Chemical Bonds

A great friend of mine gave J and I a set of audio books for a wedding present, they were a series of lectures entitled "scientific literacy" the latest once I have been listening to have focused on the reasons chemicals bond together, if you are interested this site is a great resource for understanding the basics.

Amen brother

'But life is short, and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.'
: Arthur Schopenhauer

New Open Source

So open source is clearly all the vogue, major corporations are migrating from proprietary application development to open source, community based development. It's only natural there fore that the shadier businesses move into this space too...
Government Health Warning: don't open this site at work: Violet Blue

End of an era

The BBC is reporting that a major UK computer retailer is no longer going to sell floppies.....
PC World says farewell to floppy

Presidential Campaigns

I don't know if this happened at the last election (I doubt it) but there does seem to have been a significant move to the web as a method of campaigning for the 2008 presidential election.
So far I have found the following sites with video etc:

Democratic Party:

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Tom Vilsack, Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Christopher Dodd

Republican Party:

Sam Brownback, John Cox, Duncan Hunter, Michael Smith, Jim Gilmore, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Tom Tancredo, Tommy Thompson

There are also a bunch of others from the Green, Libertarian and Socialist parties.

Here is a great resource for those interested in the background for the 2008 elections.

Comcast DNS problems

A colleague of mine asked me yesterday about some trouble with his home network, it appeared to be a DNS issue, it reminded me of a challenge I had a few years ago when Comcast (who just happens to be his broadband provider) was having DNS server trouble.
I did a quick search and came up with this page of alternate DNS servers to use, hopefully this will be helpful.

Holy Grail quote

In case you missed the reference in that last post here is the scene script of one of my favorite Monty Python quotes enjoy.

I wish to be in WA

Further proof that sex is more fun than logic:

Now why cant my local coffee shop be more like this?
http://www.slashfood.com/2007/01/28/seattle-coffee-shops-say-sexpresso-sells/
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003535398_coffeegirls22e.html

Now of course this would not work in MN due to the wonderful -9F we had last night, but I can but dream of a stimulating cup of coffee from Caribou.....

Feelings Search Engine

I found this site today WeFeelFine it is a visual search engine that allows you to find people with defined demographics that feel a certain way. Not sure of its piratical application but it certainly is interesting to play with for a few minutes.

News.com

A buddy of mine pointed out that when he tried out the link I posted to view the LivePlasma view of news.com he could not find it. I did some quick research this morning and sure enough it is only sporadically available. They have at least two visualization tools which appear from time to time and it is not clear to me which one appears when, maybe they are testing user response to them both before committing.


Here is a screen shot of the Live Plamsa version:

And here is the other style, a bit of a heat map approach:

This irritates me

Microsoft 'not happy' with search results, this irritates me not because MSFT is not doing well but instead because of the potential for a G monopoly, if the likes of MSFT cant be successful in this space then how is innovation going to be sustained in the search space? The plethora of search start-ups continues to grow but how will they crack the G nut? How will they survive?
I don't think a world where the only open web search relevancy research is under the control of G would be a good thing.
At some point will VCs stop funding search? I really hope not.

Live Plasma

I have always been impressed by the live plasma site that shows the relationship between musicians, today I noticed they have applied their visualization to news results too. News.com seems to be using the Live Plasma technology as a navigation aid, and I love it. This is the link that I used to find it

Great American Society

America (in my limited 8 years of expereince) is disticntly lacking in many areas, community, pubs, good beer, but this week I discovered that they lead the world in one area: Female Pillow Fighting. okay so how the heck can they take this seriously?

Final proof that boys are just well Bad

I never knew there were so many uses for a pack of butter....

One Billion Phones

I quote .... "Cell phone vendors shipped 1.019 billion phones in 2006, 22.5 percent more than the 832.8 million they sold in 2005, according to the research firm IDC."

You Can't S**t on Your Employees....

