CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-21 07:04:40 (57 comments, 2 reshares, 21 +1s)

2013-05-21 03:37:38 (8 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

In lieu of a longer write-up that's still pending: Has there been any significant reporting on/thinking about secure data storage for the #quantifiedself  idea?

Anybody got pointers to articles, white papers, etc...?

2013-05-20 21:24:18 (7 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

Each time Chromium code is updated, powerful bots run tests to make sure there is no regression. When all tests succeed, Last Known Good Revision aka LKGR is updated at http://chromium-status.appspot.com/lkgr

To have a better understanding of where and when some tests fail, you may want to have a look at the Status Dashboard at http://build.chromium.org/p/chromium/lkgr-status/

2013-05-18 19:44:24 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 14 +1s)

Excuse me while I do a little bit of math in my stream. It's trivial math, so nobody will be harmed - you can keep looking. In fact, it might be interesting.

A while ago, there was an interesting discussion on the risk of terrorist attacks in my stream. [1]

And the discussion turned to what is more likely, winning the lottery, or being killed by terrorists. 

It was brought up that the number of terror deaths in the last 10 years was about 150 total. That would mean 15/year. Of course, that ignores the elephant of 9/11. The problem is, we simply don't know the frequency of large-scale attacks like 9/11 yet, so attaching any number is difficult. The only thing we can reasonably say is that so far, ~3,000/year is an upper bound. Let's go with that.

Now to winning the lottery. The CA lottery seems to produce about 10 millionaires per year, Iowa about 4.... more »

2013-05-18 06:30:42 (28 comments, 0 reshares, 14 +1s)

I accidentally jumped over to "What's Hot". (I know, my own fault). To find a post from +Robert Scoble with this quote:

"Sick!"
Translation for those who don't understand youth language: "can I try them on pretty please?"

Uh, Robert? "Sick" was "youth language" sometime in the 80's, when hammer pants were rad, and you pulled gnarly tricks with your skateboard ;)

2013-05-17 19:18:16 (4 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

This is interesting. Amnesty International accesses your Facebook information, and determines what types of crimes you could be convicted of around the globe.

http://www.trialbytimeline.org.nz/

(H/T +Alison Marlowe)

2013-05-17 18:28:58 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

#io13   #morethanabrowser  

Curious to learn Chrome packaged apps? Tomorrow we will have a great (:-)) Codelab session at I/O 2013. I know it will be Friday, lunch time, but I would love to have you in the room.

I will be guiding you through converting the famous +Addy Osmani's ToDoMVC benchmark app into a fully fledged Chrome packaged app. At the end you will have an ToDo app that actually executes your tasks for you.. oh wait, that's not ready yet...

A good part of the packaged app engineering and devrel team will be there to answer your questions while you learn the platform.

Ah, one last information: we will have some really cool swags raffled during the codelab! (see? I told you would want to come :-))
 

2013-05-17 05:30:51 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 10 +1s)

"Based on our abstract ratings, we found that just over 4,000 papers took a position on the cause of global warming, 97.1% of which endorsed human-caused global warming. "

That is about as close to unanimity as you will get in the scientific community.

#AGW #globalwarming

2013-05-17 02:15:44 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 22 +1s)

The Internet. Where private means entirely different things than you would think it would :)

2013-05-16 17:11:00 (30 comments, 4 reshares, 17 +1s)

We have obviously been wrong this whole time. How can you argue with such clever use of science by creationists?

2013-05-16 05:35:50 (13 comments, 0 reshares, 12 +1s)

It's amazing to actually take a look what motivates my actions. Depending on my mood, the rationale I give myself shifts in a way that makes me feel better given the current mood I'm in. 

And as I keep looking, it becomes harder and harder to tell which, if any, of the reasons I give myself is why I really do things. It's fascinating.

And disquieting - because really, if I can't identify the true reason, who says it's really me making that decision, and not just habit, instinct, or hormones?

2013-05-15 19:53:21 (8 comments, 2 reshares, 2 +1s)

Using Gmail and Google Wallet, you can quickly and securely send money to friends and family within the U.S. 

2013-05-15 19:05:06 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

Blog post by Randy Blythe from Lamb of God. A really good read, even if you're not into metal.

