• The Chip History Center – “The Chip History Center is the world’s first virtual museum focused on the history of the semiconductor industry, semiconductors, how computer chips are made, and the tools used to make them. Exhibits focus on landmark designs and manufacturing equipment as well as the legendary visionaries and companies that made it all possible.“
• Dan Bricklin: Tour of Eclipse Aviation with Vern Raburn – “I was pretty blown away seeing their actual production facilities in operation. Dozens of planes were moving through a production line and I saw some literally about to go out the door. The company is entering the phase of moving from creating the design to optimizing the ongoing production. You can see how the original design should facilitate that optimization.“
• Seattle Bubble: Somewhere Between Anxiety and Denial – “Although it takes an ounce of actual critical thinking to see the cracks in Seattle’s housing market as of now, I believe that those most involved in the market can feel it in their bones. Whether they are consciously aware of it or not, the fear of what’s about to happen is starting to come through in what they write. Based on what I’m reading out there, I would place the general market sentiment in Seattle right now at somewhere between “Anxiety” and “Denial.”“
• Wall Street Journal: Credit Crunch Moves Beyond Mortgages – “It’s not just mortgages. As it gets tougher to land a home loan, some people are also finding it harder and more expensive to get other types of consumer credit.“
• Jeremiah Owyang: Tips to save time from the Web Strategist – “Every morning before the world wakes up, I get up and read, check feeds, techmeme, digg, and key blogs. I then blog, this process takes about 2 hours, usually before 6 or 7 am. I leap out of bed every morning in anticipation for this, no joke.“
• Teacher Tube: Creating Life-Like Clothing in Second Life – “This video will teach you how to create life-like clothing in the 3D virtual world Second Life.“
• Metaversed: Killing Old Media in Second Life – “So in summary, we want to host massive events, using 3D syndication, which would be a mixture of server tech, and object distribution whilst teaching anyone that doesn’t already have a grip on this stuff how to do it themselves.“

• Smart Mobs: Emergency 2.0: Twitter Helps Public Services Speed up Ahead the Government in Crisis Situations – “Redcross will be a test channel that will serve to spread information during a mass evacuation: evacuees will text ‘FOLLOW REDCROSS’ to 40404, and sign up to get updates about where the shelters are, distribution sites, and other contact info. Safeandwell is going to be more for incoming communication, meaning that people who text ‘FOLLOW SAFEANDWELL’ to 40404 will automatically be followed back, thus being able send their private information as a Direct Message to the American Red Cross database.” – via Nick Wilson‘s Twitter.
• EvolutionBlog: How Scientists Lose Debates to Cranks – “The crank wins just by looking serious and thoughtful and not at all like the raving lunatic mainstream consensus says he is. That the facts he cites are invariably wrong and the references he tosses off relentlessly unreliable is mostly irrelevant. Unless you have really spent some time immersed in crankdom, you should not be debating the subject publicly.“
• Niall Kennedy: Yui Rich Text Editor for Blog Comments – “In this post I’ll walk you through how to implement YUI’s Rich Text Editor on your own blog with comment-specific features.“
• Phil Burns: The Ancient Art of Writing – “I never learned to write in cursive, it always seemed stupid to me. I mean, I can sort of do it if forced, but there’s no way I can sit down and write in cursive without thinking very carefully how to create each letter. When I do write, it is always in print, and I have no concept of upper/lower case letters in print.“
• Tim Paterson: Is DOS a Rip-Off of CP/M? – “If tiny Seattle Computer Products had been sued by Digital Research back when DOS was new, I’m sure we would have caved instead of fighting it. I would have changed DOS so the API details were nothing like CP/M, and translation compatibility would have been lost. But in the end that would have made absolutely no difference. No one ever used or cared about translation compatibility. ”
• Wall Street Journal: Why Rich Kids Don’t Stay Rich – “My conclusion is that despite all their supposed advantages, today’s rich kids have grown up in such bubbles of privilege that they’re not prepared for today’s increasingly competitive job market. They don’t make good investors, they don’t compete well for the top jobs, and they’re not hungry for success like kids who grow up in middle-class homes can be.” – Be sure to read the comment trail; there’s a lot of interesting stuff there.
• Hubble Site: Hubble Pans Across Heavens to Harvest 50,000 Evolving Galaxies – “Several hundred images taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have been woven together into a rich tapestry of at least 50,000 galaxies. The Hubble view is yielding new clues about the universe’s youth, from its “pre-teen” years to young adulthood.“

• Noonhat – “Lunch with people you’d never meet otherwise.” – This is going to grow into another great tool to help me make my AWS evangelism trips even more action-packed.
• Dale’s SL Viewer – “This is a version of the SL Viewer modified by me. It adds a few features that aren’t present in the standard viewer.“
• [Nicholas Beresford: Viewer Startup Options](Viewer Startup Options) – “There is a couple of startup options which seem to unknown to most (I accidentally discovered them when working with the source code), but which may be helpful nonetheless.” – Some good options for starting the Second Life viewer, including specification of user name and password (great if you have multiple avatars – create desktop shortcuts for each one).
• New Scientist: Top 10: Life’s Greatest Inventions – “The first eyes appeared about 543 million years ago – the very beginning of the Cambrian period – in a group of trilobites called the Redlichia. Their eyes were compound, similar to those of modern insects, and probably evolved from light-sensitive pits.“
• Meet at the Pig – “a Seattle events blog for geeks, techies, hackers and makers.” – Via Stuart Maxwell on Twitter.
• New York Times: Fly Me to the Moon: Space Hotel Sees 2012 Opening – “Galactic Suite began as a hobby for former aerospace engineer Claramunt, until a space enthusiast decided to make the science fiction fantasy a reality by fronting most of the $3 billion needed to build the hotel.” – Hmm, another Paul Allen debacle investment, perhaps?