...and expect them to deliver results... An interesting blog worth reading

Classic

The science behind a cute behind

Drinking Water

I clearly don't drink enough (water) ;)

http://members.aol.com/SaveMoDoe2/importance.htm
http://nutrition.about.com/od/hydrationwater/a/waterarticle.htm
http://www.colonhealth.net/free_reports/h2oartcl.htm

So drink more water lose more weight, we shall see.... off to get eight bottles of Evian and become "pure" again.

Dance with the Devil in the pale moonlight

My how the world has changed, it seems like we can all just get along after all.
That said it seems like PeTA and Walmart will never be friends, what a suprise.....

Database Scalability

Interesting article on using sharding as an approach to make the Database behind Flikr scale

Farecast updated

Farecast is a search engine that identifies trends in ticket prices for airline tickets, today they launched a new product which allows you to buy "insurance" to lock in a price returned by the site. I use Farecast to decide when to buy vacation tickets, one annoying limitation seems to be the inability to produce forecasts more than 90 days in advance. This weekend I was researching ticket prices for a vacation in December and it would let produce forecasts, it did however have some useful historic data for how the tickets fluctuate in price throughout the year.

Bandwidth

I just read this "right now somewhat more than half of all Internet bandwidth is being used for BitTorrent traffic, which is mainly video. Yet if you surveyed your neighbors you'd find that few of them are BitTorrent users. Less than 5 percent of all Internet users are presently consuming more than 50 percent of all bandwidth" I would never have guessed it was so extreme, I wonder what proportion of bandwidth is consumed by legal video downloads?

Cross Country

We went Skiing again this weekend, we went to Hyland Park it was tough going (only our send outing) the trails where only just covered in places and the skating style skiers had destroyed the classic grooves which then made it very tough for us beginners. I just did some searching and found a great site with descriptions of the basic techniques, and another with trail reports for the major destinations around the twin cities.

Getting open access

Have you ever been to an office where they have software filtering the URLs that you can surf to? and find they have blocked access to a web site you need to get too? I do frequently, like today I needed to get to HTTP://WWW.IAB.NET and it was blocked, I get around this issue using a service called The Cloak check it out next time you have a problem, but don't forget people can still see the traffic so it does not make it "safe" to do something dumb at work!

View from my office

I work in a large office complex looking north towards the MSP international airport, every few minutes a large NWA plane flies past my window and lands. Just for kicks while making the link to Google maps for my last post I scanned the pictures of the runways, and eventually found a satellite image of a plane taking off from one of the run ways, cool huh....

Voyaging Parents

My parents are off on a grand voyage across part of the Gulf to some remote Keys. This afternoon I received a very scratchy call from my cell phone telling me they had reached Nest Key, which can be viewed at this Google Maps link it looks like an awsome place.
They use a North Star double Kayak that is made by Wilderness Systems. It is the same one in the picture of the girls playing from the vacation.

Cool product design

I came across this new product from Vonage today - I have no experience of it but it looks very cool.

Presidential speach Tag cloud

Seems like Tag Clouds like my earlier blog predicted, are being used as aids for human pattern recognition. See this cool use of clouds to represent the bias in Prezo Bush's speeches

Cool O'Reilly Radar Tag cloud

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/01/tag_cloud_of_wh.html

More Eye Tracking

Found this interesting eye tracking article linked from the previous article I linked to....

The trouble with Search

An interesting article by Jakob Nielsen on the potential perils of the current focus on Search Engines as the central point of web access. Which then led me to read another good article by him on search being used to find answers rather than navigate to destinations.

More pictures from FL trip

It is hard to describe how much fun the girls had on the beach, they spent hours jumping waves, fortunately the water temp was higher than last year so they did not turn blue.
I practiced rolling the kayak a few times, without a great deal of success.
The girls hunted for shells sponges and anything for their "shell shop" where everything cost one "sand" dollar to buy.

One of our favorite sights was the shrimp car which seemed to be advertising something, but we were never clear what.

