Halloween Partay pic samples

My rendition of the Eat More Chikin Crew (click for larger version)

Zombie ER

 

Zombie Hug

Best Costume Evar

My friends Andre and Jamie sent me this, watch the whole thing.

Google Performs Double Fatality on Garmin and TomTom

So various friends sent me links telling me about how Google just killed TomTom and Garmin. So I decided to provide a nice info-graphic.  Notice the drop for the two run the range of 16% to 20%. Now that is pretty epic.... that probably feels like a double GREY SWAN uppercut to the face for TomTom and Garmin.

Arnold Drops an F-Bomb Cryptography Style

So I saw this posting on boingboing.net about Arnold Schwarzenegger's EPIC Veto.

Clayton in the Rain - Sample 1 and 2 and 3 and 4

Here is a sample of some of the shots I took tonight in downtown Clayton MO.

 

Totally Sweet Commercial

I found this commercial after reading this article on swarm robots.  I originally found my way to this after finding the link on slashdot.org.

Android Phone + Google Street View = Virtual Reality Goggles

I saw this linked off of slashdot.org and thought I'd share... super hilarious design and awesome.

Everyday Normal Guy Rap LOLZ

The Power of Networking

So I saw this website a long time ago but I thought I would share. The website is called theyrule.net. In their own words they:

They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations.

Basically this website takes a snapshot in time, circa 2004 I believe, and allows you to graphically see the members of the 'board of directors' of  major companies and institutions.  You can go on there, select a company, see their board, and then see what other boards their board members sit on.  The 'fatter' the dude icon the more connections he/she has.  The graphic I provided is one of the preloaded popular mappings you can load up. It is called the Magnificent Seven and it basically shows how 7 individuals can have influence on almost all the other major pieces through 1/2 degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Try it out, its pretty interesting.

However... Depending on your world view, this high level of connectivity could either be sinister or totally awesome. In a way this high inter-connectivity is a testament to the sheer power of interpersonal relationships and shared goals.  Like it or not, the old phrase of who you know is not just a trite saying.... (usually when people say it it is with a negative connotation instead of expressing the crystallized truth of it - aka being a hater) it is a cold literal bit of knowledge which reflects into wisdom. IF you have the choice,  better to look into your blind spot, sometimes you need to look into the abyss. =-)

Notice I said IF, sometimes not seeing the abyss is more favorable, but the IF implies you actually notice glitches in the matrix..... if you don't notice the glitches then there is no abyss.

Adventures in Everyday Objects

An exercise in high dynamic range, guitars, and some old school xerox style

 A view out my front door.

Bears Playing Hockey

Here are some video's and an article I found linked to on metafilter by user Weston.

YES those are videos of BEARS PLAYING HOCKEY.

Unfortunately for the bears and the trainers, sometimes this Bear business turns deadly.

Now on a lighter note (avoiding obvious animal cruelty arguments) I did some digging and found a few more 'animals playing human sports videos'.  You can find them all here (this includes dogs riding bicylces, chimps playing karate, chimps playing tennis, elephants playing soccer, and more.

The Blind Spot

The Blind Spot    
  

Don Draper is the man

Don Draper, a return to awesome.


The Cigarette Pitch.

Here is the LipStick pitch from MadMen.

Here is the Carousel pitch.

Mad Science - Mind Control with light on Mice

Ok so yet another epic story I saw on slashdot.org.   Check this totally sweet and crazy Wired Magazine article about how some researchers figured out how to control the brain of a mouse with light.

Excerpts from the Story:

In the summer of 2007, a team of Stanford graduate students dropped a mouse into a plastic basin. The mouse sniffed the floor curiously. It didn’t seem to care that a fiber-optic cable was threaded through its skull. Nor did it seem to mind that the right half of its motor cortex had been reprogrammed.
One of the students flipped a switch and intense blue light shone through the cable into the mouse’s brain, illuminating it with an eerie glow. Instantly, the mouse began running in counterclockwise circles as though hell-bent on winning a murine Olympics.
Then the light went off, and the mouse stopped. Sniffed. Stood up on its hind legs and looked directly at the students as if to ask, “Why the hell did I just do that?” And the students whooped and cheered like this was the most important thing they’d ever seen.
Because it was the most important thing they’d ever seen. They’d shown that a beam of light could control brain activity with great precision. The mouse didn’t lose its memory, have a seizure, or die. It ran in a circle. Specifically, a counterclockwise circle.

NCSU creates fingernail-size chip that stores 1TB of Data - GO WOLFPACK!

