Pictured above, a close-up of wax beads encased in plastic shells (see article link). As anthropomorphic as the big one on the right may be, it's even more awesome because it can help maintain heat in your home.

These guys are on a new insulated dry-wall that claims to cut cooling and heating costs. I am not sure the process is accurately described in the article, because it seems like it could potentially work in the opposite direction (i.e. I am trying to cool my home, but these wax beads keep hardening and therefore pumping heat energy back into my home)

I just thought it was awesome that what looks like a black-and-white picture of peas can save you money and cool your house. Science!

Productivity in 11 words: One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now.

A simple tweet by someone I don't know.

Changing my Monday morning with it, though.

A pocket knife from 200AD with a built in spoon, fork, knife. The Swiss version may have cleaner lines, but this one beat them to the punch by 1500 years or so.

Dang.

"Our job is to build the interface between the person and the tsunami of information," said Gladwell.

Sanders expounded: technology should not "give us what we ask for, [which is] more data. Give us better data."

Recently, I have been wrestling with my desire to overhaul and tweak the systems I use to store and organize data. I love knowing stuff, and I love knowing all kinds of stuff. I collect recipes, goofy pictures and videos, articles about string theory, and inspirational poems. I have over 1000 bookmarks to websites, and that is a shockingly low number to me.

And I love an application with good search. Google. Evernote. Even Windows 7. I love the idea that I can get at the massive pile of data I have forming.

And yet.

In practice, I simply remember the funny illustration I want to use for a lesson. Or remember that I have a recipe for Dutch Baby that I want to try. Or remember that I read once that I needed to change some fields in the database manually after upgrade. That information is in the big pile of data, but I search for it far less often than I thought I would.

And that means I am missing some things. I know that I have bookmarks, recipes, poems, code, and more that I saved but have never referenced. It's out there, but since I don't intuitively recall it, it remains lost to me.

This is the next big challenge for technology, to present data that is relevant and useful, rather than ALL the data. I can't wait until it is here, but for now I will continue to make my piles and hope that my intuition and Google's power can get it done.

I had seen an older TED video on this project last year and my inner geek still squeals with glee when I think about it. But I particularly wanted to pass this video along because of what is said near the end: Technology can make us more human gain.

I spend a lot of time staring at a computer screen and often feel like a complex machine sitting in front of a complex machine. I would love for the borders to blur a little between my digital and physical worlds in the way described here. I used to be fascinated by a virtual world where anything is possible, but the possibilities described here are just awesome. Rather than hide in our computers, we could be using them to interact in real life.

Sign me up.

(thanks to @shawnrobinson on Twitter for the link)

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.

This is an incredibly well thought out piece on Apple's latest gizmo. When I finally saw the specs for the iPad, my first thought was "I'd rather buy my son a netbook". The quote above helped me figure out why.

Great article. And in case you missed the link under the quote: http://al3x.net/2010/01/28/ipad.html

 

I just couldn't say a thing and he began to tell me how important my role was, what an inspiration it was. And you have to understand we were in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, people were regularly being attacked by dogs, and marchers were being hosed on the television every night, real life things, and here I am in this futuristic thing on TV and he was so complimentary, he told me "I was so important and the way you have created this role," and I am just looking at him and looking at him and I remember I just kept hoping he'd never stop talking. Because his voice is just... you know the voice. And I finally just start saying, thank you so much Dr. King and I am shaking his hand and still shaking from nervousness and I said thank you so much and I am really going to miss my co-stars.

And at this his face totally changed, and he said "What are you talking about?!" and so I told him I would be leaving the show, because; and that was as far as he let me go, and he said, "STOP! You cannot! You cannot leave this show! Do you not understand what you are doing?! You are the first non-stereotypical role in television! Of intelligence, and of a woman and a woman of color?! That you are playing a role that is not about your color! That this role could be played by anyone? This is not a black role. This is not a female role! A blue eyed blond or a pointed ear green person could take this role!" And I am looking at him and looking at him and buzzing, and he said, "Nichelle, for the first time, not only our little children and people can look on and see themselves, but people who don't look like us, people who don't look like us, from all over the world, for the first time, the first time on television, they can see us, as we should be!
As intelligent, brilliant, people! People in roles other than slick tap dancers, and maids, which are all wonderful in their own ways, but for the first time we have a woman, a WOMAN, who represents us and not in menial jobs, and you PROVE it, this man [Gene Rodenberry] proves and establishes a precedent that validates what we are marching for because three hundred years from today there we are, and there you are, in all our glory and all your glory! And you CANNOT leave!"