Search Spam

It is articles like these two that make me sleep at night, safe in the knowledge/opinion that we have a sounds business model by inserting a human element to undo the perils of SEO in our search approach:
Spam Detection Research
Stop The Freak Out Over Linking

1-in-8 blokes would swap their lady for a must have gadget

http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/16/1-in-8-blokes-would-swap-their-lady-for-a-must-have-gadget/

I doubt it, but there again the iPhone is pretty cool.

Havin' fun with the girls

Blue sky, blue sea, and no blues....

Search research

In doing some research this morning I came across four documents worth linking to:

http://www.lorilorigo.net/google.pdf
ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2007-01.pdf
http://www.enquiro.com/eye-tracking-pr.asp
http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=322

After reading these it brings up some interesting points. Google et al cause users to scroll the screen in order to get to the next page of results. Most people (especially women) don't go to the next pages. most people also do not scroll the screen. If the next page link was displayed on the page without needing scrolling to find it would more people view the second page? This could be achieved by placing it at the top, or more intuitively just reduce the number of search results so they plus the navigation links fit within the viewable area.
I was fascinated by the behavior of not clicking or scrolling to navigate to the next results but instead typing in a new query. It would be interesting to look at the progression of the query phrase as it develops for each "search"

And I thought I had a rough trip on Saturday

Just when you you thought you were having a good day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJvlxufo-GQ

I will post some pictures from my recent sea kayak vacation this evening, no whale incidents to report though.

-13F

Since when was -13F acceptable? My hair froze on the way from the gym to my car this morning. Lovely..... not.

Minnesota Skiing

Minnesota skiing is very different than anything I have experienced in UT, CO, CA, MD. Now that may have been because the usual mountain was replaced by a hill, Buck Hill to be precise which claims to have a bunch of runs but in reality has only one slope that I consider worth skiing. The conditions we awful, flat light, man made snow, scraped off within a couple of hours. On the east coast skiing is more akin to ice skating, you learn to edge hard and keep your skis sharp. In the great states of UT, CO and CA you learn the joys of powder, and it seems in MN you learn to deal with very changing conditions, one second you ski on Ice/hard-pack and the next minute you are skiing into 6 inches of new man made snow, out west they call this crud and we tended to go and have a beer instead of dealing with it, here it seems it is the norm, I guess I will have to get to like the new norm....
Now the other type of skiing I have been introduced to in MN is cross-country, at this point I have tried it once, plan on trying it again and again, and currently find it challenging! Not much of downhill seems to translate well into cross-country. Apart from getting a good workout.

Dynamic clouds

I was forwarded this link by a colleague at work today Microsoft history, it provides a fascinating way to navigate history using tag clouds, it seems very reminiscent to me of the market maps that are prevalent in some of the financial new sites.
This implementation requires to to move the slider manually, now if it was animated and it showed roughly the same collection of terms shrinking and growing over time it would be a great way for humans to detect the trends. I would like to see this for IBM, it would be interesting to see how the changes in leadership affected it, and also to watch the adoption of Open Source as a key strategy and for that mater Services.

She Turned me into a Newt!

From: How to model logical arguments
A group of village idiot types are attempting burn a woman that they claim to be witch. Sir Bedevere arrives on the scene, and asks them why. They first claim that she looks like a witch - and she points out that they dressed her up. The grudgingly admit this, and then make some more outrageous claims (one says that she turned him into a newt - though he later 'got better'). Sir Bedevere then talks them through the 'logic' for checking that she is a witch - and after some false turns and lots of dim stares, they come to the following basic conclusions.
Witches Burn. This one is fair enough - though the villagers suggest trying to actually burn her as way of testing this. Wood Burns. Hence witches are made of wood. How do you check that she is made of wood? Try building a bridge out of her, one suggests - but Bedevere points out that you can also make bridges from stone. Wood Floats. Bedevere gently leads them to this point, and asks them if they know anything else that floats. Ducks Float. They actually have a lot of trouble thinking of something else that floats - and it is Arthur, who has just arrived on the scene, who says: 'A Duck!'. Therefore... The logic goes: that if she weighs the same as a duck, she's a witch and they can burn her. So they put her on a set of scales with a duck, and of course she does weigh the same ('it's a fair cop').