BOOM! So I saw this article on slashdot.org today and thought I'd share.  According to this article at computerworld, NCSU engineers created a fingernail-sized 1TB data storage unit.

GO WOLFPACK!

Excerpt from the article:

Computerworld - Engineers have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold 1 trillion bytes (a terabyte) of data -- 50 times the capacity of today's best silicon-based chip technologies.

The engineers, from North Carolina State University, said their nanostructured Ni-MgO system can store up to 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text, "far exceeding the storage capacities of today's computer memory systems."
The team of engineers was led by Jagdish "Jay" Narayan, director of the National Science Foundation Center for Advanced Materials and Smart Structures at the university.
The engineers made their breakthrough using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material whose properties consequently change.
Working at the nanoscale, the engineers added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers -- a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers. The discovery represents a 90% size reduction compared with today's techniques, and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity.
"Instead of making a chip that stores 20 gigabytes, you have one that can handle one terabyte, or 50 times more data," Narayan said in a press release.

......


"Most energy used today is harnessed through the movement of current and is limited by the amount of heat that it produces, but the energy created by the spinning of electrons produces no heat," the university state in a press release.
The engineers manipulated the nanomaterial so the electrons' spin within the material could be controlled, which could prove valuable to harnessing the electrons' energy. The finding could be important for engineers working to produce more efficient semiconductors.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some stats about NCSU

National Science Foundation 

• 4th in Industry Research Funding among universities without medical schools (2008) 
• 9th in Total Research Expenditures Among Public Universities Without Medical Schools  (2006)
• 25th in Graduate Students in Science and Engineering Fields in Doctorate-Granting Institutions (2006)
• 33rd in Total Research Expenditures Among Public Universities (2006)

Experience is less Contango

Remembering something interesting my friend Kyle once said an idea popped into my head.

With the whirlwind of change that the modern business world is confronted with, experience plays a changing role. When crossing the boundary into things where no one has experience yet, some experience is thus undergoing Backwardation, thus reversing some of the existing Contango.

LOL WTF - Kanye West Short Film

Joke of the Day.... LOLZ...

My friend Ian M. sent me this awesome joke of the day.
I love the comment on the main youtube page by 'youtubosaurus'

We found it, it's LOCALHOST! *Gasp*

LOL!

The RZA Interview on being a Geek.

So I found this video on a BoingBoing.net blog posting about the RZA.
This video is pretty interesting.  I recently bought the RZA's book  The Tao of Wu.
It is an interesting look into the philosophy and the life of the leader of one of Hip Hop's most influential groups. W.U.T.A.N.G     Witty, Unpredictable, Talented and Natural Game.



Video of RZA kicking something off the interviewers head. LOL

How To Recycle a Tweet

My friend Melissa made a cameo in this at 1:09.

The most honest analysis of Corporate Culture / Org Design using the Office

 

So my friend kyle sent me this genius analysis of corporate culture and organizational design.
Check out the PURE AWESOMENESS that is the office according to 'the office' here.

The great thing about this article, besides being hilarious, is how true his observations are and how much he peels back the onion on the underlying possibilities of why things are the way they are.  This is similar to people getting caught up in trying to change corporate culture... when in reality.... what they are fighting against is that way 'By Design'

Selected excerpts from the article: (to do this justice you should follow the link to the entire thing)

The “sociopath” layer comprises the Darwinian/Protestant Ethic will-to-power types who drive an organization to function despite itself. The “clueless” layer is what Whyte called the “Organization Man,” but the archetype inhabiting the middle has evolved a good deal since Whyte wrote his book (in the fifties).  The losers  are not social losers (as in the opposite of “cool”), but people who have struck bad bargains economically – giving up capitalist striving for steady paychecks. I am not making this connection up.

.........

Back then, Whyte was extremely pessimistic. He saw signs that in the struggle for dominance between the sociopaths (whom he admired as the ones actually making the organization effective despite itself) and the middle-management Organization Man, the latter was winning. He was wrong, but not in the way you’d think. The Sociopaths defeated the Organization Men and turned them into The Clueless not by reforming the organization, but by creating a meta-culture of Darwinism in the economy: one based on job-hopping, mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, cataclysmic reorganizations, outsourcing, unforgiving start-up ecosystems, and brutal corporate raiding. In this terrifying meta-world of the Titans, the Organization Man became the Clueless Man. Today, any time an organization grows too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality, it is simply killed, torn apart and cannibalized, rather than reformed. The result is the modern creative-destructive life cycle of the firm, which I’ll call the MacLeod Life Cycle.

