NASA just released some mid-resolution pictures of the Moon and the various Apollo landing sites. You can see the lunary lander module courtesy of a low Sun. In the Apollo 14 shots you can see the footpath created by the astronauts. Amazing. Here’s the shot of Apollo 14′s landing site with the footpath.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. – John F. Kennedy On this day, 40 years ago the United States launched Apollo 11 on its historic trip to fulfill John F. Kennedy’s desire to “… commit nation … to achieving the goal, before decade out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.” Above is the launch photo of Apollo 11. You can see many more photographs here and historical information here, both from NASA. It’s time to revel in the most amazing event in human history, the moment we blasted off for another world and set foot on it. Pity we didn’t opt to stay…
In a prior blog existence I ran a long set of articles on startups, garnered from my experience in a few and dealing with friends who were in them as well. I still track the startup scene. I think it’s a fascinating thing to do and I’d love to do another. There’s something exciting about startups that you just can’t replicate in any other type of venture. Today I came across this article over at Ad Age. It got me thinking. Is too much money a problem? The article argues that too much too soon is bad. I will state that I agree. In fact, I think one of the best things to come out of the whole startup scene is Y Combinator which provides a modicum of funding to get a company quickly off the ground. Some folks I know tend to think it’s not a viable model, but I disagree. I think it’s actually a great model for recent graduates who are already frugally minded and able to work quickly and intensely. I don’t think it’s that good a model for those who have come to appreciate some finer things in life, like a social life . And
People tend to drive me nuts. Maybe I’m just a bit too anal, impatient, difficult or particular, but the thought processes of some people is utterly baffling. I’ll put forward one thing that still drives me nuts: mattresses. I’ll get to a few others later in the post. I have had to, over my lifetime, buy mattresses. Obviously, most other people I know have probably also gone through the trouble of buying one. And yet, many people I know will try to buy the cheapest mattress they can. I fail to comprehend this idiocy. If there is one part of your life you shouldn’t skimp on it’d be the mattress. You lay on that thing 1/3 of your life! It’s important to get a good one. If you have to save money someplace, save it on bedroom furniture — you’re rarely there and when you are, most of the time your eyes are closed! Yet, I’ve watched people go out, buy a new mattress, and then complain about how uncomfortable it is. But it gets better. Some of my friends and family also have cottages. Guess what some of them do with those old, tired, lumpy mattresses? Yup, take them
Google had a wonderful homage via their front page graphic the other day (July 10th) for Tesla’s birthday. What I’ll put forward is my favourite quote of his: Anything before 10am is an ungodly hour. Which is now backed up by research!
Just read Chris Anderson’s Free online via his online blog. You can get it in a variety of formats if you read through recent entries there, including an audio format. Note that the book is available for free but not if you’re outside the US. The audio book is free regardless, it seems. It’s an interesting read, but a quick read as well. I could probably summarize the whole book as follows: Give away something that’s common or easily created in abundance while selling something that is rare or precious or more fully featured to those who wish a more intimate, more private, or simply more extensive instance of the thing you are selling. Thus, he’s proposing that that which has become a commodity — too cheap to meter, say — should be given away or provided in an open fashion. That which is rarer, say the statistical analysis of some data, should be sold to those wishing access to it and then at a premium. He even uses his own book as an example. The audio book is literally free (gratis). You can download it and listen to it. However, the abridged version is somewhere in the neighbourhood of
I’ve long been complaining — some would say bitching — about how verbose it is to code in many languages today. In many cases I am sorry witness to people programming in C/C++ or Java and writing thousands upon thousands of lines of code only to end up with a piece of code that coudl easily have been expressed in a denser language in a few hundred lines of code. Today I came across a nice table produced by Larsson Omberg comparing the code required to do some value decomposition in Mathematica, Matlab, and Python. It’s from 2005 but much of this probably still holds for his example. What we see is the following: Mathematica: 276 lines of code Matlab: 52 lines of code Python: 71 lines of code What we see is a density advantage of 5 times for Matlab and about 4 for Python over Mathematica. And Mathematica is already a dense language. Imagine coding the same solution in C/C++ or Java? We’d probably see at least twice as much code over Python for C/C++ and Java. That means the Mathematica code would be 10 times as dense, an order of magnitude. What that means is that on
I’ve been trying for a long while to put into words why I became disenchanted with the Ph.D. process, and why that was one reason — though not the overriding reason — why I terminated my pursuit of a doctorate. But today, sitting back and reading a bit of Thomas Aquinas I came to a sudden epiphany. The reason is straightforward, and ironically was told to me by a dearly departed friend years ago. The problem, is that Ph.D.s are too narrowly focused. Or, as Jim Anderson so eloquently put it way back when, “Some of the stupidest people I know have Ph.D.s.” He bemoaned their inability to grasp the larger picture, instead focusing on minutiae, some small problem ignoring all else. Sometimes ignoring reality itself and coming up with a “solution” that worked only within some fantastical model that had little relation to how the real world functioned. Now Jim, like myself, was an old grey beard of security. In fact, I would argue that Jim was responsible for what today is called “information security”. The very foundations of computer security were formulated and documented by Jim way back in 1972. I was fortunate enough to work with Jim
Sometimes things just happen. Like silence in a crowded restaurant. Recently I had back-to-back songs with cowbell pop up on my iTunes random playlist. Quite eclectic collection. I’m sure there are others. Dance the Night Away, Van Halen Don’t Fear the Reaper, Blue Oyster Cult Hair of the Dog, Nazareth Lay Lady Lay, Bob Dylan Time Has Come, The Chambers Brothers I’m sure there are plenty more, but these have it pretty front-and-centre. And whenever I hear a cowbell I think of Gene Frenkle and that Saturday Nigh Live sketch.
I’m not a camera buff. But I know a cool camera hack when I see one . This hack by a Japanese camera buff is totally cool. Although it only works for stationary objects being photographed, the resolution is absurdly high (130 megapixels). And I can think of some pretty cool uses such as photographs of the nighttime sky, for example. Hooking this baby up to an equatorially mounted telescope would result in stunning photographs. Totally cool.