Travel Photo of the Week



waterfall in the middle of Morocco



360 Degree View of Things



photo by Jonas Pfeil

This nifty ball can be thrown in the air and at its apogee, take a suround photograph. 36 cameras snap photos that are knitted together by software to create a spherical panorama.

To be presented as the Emerging Technologies demonstration 'Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera' at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2011.

The Future of Work: These Mexican Immigrants Made Their Own Jobs

As we contemplate the economic meltdown that 40 years of increasing income disparity and overseas outsourcing has brought the US, we wonder: where will the jobs come from?

These women are not wondering. They are banding together to create businesses. This group, the Apple Eco-friendly Cleaning Cooperative, is a collective of five Mexican women living in New York City who got tired of working odd gigs and wanted more control of their careers. After meeting at a Brooklyn day laborer hiring site, where they would compete for cleaning jobs with dozens of other women, the quintet decided go into business for themselves, and formed an LLC.

If you want to shape your own destiny, start a business.

Homemade Mayonnaise

I love to cook and some times I make my own condiments. Here's a short video on how to make mayonnaise. I've got to get one of those hand blenders.

Martin Luther King Memorial

My wife, a friend and I visited the MLK Memorial in DC yesterday. I remember as a young teen hearing this great man speak on television and being so moved by his heart and words. His words hold no less power today and to see this magnificent memorial was very moving, bringing back those times clearly to me.

Here are some photos I took. If you get the chance, go see this great tribute to one of our nation's great leaders.

Click on images for higher resolution.

How Do You Save a Dying Language? Crowdsource It!

In an earlier post I shared my concern about dying languages. Every year, around 26 languages become extinct and it's estimated that up the 50% the languages now spoken on the Earth will be gone by 2100.
Althought there are many groups dedicated to stopping this trend, one of the most interesting ideas circulating is the notion of crowdsourcing the task.

Biagio Arobba , a 32-year-old South Dakotan, has launched LiveAndTell, a user-generated content site for documenting and learning rare languages. Arobba is especially in preserving Native American tongues. The site has an accompanying Facebook page to facitate crowdsourcing endangered languages by speaking another that the next generation already knows: the language of the Internet.

Fun Time! Cigar Box Guitars!

Travel Photo of the Week

Often mistaken for Ireland, the view from my mother's backyard in Stephenson, VA.

Space - The Vinyl Frontier

If you've ever thought that NASA was the last word in space exploration and that we've lost our commitment to that grand adventure, think again. It is now officially the age of consumer space travel and I'm not just talking about Scaled Composite's Spaceship One and Two or Blue Origins New Shepard or any of the other commercial outfits that are charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for short suborbital flights.

Have a look at this video of Derek Deville's Qu8k (pronounced "Quake"). Deville has been building and launching rockets for quite a while and it's not a surprise to find out he worked for DARPA and helped design SpaceShip One's rocket engine.

This particular rocket was built in an attempt to win the Carmack Prize which awards $10,000 to the first person or team to launch a vehicle that achieves an altitude of over 100,000 feet. Deville's rocket made it to 121,000 feet, but alas, the GPS crapped out on him.

I think it's important to note that this is how the personal computer started out.

It's Time For Time

I have always been fascinated by the concept of time. If you sit and talk with me awhile, it will eventually come up. But what IS time? By that question, I mean how do you actually define it and does it really exist as more than a useful concept? Does time have inherent independent existence? Many cultures don't even have a word for time and no past or future tenses in their languages.

Here, in New Scientist magazine, is a series of articles discussing time. Notions of time's arrow (does time flow in both directions? into the future and the past?), time flowing at different rates for different observers, an end to time and time travel are all covered. I won't go into a discussion of all the ideas here.

Perhaps we should sit down and talk about it in person. Sometime.