Links to cool places or things.
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The Hibbles travel America
I like to think of myself as a “leaper,” but I don’t come remotely close to my friends the Hibbles. They make me and nearly everyone else seem positively timid! Geoff and Robin have packed their entire family into an RV and will live on the road for a whole year as they travel America. It’s crazy, it’s irrational, but it’s also strangely compelling.
You can follow the Hibbles on their adventures at their Switching Gears blog. Bon voyage, y’all!
Here’s a fascinating look at the role luck plays in business success.
Recently, we completed a nine-year research study of some of the most extreme business successes of modern times. We examined entrepreneurs who built small enterprises into companies that outperformed their industries by a factor of 10 in highly turbulent environments. We call them 10Xers, for “10 times success.”
The very nature of this study — how some people thrive in uncertainty, lead in chaos, deal with a world full of big, disruptive forces that we cannot predict or control — led us to smack into the question, “Just what is the role of luck?”
via Luck Is Just the Spark for Business Giants – NYTimes.com.
More astonishing overreach from our intellectual property overlords and their corrupt cronies in Congress.
The Stop Online Piracy Act also goes by another name: The E-PARASITES Act. It stands for Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation Act. If it passes, that muscle would certainly be available.
Mark A. Lemley is a professor at Stanford Law School and director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science, and Technology. He says, “What’s remarkable about this provision is that it would allow the government and in many cases private parties to come into court, get a temporary restraining order without the participation of the accused website and shut down not just the infringing material, but the whole website.”
I was poking back through the MT.Net archives to find this really cool Halloween effect I did six years ago. I called it the Floating Ghost Effect.
Here’s a picture of it in action as well as one that shows how it was set up.
Continue reading
The Atlantic Monthly takes a peek at Durham’s startup efforts:
Durham is a fascinating example of what happens when a community bands together to try to attract entrepreneurs. They’ve set up all the mechanisms and institutions to foster innovation and now they’re waiting to see if startup culture can take root. The city itself has “great bones,” as they say, with a dense downtown core filled with beautiful old-timey architecture. They even have some inspiring local business history to draw on. Durham was once known as “The Black Wall Street” because of the preponderance of successful African American-owned businesses on Parrish Street.
As I said before, Raleigh needs to get into the startup game pronto or face being forever branded as LawyerTown.
Dennis Ritchie, legendary creator of the C programming language and co-inventor of the best operating system ever (UNIX), died earlier this week. He was 70.
Ritchie was every bit as influential as Steve Jobs in shaping our computing world. Perhaps even more influential than Jobs.
Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and co-creator of the Unix operating system, has died aged 70.
While the introduction of Intel’s 4004 microprocessor in 1971 is widely regarded as a key moment in modern computing, the contemporaneous birth of the C programming language is less well known. Yet the creation of C has as much claim, if not more, to be the true seminal moment of IT as we know it; it sits at the heart of programming — and in the hearts of programmers — as the quintessential expression of coding elegance, power, simplicity and portability.
Its inventor, Dennis Ritchie, whose death after a long illness was reported on Wednesday and confirmed on Thursday by Bell Labs, similarly embodied a unique yet admirable approach to systems design: a man with a lifelong focus on making software that satisfied the intellect while freeing programmers to create their dreams.
The Charlotte Observer rightfully takes Gov. Perdue to task for her mealy-mouthed stand on the marriage amendment.
Yes, jobs are important but so is taking a principled stand against constitutional bigotry.
In a press release late last Friday afternoon, Perdue said she’d vote against the amendment. No, not because she supports gay marriage but because “I cannot in good conscience look an unemployed man or woman in the eye and tell them that this amendment is more important than finding them a job.”
We agree that this ill-advised constitutional amendment could hurt the state economically, deterring good businesses and workers from locating in North Carolina. Some N.C. business leaders have begun belatedly speaking out on that issue.
But the governor missed a chance to stand up against the amendment for a bigger reason: The amendment is discriminatory. Her johnny-come-lately assertion came across as spineless and political.
Because I love to see where my public-domain photo of Raleigh will show up next, I decided to give Google’s new search-by-image service a test drive. I uploaded a small size of my pic and lo and behold, Google provided me many, many search results showing where my photo is being used.
So far that’s ABC11 (WTVD), NBC 17 (WNCN), the City of Raleigh (who Photoshopped a light pole out of it!), MSNBC, Business Week, Yahoo! Finance, several local businesses including Four Points Sheraton in Cary, Allied movers, Signs By Tomorrow, and several real estate companies and taxi companies among many, many others. Good to see how far it’s traveled!
Interesting.
Taking magic mushrooms (psilocybin) can have a lasting change on the individual’s personality, making them more open about their feelings and the way they perceive things, researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA, wrote in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. The authors explained that those who had mystic experiences while on psilocybin were more likely to subsequently exhibit certain personality changes, making them more forthcoming about their feelings, becoming more focused on being creative, curious, and appreciative about artistic things.
via Magic Mushrooms Can Bring About Lasting Personality Changes.
Every now and then, a scientific discovery delivers to us smug mortals a healthy kick in the head: reminding us that for all our bravado we still don’t know squat about how the universe really works!
Neutrino particle traveling faster than light? Two ways it could rewrite physics.
European scientists are shocked by an experiment that showed neutrino particles moving faster than light. The result, if confirmed, could challenge Einstein’s signature theory on relativity or point to a universe of more than four dimensions.
via Neutrino particle traveling faster than light? Two ways it could rewrite physics. – CSMonitor.com.
