Ok, i can’t keep quiet about this any longer. I’m also not going to post it on twitter or facebook, since that is primarily where i see such behavior. I’ll graciously assume that all my blog readers are a bit more educated. Plus i don’t want to make anyone feel bad. Maybe they really don’t know they’re doing anything wrong … I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. 
<rant>
It just grates on my nerves every time i see some status update where someone unintentionally uses a homophone. A what? “Words hat are spelled differently but sound the same.“ For example, you use the word “to” when you should have used “too”. Or Two. What about “knight”, or “night”. “There, their, they’re”. Break, brake. Piece, peace. Rain, reign, rein. You get the idea.
If someone does it intentionally now and then for artistic purposes, that’s one thing. But it’s crazy how many times a day i cringe reading some status update where someone put in the wrong word. And i can guarantee it wasn’t on purpose. Yay for spell checkers, but COME ON PEOPLE! Seriously … Do you honestly not know the difference between piece and peace?
It reminds me of a book i read many years ago where there was a “spelling bee” – a literal bee that would spell-check your papers for you. The only problem was that the spelling bee was mischievous and intentionally used as many homophone’s as possible. Sure, technically every single word was spelled correctly, but the entire paper was gibberish. And gibberish is all i get when i read these status updates. I don’t remember what the post was about. All i remember was that they used a homophone.
</rant>
I weep for the future!
All the information quoted is here from an article on this website (but that doesn’t appear to have a permalink). The premise of the article is about a guy who wants to be the next CEO of Apple. Good for him. And some bits of the article – mostly towards the front and back – talk about Apple-specific ideas. That’s not what caught my attention. What did catch my eye was his vision of where the world is headed in the next decade. It’s truly visionary and i agree – in large part – with his assessment.
In just ten years, there won’t be any more PCs or MP3 players, there won’t even be any “smart phones” or televisions as we know them today. There won’t be any operating systems for consumers, no downloadable music, no DVDs, and 100% of today’s software will be retired. We’re on the brink of the Semantic Web, a transformation as significant and different as everything we’ve built over the last forty years. The Semantic Web will slowly but surely accelerate us from the old flat innovation curve to a new, disruptive, hyperconnected future.
We’ve spent the last thirty years recreating our old paper documents and filing cabinets on hard drives – same information, just with an easier way to move it from place to place. We’ve gotten very good at integrating hard drives and memory chips into our lives, so we can see all those 19th-Century paper documents on our screens. Where we’re going, we don’t need hard drives and memory chips. Instead, we’ll have ubiquitous access to the Semantic Web. Whether it goes on your wall or in your pocket, all devices are simply “screens” that can see the semantic web, and the screens will come in all sizes, from one centimeter square to wall-size. They will wrap around you or project onto the side of your igloo. They might just be built into your glasses. Ray Ozzie calls this your device mesh.
For consumers, there will be many benefits. Your online identity will be safer and more powerful. You’ll do everything you do today from your online semantic desktop. Your calendar will hook to all your activities, so it can keep up with you automatically and work with others’ calendars to actively help you coordinate your schedule. Your resume is always up to date, and interesting job offers flow in as they are created by employers – you can adjust the flow according to your desire for a new job. Your health records will stay online under your control, and you’ll choose who gets to see them. Your financial information will all be in one place, so you can direct what happens to it. Your taxes are always prepared. Your photos go straight from your camera to the server – no memory cards to lose. You’ll access all your social networks from one place. Lose your phone? No problem – take mine and log in. Want to watch any movie ever made? Listen to music you’ve never heard but really enjoy? No problem – the Semantic Web will stream it to you, and you’ll never manage or back-up your media collection again. All your assets and ownership are under your control – you’ll be able to see every mile your car has been driven, the temperature in every room of your house, and when the next train arrives at the subway stop near you. You’ll have full information portability so you can take your account from one vendor to another. All your information will live in the cloud and be woven into every product you use. You’ll have VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) tools that put you in control. You’ll work with marketers on your terms, not theirs. Your will won’t be a paper document; it will be an executable document that can work for you long after you’re gone.
For businesses, the spaghetti of text and keywords that today serve as electronic mimics of our previous paper-and-pencil records will be replaced by meaningful, semantic documents that are like plug-and-play lego bricks: reusable modules of information that stay in one place and give your business more leverage than you can imagine.
For professionals the world will change completely. You’ll do everything from your social semantic desktop – your control room that gives you access to everything and everyone you need. We’ll see the emergence of passive commerce and passive search – where you specify exactly what you’re looking for and it will find you, rather than the other way around.