And I did not leave.

First, you must read this article from scifiwire.com: http://scifiwire.com/2010/01/the-true-story-of-how-dr.php

Don't worry.

I will wait.

As a white, middle-class, college educated, science fiction loving, God following man born in the early 1970s, this article leaves me tangled. My heart is humming in resonance with the core of the message here, but the details are historical fact rather than personal experience. Still, there are a few themes that stick with me.

First, I have a deeper appreciation for the work of Dr. King. That he loved Star Trek humanized my imagination of him. That he saw the gender issue as well as the racial issue deepens my appreciation for the breadth of his vision. Speeches and newspaper articles have taught me the historical detail, but an anecdote like this one reveals the heart of the man. Dr. King seems less distant in history to me now.

Second, it reminds me of C.S. Lewis' beliefs about story: that themes and ideas that are too big for this world are better played out in another. When the current world could not accept the simple truth that God made us equals, Star Trek painted a future where everyone knew it. Yes, Star Trek still held on to some female stereotypes (hello crazy uniforms and alien ladies for Kirk to conquer), but it is good to know that the vision was Equality and the rest was probably a cultural vocabulary coloring the telling.

The truth is, my cultural context distances me from the reality of the Civil Rights movement. I have understood it, in part, and related to it as historical fact, not a front row seat to what long-coming, long-overdue justice looks like. Any discrimination I may have experienced in my life doesn't even register on the scale of what the Civil Rights movement resisted. It is a world I can barely imagine, but know to be true.

In the same way, fairy tales and science fiction open my eyes to a world where justice prevails, good triumphs, evil is vanquished, and truth is real enough to hold in your hand. I can barely imagine it, but I know it to be true.

So for those of you who think that Science Fiction is all about robots and lasers, please understand that there can be so much more to it. Good writing and great stories give me handles for ideas too big for this world. What does it mean to be equals? What does courage look like? Is there any cost too great for seeing justice done? I can wrestle with these thoughts because of great stories.

And for those of us who love to do the thinking part, but fall short on action, I hope we find the courage to let the big ideas of our favorite stories spill over into real life. I hope that we can dare to try and bring that idealized future one a little bit closer to today's reality.

As a great man once said, "I have a dream..."

Americans are being taught that we’re too stupid to cook.  That cooking is so hard we need to let other people do it for us.  The messages are everywhere.  Boxed cake mix.  Why is it there?  Because a real cake is too hard!  You can’t bake a cake!  Takes too long, you can’t do it, you’re gonna fail!

I had never considered the possibility that I like to cook because it makes me feel smart. My wife makes bread using a process that involves no kneading and I consider hear a genius because of it.

I had not considered that my culture reinforces this idea every day. All of my cooking heroes (Alton Brown, Michael Ruhlman, et al.) regularly throw back the curtain and say "Look! What you thought was magic is actually easy!"

Case in point: a couple of months ago, I was getting ready to make pizza with my family. I did not go all out: used pre-made pizza dough from the store (available in the refrigerated section), shredded some mozzarella, opened a package of pepperoni, cut up a green pepper. Then I realized I had forgotten to pick up pizza sauce. Panic set in. There was no way my kids would eat a pizza with just olive oil & garlic (their loss). So I went back to the pantry, hoping to find a jar hiding somewhere. In the pantry, I came back to my senses. I had garlic, herbs, tomato paste, and a can of crushed tomatoes. I had a stick blender (immersion blender). 5 minutes later, I had pizza sauce. I felt like a genius for doing what the automated machinery at the pizza sauce factory does all day long.

I had initially planned to rant a little bit, go on about the demise of Western culture, etc. Instead, I would simply encourage you to cook something today. Take Ruhlman's advice and roast a chicken or make some soup (recipe: stock plus what you like in soup) or make cornbread from scratch (a recipe is probably on the cornmeal package). You will eat well. And you will feel like a genius.

Easy win.

This is a cute little article about the messages sent by typographic choices. Some of the juxtapositions are pretty funny. Like the one above.

http://bonfx.com/23-really-bad-font-choices/