But enough about you

OK, here's mine, from careercruising.com.

1. Computer Engineer
2. Mathematician
3. Computer Support Person
4. Actuary
5. Cartographer
6. Computer Programmer
7. Air Traffic Controller
8. Project Manager
9. Biomedical Engineer
10. Mining Engineer
11. Agricultural Engineer
12. Petroleum Engineer
13. Astronomer
14. Materials / Metallurgical Engineer
15. Electrical Engineer
16. Industrial Engineer
17. Operations Research Analyst
18. Physicist
19. Chemical Engineer
20. Mechanical Engineer

It's worth spending twenty minutes watching this TED talk on the statistics of developing nations. The data visualizations that speaker Hans Rosling generates to demonstrate his points are dazzling. Watch if you are interested in global health and development. Watch if you're a data vis geek. Watch if you just need to kill twenty minutes and you're tired of poking your friends on Facebook.

Oh, and I guess we acquired Rosen's data vis software, Trendalyzer, a few months ago. I hope we do great things with it.

I've been craving a good RTS lately. I used to buy every new version of Age of Empires and all the expansions.

Travian doesn't quite scratch the itch to click-click-click my way to frenzied victory, but it's an interesting take on the genre. I'm still in the "beginner protection" phase of the game until early tomorrow morning. After that, I will probably get rushed by more advanced players and be clobbered, but I've had fun so far.

Anyone else want to start up a village and make an alliance with me?

Thank goodness this site has a 15-minute-per-day time limit unless you give them money:

http://www.troyis.com/

Enjoy!

I've been reading my friend Terence's chocolate blog for a month or so and really enjoying it. You don't have to be friends with Terence to enjoy it. You don't have to be interested in chocolate-making to enjoy it. You can just enjoy it. Here's Terence describing the dessert at L'Atalier in Las Vegas:

The gustatory system now properly warmed up, I tried the chocolate dessert, which, predictably, was extremely good. The basic chocolate ingredients were pedestrian (Oreo cookie crumbs) and sublime (Valrhona’s Araguani), combined into a sort of ice cream plus ganache heaven. Interestingly, the restaurant doesn’t list the chocolate as Valrhona, but just uses the Araguani name. If you want to make ganache with the same basic material that Robuchon uses, Whole Foods sells “feves” (bean-shaped discs) of Araguani in bulk. This is a blend of two undisclosed bean varieties, and is what an Armani suit would taste like if it was chocolate.

That Terence can say that food tastes like clothing, and mean it as a compliment, and get away with it, cracks me up.

Shaping the Future, a recent talk by Charlie Stross, science fiction author.

Stross talks about lots of different pieces of the future that'll be here in our lifetimes, but my favorite bits are about lifelogging: the technology that's going to make it possible, the consequences for privacy and privacy law, and the future of history.

(Photo by PT Ford)

I saw a little piece in Wired this month about the Bartenbach Lichtlabor Artificial Sky. A big part of architectural design is figuring out how the inside of the building is going to look under different natural lighting conditions. Will the atrium have a pleasant golden glow or will it be uncomfortably bright? And if you get it right for midday in July, how well does it work on a November morning?

The Artificial Sky project takes some of the mystery out by simulating any lighting conditions for any day of the year at any point on the globe. You build a model of your structure, set it up inside the spherical Artificial Sky room, and set the room to cycle through various days of the year at your proposed building's location.

The only problem I can see is, how do you shrink yourself small enough to walk around inside your model and see how it looks? I hope the people-shrinking technology has improved since that terrible Rick Moranis movie.

I don't know how it got by me, but last week I discovered Google Reader. I've been using Bloglines but I like Google Reader better. If you're not happy with your current aggregator, or if *gasp* you're not using an aggregator at all, check it out. It's still in beta but like everything Google makes it has a simple, clean, pleasing interface and it just works.

I do still read my LJ friends page on LJ itself. There's a way to get your LJ stuff, even the protected entries, to show up on your Google personalized home page, but I prefer the LJ interface.

And while I've got your attention, and because not all of my LJ friends are also friends with each other, here are some recent posts worth passing along:

14limes notices that polyamory is in the OED now

malafrena experiments with GTD

erev_rav and sevoo have a baby

leeeah quotes Tom Stoppard in a way I can't get out of my head

Elliott's page has been updated:

December, 2006
Elliott's page

The big new thing is that Elliott has learned to point and click with a mouse. He spent more than an hour clicking around the alphabet section of starfall.com last night and then he did it again this morning. He just loves it and I think he might actually be learning some reading skills in addition to pointing and clicking.

I'm so glad we're bringing this kid up right: wasting hours and hours on the internet is an important life skill.

I've spent far too much time today on this site: Wei-Hwa's Puzzle Gadget

and I'm told that when I'm done with that, Indigo Puzzles is the thing to check out next.

