Archive for January, 2013
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »NASA Budget vs Military Budget Infographic
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 10, 2013 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Thursday, January 10th, 2013The US military probably spends more on golf courses and toilet seats than NASA spends on launch prep. Let’s take a look.
I want to go to Mars. No. Really. When I was a kid, I was pretty sure I was going to be an astronaut or aerospace engineer. This was partly the result of seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey
Quick! Call the Uncanny Nanny!
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 9, 2013 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, January 9th, 2013Diego-san and the other robot boys are running wild in the Uncanny Valley!
 Why is this robot baby pouting? He probably just saw what he looks like for the first time. |
Why do robot developers insist on creating robots that are every bit as macabre in appearance as the creepy ones in dystopian movies like Artificial Intelligence
Who Is This Guy Wolfram Alpha?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 8, 2013 by admin in Technology
Tuesday, January 8th, 2013And how did he get so smart? However he did it, I think I’ll be hanging out with him instead of Google more often.
That’s an actual search box. Give it a spin. |
I remember when Google was new. It not only seemed magical in its ability to present me with what I was looking for, it was truly elegant in its simplicity. No wonder it decimated competing search engines so thoroughly that most of us barely remember names like “Lycos”, “Alta Vista”, and “Excite”. Like everything exceptional though, there’s always the possibility that the people involved will start “drinking their own bathwater”, as the old saying goes, and that exceptional thing eventually becomes remarkably unexceptional. More and more, that’s my experience with Google search. It’s still pretty utilitarian much of the time, but often the top results are utter junk, largely because of the pervasive and self-concerned goals of the SEO wizards that target those results. And turning to the other two of the big three – Yahoo and Bing – may give a little more diversity in results, but often the results are nearly identical, because in their heart of hearts, they would love to be Google. One alternative that I tried randomly for a while was Millionshort.com, which ironically helps you remove Google’s top results to get BETTER results. It can be surprisingly effective, but always feels like you ordered a piece of pie and scraped the whipped cream off the top. It’s an odd workaround. So in my endless search for better search recently, I rediscovered Wolfram Alpha . We first talked about this amazing search tool back in 2009, but the other day, while I gave it a spin to do something I know it’s good at – i.e. helping you explore and calculate the physical properties of a material (in this case it was Gold), I was rather stunned at how it had subtly evolved into a fantastic general search tool. Give it a spin yourself; that’s a functioning search box in the upper left. You may be surprised at how smart the results are. As their tagline says: “It’s not a search engine, it’s a computational knowledge engine”. We’ll be doing a followup soon; today I spent about an hour doing side-by-side searches on Google and Wolfram Alpha of common things like hotels, cities, entertainers, politics, science, and technology, and I’ll share screen grabs and links to the often exceptional results. You may find it especially cool if you have terminal Wikiphilia like me. For now though, I have to get back to obsessive searches about things I just learned about two seconds ago. Below is a video explaining what it’s really all about. Read the rest of this entry »
My Other Internet is a Tablet
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 7, 2013 by admin in Popular Media
Monday, January 7th, 2013Why the web is dead, this website sucks, and why you’ll see me on your Kindle soon.