The only hesitation i have is that everything will be in the cloud. I agree that a lot of stuff should/will be there, but i’m not entirely convinced that we’ll get rid of our desktops and throw out all our hard drives. Consider gaming. That takes a lot of processing power, and if you have to do all that off-site somewhere and transfer all the data in real-time, it could be prohibitive. What about process and data intensive tasks? How much will is cost to “rent cycles” off someone’s CPU to grind away at some calculations? Will it be cheaper than just running something at home? What if there’s not enough bandwidth or the server goes down? You’ll need offline storage of critical pieces. I don’t think the OS is going away. But it will certainly transform.
Regardless, the future is coming fast and i can’t wait to see what it brings.
Freemium – a business model that gives away basic content (or a free crippled version of something), and that charges for the full version/premium content.
Slobquake – What happens regularly in my daughters’ room.
When Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out (a year and a half ago?!), i was first in line to go see it. In fact, i think i saw it multiple times in the theater. I loved it. And yet, there was a lot of bad press. “Oh, what a disappointment!”, “They never should have done another one”, “Harrison Ford is too old”, “Shia LeBeouf, are you kidding?”. However, all is not bad. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 77% rating on the tomatometer.
Yesterday i took a day off work and decided to rewatch it with the little ones. Man – how could anyone not LOVE this movie? I mean seriously – it’s got psychic kgb spies. Indiana Jones survives a nuclear blast by hiding in a fridge. We get to visit area 51 and see the crate where the Ark of the Covenant is resting. “Big damn ants!”. Chase scenes through the jungle, sword fights, spies, plane flights overlayed on the map, creepy graves. Immortal interdimensional archaeologist aliens that can survive for thousands of years without their heads. The hat. The whip. Snakes, quicksand, poison darts. I mean, COME ON – it doesn’t get better than this.
The bottom line? The latest installment is an action/adventure story with exotic locations and an over the top story line which is very much in line with the original Indiana Jones story.
I just added another card game to the list of rules i’ve got compiled on my site. This is a fun game we learned from some good friends of ours a while back. It’s quick and easy and fun.
If you’ve got a great card game you enjoy playing, leave a comment explaining the rules (or a link to the rules).
You can solve anything with duct tape.
At work we are working on some software for a set top box (STB) and the only way to get updates onto the box is with a specially modified serial cable. We’ve got about 50 STB’s floating around the office and one cable. As you can imagine, the cable is always in high demand.
Today i needed to update my STB. After some searching, i finally managed to track down the cable. But wait, what’s this? Two of the three wires that are ever so fragilely soldered to the circuit board were just floating about loose! Turns out someone had removed the housing from the business end of the cable to try and figure out the hardware configuration so we could order more cables. A noble effort, to be sure. But they hadn’t bothered to replace the housing and now the wires had come loose – rendering the cable completely useless.
What to do? Nobody at work actually had a soldering iron (i checked all over the place). Fortunately, i know a guy i used to work with who lived about 10 minutes away who happened to be at home. FIELD TRIP! Turns out the 10 minute drive took about 25 minutes thanks to a car wreck and heavy traffic. Anyway, after a brief time we were back in business – the wires were successfully reattached.
What does any of this have to do with duct tape? In order to prevent this from happening again, Chuck (a brilliant co-worker who came along with me to actually do the soldering work [you didn't think i did it, did you?]) suggested that we tape up the wires and circuit board with duct tape. Sure, why not? And hell – he even went the extra mile and formed the tape into a rough approximation of the original housing.
Long live duct tape!
For some reason today a quote suddenly popped into my mind. Well, a vague recollection that there was a cool quote from a movie that i was pretty sure i would think would be cool if i could remember what it was. That’s not much to go on, to be sure, but i stuck it in the back of my mind and began a low-priority search algorithm, hoping that the old noggin would come up with a hit sooner or later.
As I was getting the kids ready for bed tonight, i remembered where i’d heard the quote. It was from Morpheus, during a dramatic scene in one of the Matrix movies. That’s all the info i needed. A few minutes later, Google had helped me narrow down the exact quote, the scene in the movie, and even a biblical reference of where the quote really came from.
Morpheus’ ship, the Nebuchadnezzar, had just been destroyed by some sentinels. As he looks on in helpless despair, he whispers: “I have dreamed a dream, and now that dream has gone from me.” It’s a very poignant moment. Right then, he believes there’s no possible way that mankind can win the war. I thought certainly that quote must be a reference to a poem.