This article by Clay Shirky about why ontologies are (often) bad and tagging is good will not surprise you if you've spent much time on del.icio.us, or even on tagging your LJ entries -- but I enjoyed it just the same.

Luckily for my friends Josh and Jen, who have devoted the last several years of their lives to helping build Ontology Works, the article does acknowledge that there are problem domains particularly suited to the ontological approach. Whew.

I've been wanting an augmented brain for as long as I can remember. I want an electronic device hooked into my brain that records everything my physical body is sensing for later playback.

There are lots of obvious problems with this scenario: the technology doesn't exist, or would be intrusive. Searching all that data is really hard, especially with the current state of image recognition. There are huge potential privacy problems, for me and for those with whom I interact. And if the MPAA and RIAA and their ilk don't like me sending mp3s around, imagine how they'll feel when every piece of music I've ever heard and every movie I've ever seen is retained forever in my electronic brain?

Even so, I want it. Clive Thompson wrote a great piece about Gordon Bell, a researcher at Microsoft who has logged the last several decades of his life in increasing detail as the technology has expanded to support him. I really enjoy most of what Thompson writes, and this one is definitely worth checking out.

Once they've got the lifelogging stuff figured out, I want something even better, that makes suggestions. Like the paperclip, only better. "You seem to be looking for your keys. They are on your dresser." (Photo history plus habit monitor plus calendar.) Or, "It has been two years since you've seen your old friend Sarah, who happens to be giving a talk today at a conference downtown. Shall I push your 2:00 appointment so you can meet up with her?" (Contact history plus current event monitor plus calendar plus email agent.)

For dense housing, this is awfully pretty:



Cactus building

You scored as Friedrich Nietzsche. Well you're an egotistical maniac, and you are so very iconoclastic that you probably are currently lost in a post-modern Jupiter, I mean jungle of self-definition. Don't let it get you down though, someday, through a willful onslaught of reinterpretation of dated forms and ideas, you will strike on something that passes as remotely new, and people WILL be into it on the basis of how hip it is alone. Also, the average espresso drinker looks up to you. </td> Friedrich Nietzsche 75% Dante Alighieri 58% Stephen Hawking 50% Steven Morrissey 50% Elvis Presley 42% Sigmund Freud 42% O.J. Simpson 42% C.G. Jung 33% Jesus Christ 33% Miyamoto Musashi 25% Charles Manson 25% Mother Teresa 17% Hugh Hefner 8% Adolf Hitler 0% What Pseudo Historical Figure Best Suits You? created with QuizFarm.com

Love this: This week's Ask an Uptight Seattleite column, especially the second half.

AaUS is a new feature in the Seattle Weekly that has just been added to my blog aggregator.

Does anybody want any yarn? I have a very large quantity of high-quality wool, silk, mohair, and assorted other fibers, in many colors. I find that when I start a new project, I'd rather buy just the right yarn than dig through my stash for something that's only almost-right. The yarn is too good to send to one of those knit-for-the-troops projects, which is what I did the last time my stash outgrew its storage space. Besides, tough military men don't wear magenta silk socks, or so I'm told.

Laura, I saw that book about knitting lingerie on your Amazon wishlist. That seems like a better use for magenta silk, no? (BTW, if you get that book, I definitely want to look through it.)

Or perhaps someone would like to make one of these?

Totally unsubstantiated, from http://exn.ca/cats/firstpets.cfm:

Islam's great Prophet, Mohammed, was said to have loved cats. The Hadith (an official collection of the sayings of Mohammed) says the leader condemned the practice of selling cats and told of a vision in which he saw a woman being attacked and disfigured by her cat in hell after she starved the creature to death.

"You neither fed it nor watered when you locked it up," God told her, "nor did you set it free to eat the insects of the earth." The message is clear: cats deserve good treatment because they do us all good.

Perhaps most memorable story — and certainly the loveliest — was of Muezza, Mohammed's favourite cat. It was curled up one day on the sleeve of his robe when the call to prayer was sounded. Mohammed had to leave, but rather than wake the animal he cut off his sleeve and quietly sneaked out. When he returned, the cat awoke and bowed to him in thanks. In return, it is said, Muezza was guaranteed a place in Heaven.

I'm having trouble thinking of anything less appealing than watching this:

CNN Pipeline offers free real-time stream of 9/11/01

That was just a terrible morning. I still feel sick when I think about it. It's been five years and I'm definitely not ready to watch the coverage again. You can ask again in another twenty.

Maybe this will help:

Board dots game

One of the best parts of Clive Thompson's recounting of the real-life science of snake-o-vision is that he used the word "serpentastic" to describe Snakes on a Plane. I used "herpetastic" in an email I wrote last week, but from now on I am definitely switching to Clive's word. So much snakier.