Rockets
Ah the Lakers... so much sadness. I think Kobe's a great player, but he's such an ass! If you're playing basketball, and want to win championships, why WOULDN'T you want Shaq? Why why why?
Additionally:
Phil Jackson (R) watches the game with Kato Kalin (C) and Lakers owner Jerry Buss. (Mark J. Terrill / FOXSports.com)
Um, What the FUCK? Kato is still around? How does one become a professional hanger-on anyway?
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/08/2005 10:56:00 AM
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Thursday, April 07, 2005
Foldershare and Google Desktop Search
I've been a big fan of Foldershare for a while now, and this feature absolutely kicks ass. I have used foldershare to keep documents and favorites in synch no matter where I am, but now I can synch up all my indexes to not only find where it is on my computer but on which computer it resides! That is so cool! Next step? If I do not have it in a shared folder, allow me to share the document it found automatically, based on my permissions.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/07/2005 03:35:00 PM
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Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Google hires another Firefox engineer via News.Com
The google news coverage continues, here at Iron Yuppie; this time focusing on the Firefox engineer hiring as proof of them creating a browser. Create a browser, don't create a browser, I promise that's not why they're hiring him. They're hiring him because they happen to do a lot of web pages, and are pushing browsers further and faster than they've ever been pushed before and potentially having someone on board who knows a little bit about browsers is a Good Thing(TM). Jeez people, it's not always a huge conspiracy.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/06/2005 11:50:00 AM
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Google's Maps and Redacting
Google’s White House
TerraServer's White House
For those that can't tell, Google appears to have blocked out the White House buildings with neutral pixels. I certainly do not blame Google; I am sure it is not their doing. I'm not exactly clear on how a picture which is significantly less than 3 meter resolution could be that big a threat; you could get that accuracy from binoculars. I am sure someone out there can let me in on that. The only take away from this is if you're planning to reshingle the roof of the White House, you better use something besides these maps to plan it.
D
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/06/2005 11:18:00 AM
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The Pin Clock
In the continuing clock series...
This may be the first use in recorded history where someone is doing something useful with these pin pads, rather than making an impression of their nose or middle finger.
Also on the site:
"We're already hard at work trying to figure out way to hack this thing to
display the time in binary format instead of regular numerals..."
Do you think that this from ThinkGeek would meet the bar?
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/06/2005 04:43:00 AM
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Tuesday, April 05, 2005
One Minute Rechargeable Battery
I'm such a huge fan of this, not only because it's super cool, but because it takes a completely different look at a very common problem. Everyone gets annoyed at how long you have on battery power, but very few people are really away from power outlets for 4 straight hours (barring a plane ride I suppose). Having a 1 minute rechargable battery makes it so simple to recharge and still remain on the go. It solves 70% of the problem, rather than 100%, but the 70% of people who now no longer have a problem will be pretty happy about it.
posted by Iron Yuppie
4/05/2005 04:37:00 PM
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