 ........

A sociopath-entrepreneur with an idea recruits just enough losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows it requires a clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction rather than a runaway explosion. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the sociopaths and losers make their exits, and the clueless start to dominate. Eventually, the hollow brittle shell collapses on itself and anything of value is recycled by the sociopaths according to meta-firm logic.
MacLeod’s “Loser” layer had me puzzled for a long time, because I was interpreting it in cultural terms: the kind of person you call a “loser.” While some may be losers in that sense too, they are primarily losers in the economic sense: those who have, for various reasons, made (or been forced to make) a bad economic bargain: they’ve given up some potential for long-term economic liberty (as capitalists) for short-term economic stability. Traded freedom for a paycheck in short. They actually produce, but are not compensated in proportion to the value they create (since their compensation is set by sociopaths operating under conditions of serious moral hazard). They mortgage their lives away, and hope to die before their money runs out. The good news is that losers have two ways out, which we’ll get to later: turning sociopath or turning into bare-minimum performers. The losers destined for cluelessness do not have a choice.

Mouse Plays Quake II or The future of Organic AI

From the realm of awesome... check out this MOUSE (hooked up via some sort of neuron brain linkage AKA a projector and a ball LOL) PLAYING QUAKE 2.  Brought to you by the awesome blog Boingboing.net.

This reminds me of the declassified Project ORCON, where they tried to use pigeons to guide missiles.

Excerpt from the ORCON link:

Navy Declassifies Details
Of Pigeon Guidance Project

A study of missile guidance by pigeon pecking has been taken out from under wraps by the Navy. At the same time, perhaps to calm fears of guidance designers, the Navy made clear that the project has been discontinued.
Started during World War II, Project Orcon (for organic control) was a try-anything approach to solving some then-current problems. Guidance systems for homing missiles were being easily countermeasured and the Navy thought animals might have potential as a jam-proof control element. Pigeons were selected for trial because they were light, easily obtainable and adaptable. Their job was to ride inside a missile and peck at an image of a target picked up by a lens in the missile's nose. The pigeon's pecking of the target image was translated into an error signal that corrected the simulated missile's simulated flight.
The project was revived in 1948 and carried further. In simulated rocket tests, the pigeons produced "surprisingly good results." The researchers were convinced that a pigeon could successfully guide a speeding missile under optimum conditions, compensating for his own and the missile's errors.
But after three years of equipment development and testing, the project was abandoned because the range of the Orcon system could be no greater than the range of any optical system and the system could be used only in the daytime. The trainer used target images photographed in color by a jet plane, which made picture-taking dives at a destroyer and a freighter in open sea.

About the range limit - they should totally hook the pigeon up to a long range infrared view system.

So now I extrapolate... we should really get Mice to man the Cameras on the Border OR as my friend Ian M. theorizes... perhaps we should use mice as AI for virtual border crossing simulations.

2000 Scribd Reads!

AMP iPhone App - All I can say is LOL

Here is the story covered in the Wall Street Journal here.

Here is a scathing review of this on AdWeek.

Enjoy

Chicken Wings more expensive than Chicken Breasts

In a continuing coverage of chicken price shenanigans a new bit of information has popped up thanks to the New York Times.   Apparently chicken wings cost more than chicken breasts... the 3rd horseman of the apocalypse!  Check out this article in the News and Observer on this wierdness.

Check my previous coverage of suspicious Taco Bell CHICKEN prices, and Kyle's technical analysis of the Toxic Mexican Asset Class in relation to poultry prices.

Excerpt from the News and Observer:

In seven of the last 11 months, wholesale wing prices have been higher than breast prices, a reversal in a market where breasts usually reign supreme. In September, the average wholesale price for whole chicken wings in the Northeast was $1.48 a pound, according to the Agriculture Department. Yet skinless, boneless breasts were $1.21 a pound.
A year earlier, wings sold for 94 cents and breasts for $1.15, and as recently as May 2008, skinless, boneless breasts were selling for 57 cents more than wings.
The wholesale price shift has generally not been reflected in supermarkets, where grocers appear to be trying to preserve their margins on breast meat. Nationally, on average, breasts are $2.80 a pound at retail, still 83 cents more than wings. However, some grocers are exploiting the wholesale price drop to run aggressive sales on breasts.

Woot - My Facial Expression tutorial got to featured status

You can check out my Facial Expression Tutorial video here.