2013-05-15 18:03:34 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 11 +1s)

Chromebooks deploying in every school in Malaysia. Stories like this is why I come to work every day. #io2013 #googleio

2013-05-14 23:32:35 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

It's serious business, but I swear, this could be an Onion headline in itself.

2013-05-13 16:58:33 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

I'm giving you the highlight headline of the day here... :)

(Yeah, I don't really have any deep comments here. I just liked the headline.)

2013-05-11 05:18:31 (9 comments, 5 reshares, 21 +1s)

Ahem....

2013-05-10 22:02:48 (8 comments, 1 reshares, 18 +1s)

LOL 

2013-05-10 19:43:55 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

"Climate-change contrarians, who have little scientific credibility but are politically influential in Washington, point out that carbon dioxide represents only a tiny fraction of the air — as of Thursday’s reading, exactly .04 percent. “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic,” a Republican congressman from California, Dana Rohrabacher, said in a Congressional hearing several years ago."

If you are ignorant or otherwise lack the necessary domain expertise, then please don't say anything that just exposes your ignorance especially if you are a public official. If you can prevent a potential global catastrophe, then you are obligated to replace your ignorance with knowledge http://goo.gl/rj0uU

2013-05-10 19:24:31 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

How about this one for a more depressing map... Deforestation in the Amazon basin over the last 20 years, as seen from LANDSAT.

Also there - glacier shrinkage, drying out of the Aral sea, you name it.

But then again, the tool itself is amazingly cool. Quoth: We sifted through 2,068,467 images—a total of 909 terabytes of data—to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year

2013-05-10 19:19:39 (29 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

I'd call it "the most depressing map of the week", but really, there are more...

2013-05-09 06:44:29 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

I love that Andy Grove has taken such an interest in healthcare, and has such an intelligent, principled point of view.  I hope that lawmakers take notice. The things he's looking for are eminently reasonable (healthcare cost transparency and comparative effectiveness of treatments), yet they are resisted tooth and nail by profiteers who have long gouged patients.

It's time for a change.

2013-05-04 17:05:06 (10 comments, 0 reshares, 12 +1s)

Saturday morning in the Blum household:

Honey, how about breakfast?

Sounds good. Eggs, coffee, and champagne?

Excellent plan! But on second thought, skip the eggs!

Yea, I'm feeling very haute bohème today ;)

2013-05-04 01:09:57 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 21 +1s)

2013-05-02 14:28:28 (3 comments, 5 reshares, 27 +1s)

2013-05-02 06:21:46 (12 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

2013-05-02 05:48:45 (14 comments, 3 reshares, 10 +1s)

What the...???

2013-05-02 02:49:09 (22 comments, 2 reshares, 10 +1s)

This is wrong.

UPDATE 1: There is a petition started on Change.org: http://chn.ge/16oQoU6

UPDATE 2: A followup news article is here: http://bit.ly/ZWk0nF

TL;DR version: Teen does science, it gets messy, she gets expelled and charged as an adult with a felony. If I was rich, I'd get her a lawyer and a private school education. I'm not rich, but if someone sets up an Indiegogo after reaching out to the girl, I'll gladly give.

editorial
According to the linked news article a curious student was doing random science experiments of the "Mix this and see what happens" variety. What she mixed - toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum - had a smoky reaction that exploded a soda bottle. No damage was caused. No one was hurt... unless you take into consideration the girl's future. She was expelled and according to the storyw... more »

2013-05-01 20:45:48 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 11 +1s)

Yay. My first Raspberry-driven project will soon see field deployment.

Or, less pretentious: I frankensteined together a bastard omxplayer with a few special features for an art exhibit my sweety participates in. She was stuck with a DVD player on repeat before, and I really don't think that would get past a 30 day exhibit without issues ;)

2013-04-30 19:31:34 (22 comments, 1 reshares, 9 +1s)

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/04/tsarnaev_family_received_100g_in_benefits

2013-04-29 15:50:28 (14 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

2013-04-29 05:36:39 (10 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

Sigh. Occasionally, I forget the madness that is development on Linux, and dive back into it. 