Not quite. It’s actually a biblical reference to king Nebuchadnezzar, in the book of Daniel. He is having dreams which he can’t remember and they are troubling him. “And in the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar Nebuchadnezzar dreamed dreams, wherewith his spirit was troubled … I have dreamed a dream, and my spirit was troubled to know the dream. … The king answered and said to the Chaldeans, The thing is gone from me.” – Daniel 2: 1-5.
I find it somewhat ironic that this is the quote that was troubling me all day and had gone from me. Fortunately, i got it back. Morpheus also got his hope back, and even king Nebuchadnezzar got his dream back (you know the one – with the head of gold, body of brass, feet of clay, …).
This is a test using a my mobile word press application. I’m also using a speech entry rather than typing. So far so good.
Forget everything you thought you knew about cosmology. Big bang? Dark matter? Gravitational force being so weak compared to the other forces? Fooey i say. There’s a competing theory that brings all this into question and said you don’t need any of that to explain the universe. All you need is brane theory. This isn’t necessarily new. I’ve been reading bits and pieces about it for years. But this particular article doesn’t go deep so your eyes don’t glaze over. Plus it has a cool graphic
Proponents of branes propose that we are trapped in a thin membrane of space-time embedded in a much larger cosmos from which neither light nor energy -except gravity- can escape or enter and that that “dark matter” is just the rest of the universe that we can’t see because light can’t escape from or enter into our membrane from the great bulk of the universe. And our membrane may be only one of many, all of which may warp, connect, and collide with one another in as many as 10 dimensions -a new frontier physicists call the “brane world.” Stephen Hawking, among others, envisions brane worlds perculating up out of the void, giving rise to whole new universes.
Only gravity can’t exist soley in a specific brane, but wanders where it will, leaking off our brane into what physicists call “the bulk” — the rest of space-time. Brane theory offer an fascinating and plausable explanation for why gravity is such a weakling: Maybe it’s not any weaker than the other forces, but just concentrated somewhere else in the bulk, or on another brane, providing the key to understanding the dark matter that makes up 90 % of our universe.
If our brane is but a small slice of a much larger cosmos, however, the “dark matter” might be nothing but ordinary matter trapped on another brane. Dark matter is no longer some mysterious unknown, but the force at the heart of the brane-brane interaction. With the brane model the universe goes through an eternal cosmic cycle over a vast timescale of attraction, bounce with a spread out bang, springing apart, and expansion until attraction (gravity) takes over again.Such a shadow world, Hawking speculated, might contain “shadow human beings wondering about the mass that seems to be missing from their world.”
Several of the world’s leading cosmologists believe that we are but one of many universes. As yet, as we know, there is no evidence of there being other universes out there. Some versions of this theory suggest that there is at least one other universe very close to our own, separated perhaps bu a membrane as little as a millimeter away, which, if true, could be detectable by some energy or forces such as gravity leaking through.In fact, as predicted by brane theorists, this “leakage” could be responsible for the production of dark energy from a parallel universe, its influence felt in our own through its gravitational pull.
– CERN may detect the existance of another universe
Orvut’s theory could explain the effect of dark matter where areas of the universe are heavier than they should be given everything that’s present. With their theory, the nagging problems surrounding the Big Bang (beginning from what, and caused how?) are replaced by an eternal cosmic cycle where dark energy is no longer a mysterious unknown quantity, but rather the very extra gravitational force that drives the universe to universe (brane-brane) interaction.
From the Utah Valley Daily Herald newspaper:
January 20th was the first concert of the year for Springville Junior High’s eighth and ninth grade orchestras. They played many different songs.
Alex Hawker, a seventh grader in the eighth-grade orchestra, said, “We will play six songs, and one we learned it without any music!”
Dr. Tsugawa is the director of these orchestras. Students in his eighth-grade orchestra think he is funny. According to Yamina Castro, Dr. Tsugawa teaches music concepts well and jokes with them.
In orchestra, the students learn many songs and do music theory. Dr. Tsugawa helps them with everything they do. Alex said, “Dr. Tsugawa is nice and funny. He makes learning theory fun and exciting.”
Yamina Castr’s favorite part of being in orchestra is “being able to play with many different parts and harmonies at the same time to make beautiful music.” They play songs called “Frolic,” “Fiddles Down Under,” “Joust,” “Nightrider,” “Ashgrove,” and “Two English Dances.”