The Iron Yuppie

Oil Fields Are Refilling...Naturally - Sometimes Rapidly There Are More Oil Seeps Than All The Tankers On Earth

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.

SSI Shredding Demonstrations

Man, now is when I feel more primal than ever. I could sit and watch these shredding demos all... day ... long. I love it!

Urban Cosmetic Dentistry via MedGadget

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?

The Irish Trojan's Blog - The 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.

BRING ON 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?

chooky fuzzbang: best healthcare money can buy

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.

Kernel Changes Draw Concern

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.

waiting for Godel starts there and goes for pages and pages.

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!

Gothamist: Census Says NYC's Population Went Down...

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?

InPhase announces 300GB holographic discs via Engadget

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.