Taleb presentation on the Long Now Foundation

I saw this link on zerohedge.com and thought I would share.
Check out presentation "Nassim Nicholas Taleb: An even Crazier Future". You can also download an MP3 for your iPod if you don't want to watch the entire video. It's worth a listen if you haven't read his work the Black Swan.

The Slacker Ethic or Why Ben Franklin is Awesome

So I found this article a few years ago and only recently decided to purchase this book.
Check out hilarious article about the history of the Slacker Ethic, and its most famous characters such as Benjamin Franklin.

Excerpts from the article:

To prove his point about Franklin's laziness, Lutz highlights a passage in his ''Autobiography" in which Franklin suggests that it is more important to appear industrious than to be so. The book also mentions Franklin's habit of lounging around in the nude-taking an ''airbath," as he termed it-and quotes some snarky comments about the great man's ''dissipation" and lack of punctuality made by colleague John Adams, who was posted to Paris with Franklin in 1778.

By the way John Adams sounds like a HATER.

Brown University professor Gordon S. Wood, author of ''The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin," notes that the lifestyle Adams took for dissipation was simply Franklin's judicious strategy for wooing the French. The goal at the time was to extract the maximum amount of assistance for America, and Franklin ''did not believe that shuffling papers and running around was the secret to that," Wood says.
''He's not a slacker!" Wood adds, good-humoredly. ''Effectiveness is what counts."
Of course, a key point in ''Doing Nothing" is the idea that the loafer and workaholic paradigms are not mutually exclusive. Franklin, like most of us, probably combined a bit of both.

By the way, the AIRBATHS make more sense if you understand that he always had big entourages paying him visits... predominantly attractive French women.

Here is an article from Time Magazine expounding on Ben's Game.

Excerpt from the Time Magazine Article

More than two centuries after his death, people are still trying to figure out how a paunchy, balding, bifocaled septuagenarian managed to get French ladies in a flutter. From his days as an ambitious young printer in Philadelphia to his years as a diplomatic superstar in France, Ben Franklin surrounded himself with adoring women, often much younger, usually attractive and preferably intelligent. For the most part, his loyal wife Deborah tolerated these dalliances. As she probably knew, most were never consummated. In fact, Franklin was a master of what the French call amitié amoureuse, whose English translation, amorous friendship, gives only a hint of its true meaning: a delicious form of intimacy, expressed in exchanges of teasing kisses, tender embraces, intimate conversations and rhapsodic love letters, but not necessarily sexual congress. A peek inside Franklin's not-so-little black book:

UPDATE

Apparently moments of Slacker Genius occur when you are idle.

Excerpt from article:

Managers at Google HQ in California have been working to harness the creative power of this phenomenon for six years by telling their engineers to put aside assigned projects for 20 per cent of their time at work and to pursue their own creative schemes instead.

The company wants them to use this time to work on pet projects - ideas for new search, e-mail and other services that they couldn't otherwise work on because of workload pressures.

Google's head geeks believe that the policy has paid off, spawning some of the company's most successful services, such as Google News and Gmail.

Raleigh Durham - America's Smartest City

BOOM
Apparently Raleigh Durham has been ranked by www.thedailybeast.com as America's Smartest City. Check out the America's Smartest Cities list here.

Here is an article about this from the Huffington post as well.

From the article daily beast ranking.

#1, RALEIGH-DURHAM

Metro Area Population: 1,578,527


Daily Beast IQ Score: 170


Raleigh-Durham has just about every intangible useful in attracting and developing a smart populace: It’s a university hub, including three of the nation’s elite schools (Duke, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University), and those schools led to one of the nation’s great technology incubators (Research Triangle). On top of that, Raleigh, as the state’s capital, attracts engaged political minds, as well. “We are fortunate to have great universities in Raleigh-Durham and great ‘smart’ industries that enrich our community greatly,” Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker told The Daily Beast. Enrichment enough to top our list.

Where's Waldo or Pick Which Image you like better

I have two photos of Actress/Model Milla Jovovich. The pictures are similar but have some small differences. Which photo do you find more appealing and why? Revlon apparently did similar photo-shopping in their Direct Mailers a few years back and increased their sales by 45%.

Custom Kicks From Converse

So I designed these kicks and ordered them from Converse. BOOM

CLEAR Converse Kicks or Kicking it Hollow Man Style

So now you too can rock a crazy hollow man style with Converses CLEAR CHUCK TAYLORS.
Now there is a purpose to fancy socks.... lol...