Case in point today, Raspberry Pi. Yeah, yeah, it's an awesome small device. Until, say, you try to set up a development environment for it on OSX. Or try to build the video player under the native environment.

(And I have yet to debug why my wireless connection on it tops out at 150Kb/s and often drops packets, or why the video display can't be configured via the GUI tools, or... Ah, how I missed this. NOT)

2013-04-29 00:11:16 (17 comments, 1 reshares, 9 +1s)

This stuff is pretty sickening!

2013-04-22 16:27:23 (4 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

It's a sobering but necessary read. We all should think how we would deal with our health (and artificial extensions) as it is faltering towards the end of our lives. And we should think about it while we can, and make our wishes well known.

There's a Chekov quote in the article that really struck home: “Whenever there is someone in a family who has long been ill, and hopelessly ill, there come painful moments when all timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death.”

So think about what you want to happen when you're long and hopelessly ill...

N.B.: I don't advocate any particular choice. They all suck. But talk with your loved ones before it's necessary.

2013-04-22 14:19:21 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Open Monday Through Lockdown

Law enforcement asked the chain to keep some restaurants open in locked-down communities to provide hot coffee and food to police and other emergency workers, including in Watertown, the focus of the search for the bombing suspect. Dunkin’ is providing its products to them for free.

“At the direction of authorities, select Dunkin’ Donuts restaurants in the Boston area are open to take care of needs of law enforcement and first responders,” spokeswoman Lindsay Harrington explained via email.

2013-04-22 13:53:56 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

2013-04-20 18:59:12 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

"That said, a large percent of the reaction in Boston has been security theater. "Four victims brutally killed" goes by other names in other cities.

"In Detroit, for example, they call it "Tuesday".

…and Detroit does not shut down every time there are a few murders."

2013-04-20 17:03:43 (20 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

There is no right to a Miranda warning.

The government must give a Miranda warning if it would like to admit the defendant's statements into evidence. However, if the police aren't trying to elicit self-incriminating evidence, and have no intention of admitting the defendant's statements, then the warning is unnecessary. There is nothing illegal about an interrogation done for other-than-evidentiary reasons.

My suspicion is that they already have enough evidence to convict Tsarnaev. If that's the case, than any interrogation is essentially for the purpose of ensuring that there are no other attacks in the works. Quarles, which Emily Bazelon cites as a reason for admitting the evidence, is essentially irrelevant -- they may be able to admit some of the elicited evidence under Quarles, but that's by no means a foregone conclusion once the investigation has gone on... more »

2013-04-16 15:58:53 (27 comments, 4 reshares, 10 +1s)

I'm sure there will be no shortage of people who seriously would love to go on this trip to Mars and not return.

2013-04-12 23:50:45 (8 comments, 1 reshares, 13 +1s)

2013-04-11 21:43:02 (3 comments, 3 reshares, 17 +1s)

#America  is trending....Fuck Yeah!!!

2013-04-11 21:36:54 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 19 +1s)

Tentatively liking it, really hope they get the character right though.

2013-04-01 17:27:33 (8 comments, 2 reshares, 17 +1s)

Haha! BBC, that you even fooled anyone with this makes this the winner! #aprilfools #aprilfools2013

2013-03-29 21:11:01 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

In light of my previous post, I thought I'd share:

First Computer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_101
Second computer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Nova

2013-03-29 20:59:29 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

HN continues to be a cesspit, but it also continues to be a source for great articles. 

This one's for all the young'uns ;)

2013-03-29 19:18:37 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

For all my singularitarians, extopians, transhumanists. And the rest of you, we'll assimilate you, don't worry :)

2013-03-29 03:33:21 (10 comments, 6 reshares, 24 +1s)

It wouldn't be so funny, if it was not so true.

2013-03-29 03:21:21 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 32 +1s)

2013-03-29 03:04:24 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 18 +1s)

Separation of Church and State: Matthew 22:21
Judging non-Christians: 1 Corinthians 5:12
General interaction with people you disagree with: Matthew 5:43-44

Just saying. 

(Comments closed, 'cause I don't feel like debating)

2013-03-28 18:24:23 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 17 +1s)