 Not only did they use a hashtag on the cover of the final print edition, probably the only way you can get a copy of the thing is on the Kindle.  |
I’ve been saying that the internet is dead for a while now, but apparently people only listen when you say this kind of thing if you’re Anil Dash. If you visit that link, please note the irony of the fact that his comment section is handled by a Facebook widget. But really, let’s face it. The web is dead. Google has turned search into an SEO-poisoned gutter of desperate web marketers paying to rank in Google so that Google will pay them for ranking. eBay is a shark-infested cesspool of hustlers and bidbots. And social networking? Puh-LEEZE. No one ever read your tweets anyway, and Facebook has served its only useful purpose, which was letting you re-connect with that long lost flame that previously you could only “Guilt Google” (when you weren’t busy Googlewanking) so you could either hook up, or finally remember why you lost track of each other in the first place. Why am I so adamant that social is dead? Well, about five years ago, while doing a little work I cringeingly called “Social Network Consulting”, I ran into a friend who actually had that printed on her business card! I asked her: “So what does that mean? You charge people to tell them to use Facebook and Twitter?” Our pockets – bulging with consulting fees – bounced as we had a belly laugh. Well guess what. There are now over 180,000 Social Media Experts on Twitter! Presumably, they’re all telling you how great Twitter is. At least they don’t waste entire paragraphs doing it, right? The last possible hope of the web getting interesting again was dangled before us not too long ago with the exciting label user generated content. I have a FEW things to say about THAT one. First of all, all you “users” have proven not only that you’re not capable of producing content worth reading, you don’t even stick to it! Just Google “I haven’t posted in a while”, and not only do you get 820 million results, Google conveniently suggests the more useful “sorry I haven’t posted in a while”. People also became disheartened quickly when they finally produced that book on Blurb or someplace, and even their FRIENDS didn’t by copies. Likewise when their Kickstarter campaign generated 200 bucks instead of the ten grand they had hoped for. Even the website you’re reading this article on sucks! It’s poorly-coded for mobile devices, the articles are too long, and thanks to the content scrapers – who prefer to call themselves “curators” so they don’t feel badly for building entire websites with other people’s original content – it ranks infinitely lower in search engines than it did even a year ago. (Insider secret: we’re shutting down to move to a new platform in the coming months)
But I’m not here to tell you how horrible life will be because of all this, I’m here to tell you how COOL it will be. A few interesting things happened last year. One was Read the rest of this entry »
Just How Big Would a Trillion Dollar Coin BE, Anyway?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 6, 2013 by admin in Politics
Sunday, January 6th, 2013The web is buzzing with silly talk of fixing the economy by minting a trillion dollar coin. So just how big would that coin be, if it were made of gold?
 Yup. That’s a football field. Details below. |
You’ve probably heard about the “Trillion Dollar Coin” by now, and maybe even taken the time to take in the experts’ predictably confident and just as polarized positions on the topic. The fact that the idea is even being discussed seriously is rather telling. Can you imagine the same conversation occurring before the bailouts of 2008? It seems unlikely. And that’s ONE angle on this whole thing that especially intrigues me. As much anger as some of us may have experienced as a result of the bailouts and their aftermath, I for one am thankful for them. Partly because it was probably the only way to avoid a replay of the great depression, but more importantly, because it was probably the first crack in a centuries-old paradigm that has far outlived its usefulness. Talk to someone who has studied economics, and the conversation will rapidly fill up with elaborate terminology that tries to express the incredible complexity of global markets and speculative investment. But as much pride as economists or financial experts may take as they display their head-spinning depth of knowledge on the topic, they are usually overlooking one stark, annoyingly simple fact. At the foundation of it all, their elaborate constructs are all based on a rather simple social contract, i.e.: the tacit agreement on the part of large numbers of people that a piece of paper is worth what someone says it is. It’s tragic that millions of people suffered through a decade of poverty and that perfectly functional factories sat idle after the crash of 1929. And the tragedy was compounded by the fact that it was primarily because pieces of paper had lost their perceived value. That was the magical thing that occurred in 2008; Paulson & Bernanke’s Bailout Bankster Brigade basically “broke capitalism”. That has only peripherally sunk in for people, but every passing day, more people get hip to concepts like fictitious capital, and we live in an era of some of the most innovative thought in human history. About the only thing the archaic entity called a “bank” is good for these days is laundering drug or war money, and centralizing power. That paradigm is not long for this world, in my opinion.
That’s why I don’t find the blogsplosion about the Trillion Dollar Coin particularly interesting. As Matt Taibbi, the pop media journalist the Goldman Bankster Gang loves to hate most points out in his most recent piece: “The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme”. A paper version of the Trillion Dollar Coin was created in 2008, and we’ve been gleefully spending imaginary money since long before that, it’s just that the average person doesn’t understand why THEY don’t have any. They’ll eventually figure this out, and that’s when the feces will really hit the fan. So what really intrigued me was this silly question:
What if we still had to back currency with a real-world asset, and we were only allowed to mint this trillion dollar coin out of GOLD?
Here’s the rough result. I explain my admittedly sketchy methods below.
I’m no genius when it comes to volumetric geometry and 3D imaging, so this graphic may be a little off. Feel free to correct me in the comments! I used yesterday’s price of gold, which was $1661 an ounce. Dividing a trillion with that figure, I determined it would take about 181.23 tons of gold, and according to Wolfram Alpha, that would require a cube that’s 65 meters on each side. I tried to approximate the dimensions of a quarter (24.26mm x 1.75mm) to create the cylinder/disc dimensions. That ended up being a disc about 418 meters in diameter and 2 meters thick. The football field isn’t perfectly to scale, but you could obviously fit four football fields end-to-end on a 420 meter disc, so I roughed it in.