- Merrill Lynch US Economics: The Frugal Future – “Mean Reverting This Chart Points To A 30% Decline In Home Prices.“
- Desktop Factory: Our Product – “The Desktop Factory 3D printer has a build speed comparable to existing 3D printing technologies, and produces robust parts that are strong enough to be thrown across a conference room table!“
- Don Knuth: Financial Fiasco – “Due to an unfixable security flaw in the way funds are now transferred electronically, worldwide, it is no longer safe to write personal checks. A criminal who sees the numbers that are printed at the bottom of any check that you write can use that information to withdraw all the money from your account. “
- Phil Windley: I’m Voting for The Conservative Candidate — If I Can Find Him – “Technology isn’t just a way to send letters without a stamp. Technology underpins the modern world in the same way that economics does and anyone who does not understand it is bound to make poor policy decisions.“
- Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: Scariest Jack-o’-Lantern of 2008 – “Jack-o’-Lanterns are supposed to be scary, right? So here is our new one: it’s a mini pumpkin with a (tiny) scrolling LED stock ticker. Reprogrammable so you can update it every day with gloomy news from Wall Street.” – I must build one of these sometime!
Monthly Archives: October 2008
Links for Monday, October 27, 2008
- Scripting Your World – “Scripting Your World is the complete scripting introduction for anyone who wants to learn how to make their Second Life objects move, interact, and change. This book, written by an expert team of programmers, covers every aspect of LSL, from the basics of avatar movement and communication to physics and special effects to interacting with the world outside of Second Life.“
- Shannon’s Weblog: SL Astronomy – Prospero’s astronomy Gallery – “Prospero Frobozz has created a nice little collection of astronomy exhibits in SL on Grouse Island.“
- Wall Street Journal: The Age of Prosperity Is Over – “Twenty-five years down the line, what this administration and Congress have done will be viewed in much the same light as what Herbert Hoover did in the years 1929 through 1932. Whenever people make decisions when they are panicked, the consequences are rarely pretty. We are now witnessing the end of prosperity.“
Links for Monday, October 20, 2008
- Tim Ferris: The Not-To-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now – “Here are nine stressful and common habits that entrepreneurs and office workers should strive to eliminate. The bullets are followed by more detailed descriptions. Focus on one or two at a time, just as you would with high-priority to-do items.“
- Linden Lab: LSL HTTP Server – “While llHTTPRequest lets scripts in Second Life request data from http accessible sources, this “http-in” project allows outside sources to request data from scripts in Second Life. The key difference is that llHTTPRequest exchanges data when the script in SL wants; http-in allows outside sources to determine when they need to communicate with scripts in SL.“
- Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: LED Ghosties for Halloween – “You can make these simple LED ghosties from a soda bottle, a couple of LEDs and batteries, string, and a scrap of fabric“
- Massively: Linden Lab and Rivers Run Red launch Immersive Workspaces 2.0 – “All of this enterprise product is a combination of Linden Lab’s Second Life Grid technology, and a comprehensive set of management and collaboration tools provided by Rivers Run Red.“
Links for Tuesday, October 14, 2008
- BBC News: Your Credit Crunch Jokes – “BBC News website readers have been sending us their own humorous views about the credit crunch.“
- Digital Urban: Cellular Automaton and Agents in Second Life: Game of Life, Segregation and Evacuation Simulation – “These are perhaps early steps but the ability to integrate human controlled avatars into models of building/environment evacuation, via environments such as Second Life, presents an intriguing step forward. Indeed, one that has the potential to lead to a more comprehensive understanding of evacuation behavior and ultimately of course better architectural design.” – Via Econ Steve.
- UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis: Agent Street: Agent Based Modelling in Second Life – “We describe the inner workings of the models along with providing the Linden Script code listings so that readers can recreate the models themselves. Movies on each page show the models running and demonstrate Second Life’s potential for outreach and communication of agent-based models.“
- Jin Kunstler: The Nausea Express – “We’re on our way to becoming another nation, whether we like it or not. No amount of numerological augury or even hand-wringing will change that. The big question for, say, the 24 months ahead is: how disorderly will we allow this transition to be?“
London Eye Street Performers
I just got back from a week-long trip to London. After a busy working week, I spent Saturday walking around. The weather was perfect and I had some good tunes on my iPod, so I walked and walked and walked, a total of over 12.5 miles.
My journey took me past the London Eye on the South bank of the River Thames:
There are a number of street performers in the area around the Eye. They dress in interesting costumes and perform for tips. Here’s what I saw on Saturday:
Links for Wednesday, October 8, 2008
- Econ Steve: The Best Dang Blog Post In A While – “It is not about partisan politics, but the general feeling that our perception of America – as a collection of small towns – is not what it really is. U.S., like the rest of the world, is urbanizing.“
- Sad Guys On Trading Floors – “Turning the economic crisis into one of those clever internet memes.“
- http://www.seattle20.com/ – “Startups, Entrepreneurship, Jobs, Events, Investors“
Funny Juxtaposition in Inbox
My sons Andy and Stephen are attending the University of Washington. The new semester started a week or two ago. Of course they were quick to email their tuition bills to me:
I found this entertaining. I am happy to invest in their futures and didn’t mind paying the bills at all.
And yes, for you eagle-eyed blog readers out there, I do use Outlook Web Access. In fact, I actually like it. It is functional (when run in Internet Explorer), smooth and efficient. In fact, I like it better than Outlook.
Links for Thursday, October 2, 2008
- Hank Williams: You Really Can’t Get Something for Nothing – “We have a market that is driven by debt that no one understands, and by trading activity run by software programs that no one understands. We have created a hive. It operates with a collective mind, but a mind like that of an adolescent or teenager, that cannot be reasoned with. No, it is worse than that. The hive is not even a collection of just people, but also of very inhuman software programs that operate based on rules that are, when executed en masse, totally unpredictable.” – My son Stephen and I were talking about this very thing, but Hank says it a lot better than I would have. The computers took over but it was a financial takeover instead of the military one that we had been conditioned to expect from sci-fi.
- ReadWriteWeb: 5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind – “The recently discovered science of complex systems is about common patterns that spawn diverse disciplines from physics to biology, from ecology to economics. This recent science of patterns is directly relevant to what we are doing around the Web. In this post we will discuss 5 different books that will get you fired up about modern science.” – I just ordered two of the five.
Links for Wednesday, October 1, 2008
- Brent Ozar: – “To my readers who are traveling to one of the upcoming fall conferences, here’s a few of my favorite travel tips.“
- Mind Mapping Software Blog: 8 Tips For Effective Presentations With Mind Mapping Software – “Most of the top mind mapping software programs now offer a presentation mode, which enable you to walk your audience one branch at a time through your map’s content in a very focused, engaging way. To do this effectively, however, there are a number of key things you need to keep in mind“