Why women NEVER get caught looking and men ALWAYS get caught looking

In this latest installment of the WMD's of the war of the sexes I bring you... the Vision Tactical Advantage.  So I saw a hilarious illustration similar to this in the book "The Definitive Book of Body Language" by Allan & Barbara Pease.  It made me laugh so hard I thought I would share a rendition with you guys in addition to an interesting study backing up this assertion. By the way if you do a little digging you will find that women have more rods in their retina than men do. Rods are the very light sensitive part of your eye that lets you detect changes in light.

Simply put women have a superior range of vertical vision =).
Men with their limited vertical range of vision have to adjust gaze if they are going to check a girl out, which is why the common complaint of men staring at woman's bust line occurs so often.  This is to be differentiated from the totally on purpose and unapologetic ''I'm totally checking you out gaze". This is more along the lines of the creepy "I'm trying to act like I'm not checking you out gaze but you can totally tell I am gaze".

So there you have it =)

Here is a link to the article. You can only read the abstract but there are numerous sources such as this article about the tactical differences between men and women in policework.


An abstract from the article first article:

Current learning theories stress input or the sensory apparatus as an important facet of learning and performance. The present study investigated the differences between athletes and nonathletes on vertical and horizontal vision and the relationship between sex and field of vision in both the athlete and nonathlete. The subjects were 132 Florida State University students. There were 53 male athletes, 29 female athletes, 25 male nonathletes and 25 female nonathletes. The subjects maximum field of vision was tested with a standard Bausch and Lomb perimeter whose depth measured 13 in. The results of the ANOVA support the hypothesis that both the vertical and horizontal fields of vision are superior for athletes compared to nonathletes. In addition, there are no sex differences within athletes and nonathletes except in the visual range. Females demonstrated greater high vertical range of vision.

Excerpt from the second link:

Women have better vision in low light, better peripheral vision and better hearing.

Jim Grant's Gold Parable

Here is a link from ZeroHedge about Jim Grant's Gold parable

Excerpt from the link:

"Gold has two interesting properties. It is cherished and it is indestructible. It is never cast away and it never diminishes, except by outright loss. It can be melted down, but it never changes its chemistry or weight in the process. Its price has been remarkably similar for centuries at a time. Its purchasing power in the middle of the twentieth century was very nearly the same as in the midst of the seventeenth century."

Human Capital. Did you know

Thanks to Tim G. for this submission

Boeing's Advanced Tactical Laser

Boeing Tests Air to Ground Tactical Laser

Thanks to Cassidy P. for sending me this.

T-Pain Obama

Thanks to Jamie S. for sending me this

Why Fake Wedding Ring Game works

This may be obvious, but this is mechanically why 'fake wedding ring game' works.

I do find it 'interesting' that her automatic direction of future reasearch is an assumption that these findings must be due to a socialization effect. You would imagine that one would have to entertain the possibility that this may be an artifact of our innate human nature.

A thought is that our behavior is the output of our evolved human nature (nature) filtered through our life experiences. (nurture).

Alternative Human Evolutionary Path

So I saw this article on the WallStreet Journal online about some interesting new fossil evidence about man's descent.  Apparently they have come to some interesting conclusions based on some interesting fossil evidence they have been working on for 15 years.

Here is a link to the actual papers on ScienceMag.

Here are some thoughts on the findings from others. (He provides a executive summary breakdown with critique)

Excerpts from the WSJ article:

"fossils from a 4.4 million-year-old human forebear they say reveals that our ancestors were more modern than scholars had assumed, widening the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from apes and chimpanzees."

Instead, the new finds show that what seems most ancient about modern chimps and apes -- such as canine fangs, long limbs with hooked fingers for swinging through trees, and hands designed for knuckle-walking -- may actually be more recent developments, the researchers said. In that sense, the human hand today actually may be the more primitive appendage, they said.

Already, the discoveries have experts reworking the human pedigree. They undoubtedly will shape debates about human origins for years to come, as scholars argue whether these creatures should be counted among our most ancient direct ancestors or cataloged as an intriguing dead-end.

Beautiful things

So yesterday I went to the art store and picked up a wide tipped Calligraphy Fountain pen.  If you think about it, the decadent art of elegant handwriting has been in it's death throes for a long time.  Especially at this point handwriting, in general, seems to be almost outmoded. How often do you write something besides signing a check? For many of you the answer is not very often anymore.  So in the spirit of decadence I am going to start rocking Low Tech. Handwriting will soon become 'Steam Punk' if not already being so.

Ode to Ornate Writing by me
There are only a few beautiful things left in this world that still have an organic hint...
The World 3.0 beauty is dipped in silicon and sprinkled in flashing lights...