• JibberJobber: Finally Announcing the JibberJobber/IEEE-USA Relationship – “IEEE-USA, which promotes the career interests of U.S. members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), has partnered with JibberJobber.com to enhance career services offered through the IEEE-USA website. With over 360,000 members, IEEE is the largest technical professional society in the world.“
• Ebiquity Group: Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities – “In this paper, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter’s social network. We find that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information.“
• Paul Graham: Stuff – “ cluttered room saps one’s spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there’s less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there’s more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. “
• The CandyFab Project: Call for Volunteers – “If you want to be one of the first people in the world to build your own CandyFab from a set of plans, we want to hear from you. If you want to help design it and make it happen, we want to hear from you even more. We need beta testers, programmers, web site admins and editors, documentation writers, and people with CNC resources.“

I was driving my son Steve back to his apartment near the University of Washington this past Sunday on Interstate 520. As we neared Lake Washington, he asked me to be alert for the change of paving and claimed that it was so quiet that I would be able to hear the engine of my Scion.

We made the transition from old to new pavement and he was, of course, correct. He referenced some signs by the sign of the road which indicated that the new, ultra-quiet paving was part of a test. Further on, just before the bridge, we encountered a second and slightly different test segment.

The road was incredibly quiet, almost eerily so. The Carless in Seattle blog reports that 70-90% of the noise from a car comes from the tires hitting the road.

According to this article in the Seattle P-I, ground-up tires were used in the first segment. Smaller rocks and more of the black “goo” were used in the second segment. Per the article, residents of the up-scale neighborhood of Medina are very happy with the 6 decibel drop in road noise. The ECRD Blog has been tracking this development for quite a while.

At this point the noise-abatement properties of the surface are well-established. Still to be tested is its durability over time.

• Wall Street Journal: How Credit Got So Easy And Why It’s Tightening – “Recent events show that financial innovations meant to distribute risk can end up multiplying it instead, in ways neither regulators nor investors fully understand.“
• NASA Space Flight: Orion Landings to be Splashdowns – KSC buildings to be demolished – “The water landing scenario – previously only required during a launch abort – is one of several items that are being baselined into the next design cycle as a weight savings measure.“
• Niall Kennedy: JavaScript Map API Comparison – “Every time you add a widget or other external feature to your website you are handing over part of your web page experience and performance to a third party. The responsiveness and total page load of these external services is one way obsessive geeks tune and tweak their sites for optimal performance. Let’s take a look at how the major mapping players performed.“

• Paul Craig Roberts: Return of the Robber Barons – “ US colleges and universities continue to graduate hundreds of thousands of qualified engineers, IT professionals, and other professionals who will never have the opportunity to work in the professions for which they have been trained.“
• Smashing Magazine: Data Visualization: Modern Approaches – “Let’s take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools.“
• Hack’s Haven: – “Maya Realities is happy to announce a new $L1 Second Life analytics solution.“
• Official Linden Blog:10 Debug Options You Should Know About – “The Client menu is jam-packed with hidden goodies which can help enhance the usability and enjoyability of your Second Life. If you’ve never heard of it before, or consider yourself non-technical and are feeling kind of intimidated already, don’t worry — I’m going to guide you through the highlights of 10 debug options that’ve enriched my day-to-day activities inworld.“

• Phil Windley: Optimizing iTunes for IT Conversations – “By default iTunes only downloads the most recent podcast from a given site each day. For most sites, which publish less than once per day, that works fine. For sites like IT Conversations, however, that means you might be missing some shows you’d rather have downloaded.“
• The Official String Theory Web Site – “So what is string theory? For that matter, what the heck are elementary particles? If this all sounds totally confusing, try this section first.“
• MSNBC: Phoenix trip to Mars Offers Suspense Galore – “Phoenix Mars Lander is on track for Saturday’s scheduled 5:26 a.m. ET launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Phoenix spacecraft is designed to land in the planet’s northern polar region next May, dig into the frozen soil and analyze samples for signs of water and other chemicals needed for life.“
• SLCC 2007 Weekend Schedule – Saturday, 4:30 PM: “PANEL: Second Life Developers“
• Utility Belt: Linden Lab: Second Life Entrepreneurship is Booming – “As evidence that business in Second Life is beginning to take off, Rosedale said 830 residents are making more than $1,000 per month, and that number has doubled in the last 6 months.“
• Tim O’Reilly: Yahoo!’s Bet on Hadoop – “OK — but why is Yahoo!’s involvement so important? First, it indicates a kind of competitive tipping point in Web 2.0, where a large company that is a strong #2 in a space (search) realizes that open source is a great competitive weapon against their dominant competitor.“

August is a month of personal, family, and business milestones for me. Indulge me while I enumerate them. I think that it is important to recognize anniversaries and milestones, so here goes, in descending order by age:

• Mitch Wagner: Terrorism In Second Life? Give Me A Break – “There is a kernel of truth underneath the mountain of stupid. Second Life is an environment that can be used effectively for group training exercises and communication. Like any tool, it’s morally neutral. You can train in emergency services and rescue, or you can train in terrorism.“
• Bug Blogger: Greetings from Bug Labs – “So what is BUG exactly? It’s Legos meets Web services & APIs. Imagine being able to build any gadget you wanted by simply connecting simple, functional components together. Now imagine being able to easily program, share and connect these gadgets in interesting ways. In essence, we’re building an open source-based platform for programmers to build not only the applications they want but the hardware to run it on. “
• NASA Visible Earth: The Blue Marble – “Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet.” – Via Bad Astronomy Blog.
• Fedora Project: GPL Compatibility Matrix – “OK. Hold on tight. Think of this as a horrible legal version of “Does it Blend?”.“